Wines of The Times:

Looking for love at bargain prices

A complex wine is a good thing. A complex wine label is death to sales - at least, some of the time. Take German wines, for example. Too often, consumers are confronted with the choking union of German words and Gothic script. Add to that arcane wine rules that offer too much information on a label but convey little of what's in a bottle, and the net effect is to deaden demand for some of the world's greatest wines.

But the Burgundy label? Now, that's a thing of intricate beauty. With a profusion of details concerning producers, geography, vineyard and vineyard rating, the Burgundy label, too, can appear complicated and intimidating. Unlike the German label, though, the Burgundy label conveys precise information and is well worth the effort to understand. Burgundy lovers can only wish that the label would have the same dampening effect on sales as the German one. Alas, good Burgundy is always in demand. There's never enough to go around.

The issue with a bottle of Burgundy is generally not what style of wine it will be. You know it will be a dry red wine. You just don't know how good it will be. While the overall level of quality in Burgundy has improved significantly in the last 25 years, it is still hard to know where you will end up on the spectrum, from something thin, sharp and mean to a wine that comes as close to heaven as is possible for a mere liquid.

Conceptually, the Burgundy label represents the definition of terror. At the low end are the most general geographical definitions: Bourgogne, for example, for the Burgundy region as a whole. That means the grapes can come from anywhere in Burgundy, most likely from several different areas of lower status. At the high end are labels with maximum specificity, indicating that all the grapes in a wine come from a single vineyard, La TŸche, for example, or Chambertin.

Here's where things get tricky. Vineyards can be good and they can be bad, so all the talk of terror won't help the wine at all if the vineyard is no good. In an effort to sort things out, Burgundy classifies its better vineyards as premier cru, and the best as grand cru. You can imagine, given the already high demand for Burgundy, that such designations are tantamount to saying, "Charge a fortune for this bottle.''

Usually, though not always, they are less expensive than premier and grand cru wines. The exception is when you find a wine from a simple appellation made by a top producer or n,gociant, like Maison Leroy.

For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Beth von Benz, a wine consultant, and Scott Mayger, general manager at Telepan, a restaurant on the Upper West Side. We decided to stick with the

C"te d'Or because we were curious about how good, or bad, these village wines would be. Good deals for pleasing wines can often be found in the C"te Chalonnaise to the south, from villages like Givry, Rully and Mercurey. Conversely, famous C"te d'Or villages like Gevrey-Chambertin and Pommard have long had the reputation as underachievers, getting by on their venerated names rather than the quality of the wines.

Meanwhile, consumers can easily fall prey to romance. Whose tastebuds would not be aroused by the prospects of a Vosne-Roman,e, the site of some of the most heralded vineyards in the world, like Roman,e-Conti and La TŸche? A village Vosnes-Roman,e, of course, benefits greatly by association.

Nonetheless the 25 wines we tasted offered a clear idea of why Burgundy is so beloved. The best of these wines were harmonious and deep with pure, elegant flavors. "How quiet Burgundy is,'' Mr. Mayger noted. "The wines don't assault you.''

(NEWYORK TIMES)