IT is enough to make wine connoisseurs choke on their Pétrus. Hugh Johnson, the doyen of wine critics, has decreed that vintages hardly matter any more.

Johnson, 68, says that wine growers have developed so many clever techniques to compensate for bad weather or disease ruining their crops that almost any year is a perfectly good one for drinkers.

After 30 years of marking wines out of 10, he now finds it a “very dull process” because so many are alike.

His declaration in the opening pages of his 2008 Pocket Wine Book, the “bible” for imbibers since 1977, will send shock waves through the sale rooms where a case of vintage claret can still go for £60,000.

Johnson, who claims he had his own Damascus moment when asked to taste two different wines while an undergraduate at Cambridge, says that half a century later it is only snobbery that is forcing up the price of some years against others.

He writes: “The truth is that vintages matter less than they did . . . when we take a bottle off the shelf we don’t need to worry, most of the time, about the year.”

In a snipe at those who covet the year on the label rather than the taste of the wine in the bottle, he adds: “Apart from making one wonder what such people drink with dinner on a wet Monday, it points to a problematic concern with prestige that is driving the market at the top end.

“Those nonprestigious years and wines are better then they have ever been in the whole of their history; at the precise moment when vintages matter less than ever in terms of drinkability, they matter more than ever in terms of saleability. Crazy or what?”

His words were borne out in America last weekend, when a £3.25m wine sale set a record for Christie’s in Los Angeles.

Johnson, the world’s best-selling writer on wine with total sales of 15m, said last week: “Vintages used to be really crucial but the difference now is not so much in quality as reputation, because the most famous ones are traded up to ridiculous prices. The reasons people buy a particular wine are complex but have a lot to do with snobbism.

“If you sold a nonvintage bordeaux nobody would buy it. It would be just as good, but it would not have the romance and the interest.”

He says he sometimes longs for the days when he could write off one vintage with a contemptuous score of “1” and praise the next to the skies with a “10”.

Modern winemaking and viticulture have made almost all wines perfectly drinkable. Growers near the Mediterranean have learnt that if they plant their vines sideways on to the sea they are inviting a lot more humidity than edge on. They can take off extra leaves to let in more sun or allow more leaves to stay on so as to give shade in hot summers - such as the blistering heat of 2003 which produced “baked” red wines in France.

In the cellars of the winery, wine is fermented in steel casks where the temperature is controlled by computer, instead of being allowed to fizz at high temperatures in oak barrels.

John Radford, a committee member of the Circle of Wine Writers, said: “There have been so many wonders in research and we know so much that there are never going to be vintages of the appalling quality that we saw after the washouts in France in 1965 and 1968 and the poor crop in 1977.”

Stephen Williams, managing director of the Antique Wine Company in London, disagreed: “Winemakers may have all this technology, but great vintages are made in the deckchair when mother nature shines and they don’t have to do anything.”

Blue-chip wines

WHEN blue-chip wines from Christen Sveaas, a Norwegian restaurateur and collector, came under the hammer in Los Angeles last weekend they fetched £3.25m.

Vintage is still everything to the connoisseur if not to the consumer. Thirty 12-bottle cases of 1986 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild went for £138,000 or £4,600 a case in the sale. In London a case of 1990 vintage of the same claret was on offer for £2,100.

Hugh Johnson, author of the 2008 Pocket Wine Book, said: “Wine is now polarised between the commodity wine that people are happy to pay up to £7 for and wines that are so special that it has to be your hobby as well as your thirst.”

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