JUST before Christmas, a friend gave me a copy of an article that I had written in a magazine in October 1978. January is traditionally a time for looking forward and back, but this year I am looking much further back than is usual. The article was an effort on my part to rate the merits of the various wine houses in Burgundy. I lost, rather than made, friends in the process.

The négociants, or merchants, have always had an important part to play in the wine-trade in Burgundy; for the vineyard holdings are fragmented, and most growers were reliant on the merchants for the bottling and ultimate sale. Even today, if you buy a bottle of, say, Beaune, with the label of one of the merchants, it might be a blend of wines from half a dozen different growers.

In 34 years, however, much has changed. More growers are now bottling and selling their own wine. The younger generation is much more prepared to learn from others, and has probably travelled to California and Australia. Growers have increasing confidence in the quality of their wines. In a number of cases, these ambitious growers have been constricted by the limited size of their vineyards, and are now buying grapes from other growers, thus becoming négociants.

On the other hand, the number of independent merchants has declined in a remarkable fashion. Many of them were family-owned companies, with an ever-increasing number of family shareholders whose desire for dividends could not be satisfied.

Others, at a time when the demand for wine was increasing rapidly, did not have their own vineyard-holdings to provide them with wine at a reasonable cost, and they found themselves unable to compete in the marketplace for the wines, or grapes, they needed. Interestingly, of the 37 companies I profiled in the article, fewer than half still exist as independent entities; some have been absorbed into larger groups, some have been taken over by outside companies, and some have simply disappeared.

At the time, I said of the Nuits Saint Georges company J. C. Boisset, "A comparative newcomer on the scene. At present the quality seems uneven." Now it is the largest wine group in the region, and even further afield, with vineyards in California. What is now the second largest company, Michel Picard, then did not even rate a mention.

There is little doubt that, overall, there has been a dramatic increase in the quality of the wines of Burgundy. When Henriot bought Bouchard Père, the first thing that it did was to reject all those wines in the cellar that it considered to be unworthy of the name. The better companies no longer buy wine from the growers, they buy grapes so that they can make the wines themselves.

The sad thing about Burgundy is that the wines are not cheap, and, generally speaking, it is worth while to pay that little bit extra. Here are just some of the houses that I would now recommend: Bichot, Bouchard Père, Chanson, Drouhin, Faiveley Louis Jadot, Louis Latour, and Leroy. Some of their wine should be available at a fine-wine merchant near you, or in chains such as Waitrose and Majestic.