Not sure if anyone has posted on this yet, but I figured I'd get the ball rolling.

As I'm sure most of you have seen, '09 Futures prices have finally started to trickle into the market. Big name wines like La Mission Haut Brion, Palmer, Montrose, Mouton Rothschild have come out in recent days and the pricing has been "impressive" to say the least.

My question today is two fold:

1. Do you think '09 Futures will turn out to be a good investment?

2. Are you in favor of the modern style of wine-making that seems to be more and more in vogue in Bordeaux? What do you think will happen to these wines with 15 to 20 years of cellar age? I was in Bordeaux for En Primeur tastings this year, and for me, many of the wines were more Cali in style than Bordeaux. If early '90s Harlan, Screaming Eagle, and Shafer are comparables for us to think about in the context of '09 Cos, '09 Lynch Bages, etc...then I can't say that I'm too excited for these wines for the long term. I can say that they will be delicious in the short term. Why did CA drop "classic" wine making (or the hands off approach) and start making super extracted fruit bombs in the mid 90's? What's even weirder is that today Bordeaux is making super modern, manipulated wines while at the same time, there's a push in CA back to the old style. I guess Parker's influence is cyclical. Regardless, I think there is a real homogenization in the modern cab producing world that's left me wanting Bordeaux and CA wines like they used to be made...with lots of character and sense of place.