What’s happening before our eyes today is something I never thought I’d see: Empires are falling. Everywhere, the old order is undergoing change on a scale, and with a speed, that no one could have predicted only a decade ago. Let me first give you an anecdotal example. Lately, pinot noir has been much on my mind. It always is, but it’s been more pressingly so than usual. As previously chronicled in this column, I was in New Zealand’s Central Otago district – pinot noir country – as well as Australia’s Mornington Peninsula and Tasmania (ditto).These visits included two pinot noir conferences as well as independently visiting producers. So I’ve been steeped like a tea bag in pinot noir. Anyway, I returned home and found myself having lunch with a Burgundy shipper I’ve known for decades – a good, honest guy who’s in the top echelon of Burgundy shippers. It was just the two of us, so the conversation was, as the State Department likes to say, frank and honest. I told him, hyperbolically, that Burgundy was dying. (Actually, what’s happening is that the less prestigious subregions such as Cote Chalonnaise and Maconnais really are declining, with increasing bankruptcies. The heart of Burgundy, the famed Cote d’Or, is so far unaffected.) As you might imagine, this took him aback. I said that although Burgundy was hardly going out of business, it will certainly steadily lose business, pointing out that California alone has the same pinot noir acreage (24,000 acres) as Burgundy, never mind Oregon, New Zealand, and Australia. I told him that I had recently recommended in this column a California pinot noir that – if I were tasting it blind – I would have sworn was a really good Bourgogne rouge. And it sells for $16.

My guest was (understandably) skeptical. The wine in question wasn’t on the restaurant’s list, so I excused myself, dashed across the street to a nearby wine shop, and snared a bottle of 2003 Saintsbury Garnet pinot noir. It was $15.99. I took the receipt for proof.

Like a cat proudly coming home with a captured mouse, I plopped the bottle in front of him. The sommelier hurried over with three glasses (one for him, too, after all), and we sampled the Saintsbury wine. The Burgundy shipper’s eyes opened wide in honest amazement. “This is very good,” he exclaimed. “This is very, very good,” he repeated. “It absolutely smells and tastes like pinot noir. And the delicacy! I never suspected,” he added, shaking his head.

Then I went in for the kill: Saintsbury makes 18,000 cases of this stuff. And that’s just one winery in Carneros. There are plenty more grapes where those came from.

“How much would this be wholesale?” the Burgundy shipper asked the sommelier, who was swirling and tasting and loving every minute of it. “Oh, it would be $12 a bottle wholesale,” he replied. “But with a volume discount, you could probably get it for as little as 10 bucks.”

I asked my friend if Burgundy could create a Bourgogne rouge as good as the 2003 Saintsbury Garnet and put it on the street for $10 wholesale. “There is no way,” he conceded. “Absolutely no way.” I tell this story not to put Burgundy in a bad light, but rather to underscore the sweeping changes we’re now seeing throughout the wine world. Burgundy producers will have to face the fact, like it or not (and they won’t), that their pinot noir monopoly is finished. After 1,000 years, the Burgundy empire is crumbling.

Burgundy’s new reality is as clear as it is challenging: It should make half as much wine (by lowering its excessive yields) and sell it at twice the price. It should transform itself into what Burgundy alone can be, namely, an elite source of the world’s greatest pinot noirs and chardonnays. To be anything less – which is today’s situation – is to continue to lose its centrality in the world’s fine-wine culture, which is already happening.

Not long afterward, I was invited to a high-end California pinot noir tasting put on by a wine-enthralled Silicon Valley venture capitalist. (The West Coast rich are different from the East Coast rich – no fusty old Bordeaux for them.) He wanted to take a tour d’horizon of some of California’s best pinot noirs and asked a few of us to come along for the ride. Thirty pinot noirs were rounded up, including such prestige brands as Marcassin, Rochioli, Calera, Williams Selyem, and Kistler, among others.

I thought of my Burgundy shipper friend as I tasted through the offerings. Were they as good as Burgundy’s best? Not quite. But Satchel Paige’s famous advice, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you,” came quickly to mind. Some of these Burgundy-busters were coming on strong, especially if compared to the thinned-blood versions of Burgundy’s more diluted grands crus made from vines with excessive yields.

What stood out? As a group – four wines were on offer – it was tough to deny the goodness of the pinot noirs from Rochioli Vineyard in Sonoma County’s Russian River Valley. All four 2002 vineyard-designated pinot noirs were lovely renditions, with Rochioli’s famed “West Block” bottling taking the prize for its berryish flavors, delicacy, and finesse. (And, yes, I could easily have confused it with a good Volnay.)

Equally satisfying, if different, was Rochioli’s neighbor, Williams Selyem. Originally created by Burt Williams and Ed Selyem and sold in 1998 to John S. Dyson, a former New York City deputy mayor and owner of Millbrook Vineyards in the Hudson Valley, Williams Selyem put California pinot noir on the world map in the 1990s.

And how good are they today? I can answer that pretty definitively, thanks to spending a day recently with its winemaker Bob Cabral. This latest tasting of some of their 2002s was an added dollop. Williams Selyem is as good as ever was, maybe even better thanks to a more extensive array of offerings.

The five 2002 Williams Selyem pinots in the tasting lineup were all, at minimum, intriguing and, at maximum, flat-out beautiful. The stars were the 2002 Allen Vineyard from Russian River Valley, as well as the more easily obtainable 2002 “Sonoma Coast” bottling. If Williams Selyem has a flaw, it’s that all of its wines are too strongly marked by oak, specifically the smoky bacon scent and taste of the heavy toast Francois Freres barrels the winery uses almost exclusively. It’s become a bit of trademark for them, unfortunately.

The third standout – the best wine of the tasting for me – was the 2002 Flowers “Camp Meeting Ridge” pinot noir from the extreme western portion of the Sonoma coast. Barely two miles inland from the ocean, Flowers Vineyard and Winery has consistently issued grand cru-level pinot noirs from its signature vineyard called Camp Meeting Ridge.

The 2002 Flowers “Camp Meeting Ridge” pinot noir may be their best yet, with its characteristic power and mineral notes allied to a greater degree of finesse and delicacy than in previous vintages. Experience reveals, by the way, that this wine rewards cellaring, which cannot always be said for some California pinots.

Can you get these wines? Yes, with a bit of looking – and a fat wallet. All of the preceding wines sell for between $35 and $100 a bottle. The best chance of tasting them is at restaurants, especially the Williams Selyem and Rochioli wines. Both wineries have lengthy waiting lists for retail customers, but restaurants have dibs. One effective and convenient way of tracking down many wine rarities is the Web site www.wine-searcher.com.

Are these high-end California pinot noirs worth the money? As an education, absolutely. And as a profound pinot noir experience comparable to equally expensive red Burgundies, you ask? Here again, the answer is absolutely yes. Empires are falling. You can taste it.