Unless you live in the fevered world of the wine trade — or at least among the wine-fixated — you may be unaware of the latest you-gotta-have-it obsession among America’s wine fanatics: Burgundy’s 2005 vintage.

A small neighborhood wine shop owner wine recently lamented that he couldn’t obtain a big enough supply of 2005 Burgundies for his customers to buy on futures. This is not for stock on hand, mind you, so that you can walk out the door with a nice bottle for dinner tonight. This was for futures or pre-arrivals (the wine trade uses both terms interchangeably) where you put up 100% of the purchase price today for delivery anytime between six months and two years from now.

The owner (who presides over the wine equivalent of the tobacco hangout in the movie “Smoke”) told me, “I sold about $200,000 worth of 2005 Burgundy futures. That was all the wine I was able to get commitments on from the wholesalers. I could easily have sold half a million dollars’ worth. But I couldn’t get the supply.”

What’s going on here? It’s the effect of a great vintage in Burgundy (a twice-a-decade event, at most) aligning with an upsurge of interest in pinot noir in general and an always-fanatical interest in Burgundy in particular. This confluence occurs regularly but, like comets, the frequency is just rare enough to create real excitement when it happens.

So how good is the 2005 vintage in Burgundy? Mighty good, is the answer. That information is enough to get even Pavlov’s teetotaling dog salivating, never mind the worldspanning tribe of the Burgundy-obsessed.

The result has been eye-popping prices on many 2005s and highschool-boy lamentations on the excruciating unavailability of the most sought after beauties. The Internet chat board sponsored by the wine newsletter writer Robert Parker (erobertparker.com) has a thread titled, “2005 Burg Campaign. So, What Have You Purchased?” It runs for 34 pages and has been viewed — blearily, no doubt — 51,834 times, which is the Internet equivalent of a dog-eared “Playboy” in a Dartmouth dormitory back when the place was all-male.

Should you even bother with this nonsense? Yes and no. Yes, you should keep an eye peeled for 2005 Burgundies (especially including Beaujolais). It was a really swell vintage and that always tips the odds in your favor.

But, no, there’s no need to get overheated about it. The reality is that these heart-pumping, wallet-opening, panting passions fade quickly and are soon replaced by yet another breathlessly reported you-gotta-have-it vintage. Remember the millennium-fueled rush for the 2000 vintage Bordeaux?

Allow me to make a few suggestions if you want in on the Great 2005 Burgundy Bonanza. I’m talking here about Burgundies for drinking, rather than as trophies (imagine what President Theodore Roosevelt’s cellar in Oyster Bay would have looked like if he had been a wine geek).

In the 2005 vintage, look for Burgundies from higher-elevation villages such as Auxey-Duresses, Saint-Aubin, and Saint-Romain, as well as Pernand-Vergelesses and Savignylès-Beaune. Because of their higher elevations or lesser exposures, these villages typically are less well-endowed with fruit and dimensionality than lower-on-the-slope, more perfectly exposed locales such as Meursault, Vosne-Romanée, or Puligny-Montrachet. But in a warm, almost perfect vintage such as 2005, the wines from these higher villages come vibrantly and richly alive, like seeing wildflowers appear in profusion on a desert landscape after a rare rain.

Try any of the three single-vineyard Auxey-Duresses reds from Domaine Jean & Gilles Lafouge. They are among the finest bargains in the 2005 vintage that I’ve yet come across. All three single-vineyard wines — Les Duresses, Climat du Val, and La Chappelle — sell for $28.99 at Chambers Street Wines. Each is different — rich and earthy with the Climat du Val and more refined and elegant with the La Chappelle — and all three will do nothing but improve for upwards of a decade if stored in a cool cellar. They are extremely tasty now, though.

On the futures front, Zachys is offering one of Burgundy’s best bargains on a pre-arrival basis: Louis Jadot Côte de Nuits Villages “Le Vaucrain” 2005 for $24.99.

The skinny on this superb red is that the 27.2-acre Le Vaucrain vineyard is located on the upper slope adjacent to the premier cru Clos de la Maréchale vineyard in Nuits-Saint-Georges. It’s the wine equivalent of living just outside the borders of Sutton Place: You get the neighborhood, if not prestige, at a much lower rent. This wine, too, will age beautifully for at least a decade, but it’s terrific even when very young.