Letter from New York elin Mccoy

‘These parties illustrate a desire for excess and a willingness to spend’

The Big Apple loves a wine party. Fortunately the city’s most important ones – la paulée, Rieslingfeier, Burdigala and la Fête de Champagne – are not crammed into a single month, but instead dotted across several.

i have been reflecting on just what these extravaganzas say about the city and its elite drinkers. For one thing, they illustrate a deep desire for glorious excess and a willingness to spend. The exclusive ‘Methuselah’ package for Burgundy bash la paulée, in March, which included the priciest tastings, seminars and meals would have set you back $14,000.

All of these one- to several-day events have at least one big tasting with winemakers and a costly gala dinner to which producers and attendees bring fabulous old bottles from their own cellars to share, which just goes to show how social the city’s wine lovers are, no matter what they like to collect.

But these parties also cater to New York’s drinking tribes. each event is like an ultimate wine club with a different atmosphere, where devotees can bond over their favourite type of wines, play one upsmanship games of the mybottle-is-rarer-than-yours variety, and share treasures with aficionados who actually know what they are – and can gauge their worth. All feature grand food cooked by chefs like Daniel Boulud, but the bottles are the stars. even CeOs don’t check their cellphones between sips.

Burgundy is the region with the most cachet in New York so, not surprisingly, la paulée is the loudest, largest bacchanalia, with 340 attendees this year. The 50 sommeliers pouring pro bono are a who’s who of the city’s somms, who pull every string for this chance to work for free – being chosen showcases their privileged status. The event gives everyone a chance to sample hundreds of bottles and add a few more stellar names to their must-drink list, get a crash course in top vintages, and a chance to meet the makers behind the labels.

Yes, the big buck dinners – $8,500 to sup with Aubert de Villaine and drink 11 vintages of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti – draw the super-wealthy, but the heart of la paulée is the grand tasting and gala dinner, both held this year at pier Sixty with a view of the hudson.

When Daniel Johnnes, then wine director at restaurant Montrachet, organised the first paulée in 2000, Burgundy had nowhere near the popularity it has now in the US, and wines from Rousseau and Roumier were actually affordable and available. it has now morphed into a three-week celebration, with more than 40 restaurants and wine shops offering deals and tastings, and a Zachys auction of rarities.

Johnnes co-founded la Fête de Champagne in 2014 (it debuts in london this autumn) and while it follows the la paulée format, it feels more friendly and less decadent, with little of the collector-clique trophy-bottle posturing that marks the Burgundy event.

The aim of Burdigala, the Bordeaux equivalent, first held in 2013, was to help restore buzz to France’s most famous wine region, though i’m not sure how much the event has contributed to changing that. Burdigala is glitzy in a sedate, upper-crust way, less noisy and orgy-like than la paulée. At this year’s gala dinner at the Rainbow Room, 56 storeys above the streets of Manhattan, great 1982 crus classés flowed like water.

Rieslingfeier was founded in 2012 by wine importer Stephen Bitterolf to highlight a grape beloved by somms but still occupying a niche position with the city’s drinkers. This was reflected in the location of its gala in Brooklyn at anti-establishment restaurant Reynard, where 130 attendees sucked up wines like Weingut Keller’s 2003 Trockenbeerenauslese.

The kind of frenzied drinking at these galas – you dump your glass of DRC, Richebourg 1949 for a Musigny from JF Mugnier whose vintage you forget, then scramble for the rarer henri Jayer, Cros parantoux – seems like the kind of overkill appropriate for this city. And it’s all part of how essential such insider parties are to marketing and selling wines here, and how much they influence the kind of buzz that makes regions trendy.