While there’s more wine than ever before available on the secondary market, how much of it is actually any good? These are the thoughts I was left with after a tasting of 1991 vintage wines to mark the 10th anniversary of Daimaru’s Melbourne store, for which a very classy collection of offerings from 1991 had been assembled. Rather than the impressive quality of the vintage – which more people are finally recognising as the truly great season it actually was – most of the discussion between the wine scribes attending the event concerned the issue of provenance. We wine writers are a spoiled crowd you see, used to tasting back vintages of wines taken directly from the cellars of their makers. Daimaru’s staff had indeed performed a sterling job by acquiring a number of the 1991 wines on show directly from the producers themselves, and almost without exception these wines stood up as well as might be expected. However, of the sixty or so on tasting, around half showed enough evidence of poor cellaring to render any scoring of marks inconclusive. Many of these wines were acquired by other means. Daimaru has a professional staff that takes their work seriously. The fact that a significant number of the wines they had sourced showed obvious signs of spoilage directly resulting from poor cellaring simply bodes the question of what other, less qualified people are buying on the secondary market. For several years I’ve written about my concerns that too many people without the knowledge and the means of properly cellaring stock are buying wines as an investment, with the inevitable outcome that an extraordinary amount of poorly cellared wine will re-enter the market. Obviously, it is. And it’s getting worse. More than ever, if you’re buying on the secondary market, check out the provenance first. Regardless of whom you’re buying from, don’t assume a thing. This issue doesn’t have to get much worse before I’ll be calling it a scandal.
