OK, then. What about '82 Puligny-Montrachet?
I forever keep forgetting about it hidden away, so should it just be binned - or will I be a star with my wino-mates??

Many true words expressed on the move to New World whites.

Robb Landers, church stretton,

I would suggest changing standards and expectations. I remember the delight of a 1971 Le Montrachet in 1976 and the acute disappointment in the same wine about 8 years later. Today, we are so used to good flavour, acid and oak balance in a New World, two to three year old wine, that we have become acutely sensitised to age-related defects.

I became aware of the disconnect between New and Old World perceptions during a vertical tasting in Australia, 4 weeks ago with our newly-arrived French stagiare. The only Chardonnay that he considered ready was the oldest, a 2003 that we had thought was totally over the hill.

Jim Lumbers, Canberra, Australia

White Burgundies, of a certain age, are one of my guilty pleasures. However, of late this has been a pleasure more often than naught, tainted by a growing sense of alarm and unease as they show their advancing age, in some cases, prematurely.

A great number of my white Burgundies, some pricy some more moderate, had been snapped up from one of the top recent years for such wines: the noteworthy 2002 vintage, which saw not only widely acclaimed healthy grapes across the region, good acidity levels, but was expected to have produced some excellent, supposedly long-lived wines. However, I've found a great number of these 2002s noticeably tiring, some already gone, and others alarmingly on their way to being more akin to something you might cook with or pour down the drain rather than drink.

Now this is a vintage in Burgundy that has been marked out as a great one, among the white wines at least, and among those selected, are some of the highest scoring and much lauded examples which were reviewed by the international wine press at the time and subsequently in the several years following as they became available on the wider market. Most of these wines were purchased from good producers and have been kept in impeccable conditions. And yet, here we are, or at least here I am, with a number of wines that should only just be entering their graceful middle age but which are already over-the-hill.

I've liquidated most of my 02s, drinking up those that are only showing a slight decline, saving a few as test cases and where prudence dictates, and have moved on to the much fresher, livelier 2004s, focusing on more northerly Chablis as well. One thing I've not done, however, is to heavily reinvest in more white Burgundies, even though the temptation due to the strident positive press that for example the 2005s have enjoyed, makes me sorely tempted. Until that is, I review my notes on the 2002s.

Instead, I've found that there are a host of complex, delicious, and by appearances, better aging whites available from Italy, Spain, and the South West of France, not to mention Alsace and Germany. For the most part, these wines are better priced (sometimes shockingly so) and yet are delivering not only equal drinking pleasure, but a much higher degree of success in their ability to age. Nowhere in these wines have I had the same prevalence of mysterious advanced decrepitude and flattening flavours as I've seen in the 1996s, 1998s, and now 2002s.

A large number of non-European white wines are just now getting well enough established (and in a few cases, with bottles old enough to show their worth) from some of the better, cooler regions of Australia, California, and Chile. Will these, along with other European producers, eventually replace, at least in quality if not in name and price, the great white Burgundy vintages of the past? I don't have an answer yet, but I think one is not far off and that at the very least, it shows at the moment all the signs of being a very possible outcome in the face this worrying trend.

Is this the end of white Burgundy as we know it? Perhaps not, but if this does not serve as a wake up call for producers in the Cote d'Or, then the end may very well be in sight.

E Edwards, London, UK