If you think prices for French wines are excessive, you're not alone. Even fine-wine collectors, people who don't raise an eyebrow at a $100 price tag, agree.
According to an informal poll of major wine merchants in the Los Angeles area--considered to be the most important wine market in the United States--the weakness of the dollar against the franc, the number of excellent recent vintages and a lot of full wine cellars have combined to force down demand for expensive wines drastically.
"The market for expensive wines? There is no market, as far as I can see," says Steve Wallace, owner of Wally's on Westwood Boulevard, one of the Westside's top wine merchants. "The people who usually buy these wines, the collectors--their cellars are full. There is only a small group of people I call 'the players,' and they have seen so many good vintages in the last decade they're getting tired of the hype."
He says savvy buyers find older wines at auctions at attractive prices. "You can find Second Growth Bordeaux for under $300 a case," he says.
Larry Seiple at the Wine House in West Los Angeles says the big buyers are dying off. At a recent wine auction, he says, "I saw a number of the 'big players' in Los Angeles. They are not players anymore, not involved in the market except as casual sippers. Their cellars are full, and they are selling their wines at auction." Newer buyers, he says, are more tentative in their purchases.
Futures for the highly praised 1989 Bordeaux are selling slower than in other past vintages, when the wines also were rated as being excellent, merchants say. (In a futures purchase, buyers agree to make a down payment for wine they will take possession of in a year or 18 months, when it is released. Usually, such wines are not tasted by the buyer before they are bought.)
"Without even tasting a wine, people will say: 'I have to have that label,' " says Tom Burke, a Los Angeles attorney and major wine collector. "Isn't that silly?
"People buy wines they think are going to appreciate in value instead of laying them down to drink. They say, 'In 10 years this will be worth $200 a bottle more than I paid for it.' Sure, and I remember too well the people who bought the '69s only to find out that the wines were terrible."
