In 1982, Ronald Reagan’s approval rating fell below 40 percent, the San Francisco 49ers captured the first of five Super Bowl titles, and Michael Jackson released his most successful album, Thriller. That same year, a blazing-hot summer in the vineyards of Bordeaux yielded a bumper crop of unusually lush and precocious wines.

A quarter-century later, Reagan is one of the most popular presidents in American history, the 49ers are headed for a fifth straight losing season, and Jackson—well, the less said the better. And those ’82 Bordeauxs? They are, in a word, amazing—so good and so highly coveted (and accordingly priced) that it’s easy to forget the skepticism that greeted them and the seismic changes they unleashed.

The ’82 vintage launched critic Robert Parker’s career, dramatically altered the way wines of Bordeaux were made and sold, and turned the United States into a wine-buying colossus. Twenty-five years on, the ’82 clarets have firmly established their greatness, and arguably proven to be the most significant vintage Bordeaux has ever produced.

Not everyone predicted such a bright future for them back in ‘82. At the time, the wines produced in the region typically emphasized finesse over power and were often austere in their youth. The hot weather in 1982 yielded markedly different wines—precocious, strapping, and more evocative of Napa, which led some critics to speak disparagingly of ‘82 as Bordeaux’s “California vintage.”

Robert Parker, a young attorney from Baltimore, had a very different view. Though Parker and his newsletter, the Wine Advocate, had only been on the wine scene for a few years, he was certain (as were many Bordelais) that the ’82s were destined to become legendary. His enthusiasm convinced retailers and consumers in the United States to gamble on his palate. Thousands of new subscribers signed up for his newsletter, and he was quickly anointed America’s go-to wine guru.

The ’82 vintage and Parker’s emergence happened to coincide with the start of a 20-year bull market in the United States. Large numbers of Americans, suddenly feeling prosperous, developed an interest in wine; egged on by Parker’s reviews (which retailers naturally trumpeted), these overnight oenophiles scooped up the ’82 Bordeauxs. In the years that followed, the U.S. became the most voracious market for top Bordeauxs, and its enthusiasm for good vintages remains unparalleled.

Today, Parker’s 100-point scale quite literally dictates the market for Bordeaux—merchants use his scores to sell the wines, consumers rely on the ratings to determine which wines to buy. His preferences also strongly influence how Bordeauxs are made: Parker’s fondness for ultraripe, powerful wines like the ’82s has led many winemakers to seek to produce wines in this style, aided by Bordeaux’s increasingly warm weather and technological advances in the vineyards and cellars.

Good fortune on Wall Street and in the vineyards fueled speculative interest in the ’82s. Michael Broadbent, the founder of Christie’s Wine Department, describes 1982 as “perhaps the first universally touted ripe-for-investment vintage of the postwar period.” As liquid assets, the ’82s have delivered phenomenal returns. The 1982 Château Pétrus first sold for $900 per case of 12 bottles; that case will now set you back $65,000, a gain of 7,700 percent. Châteaux Lafite and Latour have both soared 5,000 percent in value and currently fetch about $33,000 and $27,000 per case, respectively. Encouraged by the dizzying run-up in prices for the ’82s, wine investing has recently become an institutionalized phenomenon and the fine-wine market even has its own index now, the Liv-Ex 100.