It’s largely ‘vintages ending in 4’ for anyone looking for wines to mark a significant milestone this coming year. This is bad news for some based on vintage performances, though promising for others. Our annual expert selection will help you locate that ideal bottle for the perfect 2024 gift
For this year’s 2024 edition, I have left as few stones unturned as possible, drawing as extensively as I can both on recent tastings as well as the vinous vestiges of my own ‘cellar’ in these anniversary vintages. More importantly, I have tapped into a rich seam of expertise of fine wine-loving friends and writers who have been nowhere near a spittoon in the enjoyable product familiarisation of these wines from their own personal collections.
To gauge the popularity of different regions in the anniversary years for 2024, I asked wine trade global marketplace Liv-ex for a statistical breakdown of trade over the past five years according to vintage. The data showed the not-unexpected dominance of Bordeaux for most of the anniversary vintages, with proportions of overall trade value from about 30% to nearly 90% (for 1974). For the 1999s – 25th anniversaries this year, see p52 – Burgundy (reds 38%, whites 2%) outgunned Bordeaux, also coming within one percentage point (Burgundy 36.4% vs 37.2%) for the 1964 vintage. Champagne came in a creditable second for the 2004s (30.3% of trade vs Bordeaux’s 40.1%). Italy did reasonably well for the 2004 and 1964 vintages (11% and 19% respectively), and Port for 1994 (5.6%). Scotland putting in a nearly 5.6% contribution for 1974 was something I had to query – anomalously, it was down to the trade in rare Ladyburn single malt Scotch whisky.
I’ve made the point before, but the longer a wine spends in bottle, the more provenance and condition become paramount considerations. Champagne luminary and author Tom Stevenson recommends that you ‘never buy single bottles (or magnums) of old vintages from a wine shop, only direct from cellars or auctioned direct from cellars’. Meanwhile, Sacramento wine merchant extraordinaire Darrell Corti points out that ‘most normal drinkers have no pleasure from old wines; fresh, fruity and talked-about is what I think is really liked’. And yet, as he says: ‘When a really lovely old bottle is found, it really is both delicious and memorable.’
20th (2004)
Coinciding with the inaugural Decanter World Wine Awards in 2004, writer-director Alexander Payne’s Sideways sets a high bar for wine films; the term orange wine is coined by UK wine merchant David Harvey; and Eduardo Chadwick puts Chile on the fine wine map when his Viñedo Chadwick and Seña triumph over Châteaux Lafite and Margaux at the Judgement of Berlin tasting. This was an abundant, ‘Indian summer’ vintage in Champagne and fizz-loving 20-year-olds are spoile
