by Wine Owners
Posted on 2016-06-08
Remember spring 2011. In Bordeaux there was an early April heatwave, that added to the feel-good factor felt by producers and merchants alike. All agreed, this was a golden age for Bordeaux.
The wealthy were getting wealthier, raiding the post–Lehmann EU Agricultural Support Fund, citing 'agriculture' status so that they could construct new chais. It seemed taking the piss had become institutionalized.
By the late summer, barely 4 months after that balmy spring, it was over. The bubble had burst, but not before the world and his wife had piled into overpriced Classed Growths.
Fast forward 5 years, and the negative market sentiment created by those purchases by traditional and new En Primeur buyers has all but dissipated. The good news is those who were deeply under water on the back of 2009 and 2010 purchases are now in the shallows and feeling rather more positive about their purchases and their outlook.
This has been helped by the fact – there, I said it, by the FACT - that there hasn’t been a vintage to touch those two monumental years since. Not 2011 and 2013 of course, neither 2012 nor 2014, and surely not 2015 either. To be a great vintage Bordeaux needs to be uniformly wonderful across its communes, and 2015 was far from uniform. It’s a very good vintage overall, but not a great one. It will not join the pantheon.
The prime reason why Bordeaux suffered so badly over the period 2011-2014 was negative sentiment, and nothing fuels negative feelings like losing money on paper.
It is for that reason 2015 may well prove to be a watershed in the history of En Primeur.
Many Chateaux released at realistic prices that made their wines sensible buys – wines like Pape Clément, Rauzan-Segla and Canon, Leoville Barton, Pontet Canet, even Lafleur and Tertre-Rotebouef.
More Chateaux than not released too high. What do we mean by “too high”? After all, it’s a relative term. Our definition of too high is a price that will prove not to give a discount against future market value or which could end up having been more expensive than the future discounted secondary market value in 2-5 years’ time.
In the last few days, a few Chateaux have pushed the boundaries of credulity, releasing wines at such a high price that there is 90%-99% downside attached to buying early.
Wines such as Pichon Baron, Lynch-Bages and Palmer. As the graphs show, none offer much by way of upside and plenty of downside risk.
None of this matters to the informed, rational fine wine buyer. They simply need to say ‘no thanks’ and move on, selecting affordable back-vintages to enjoy, lay down for future drinking, or to use as a store of value.
What does matter is when less well-informed buyers are badly advised and sold into the vintage’s more expensive releases, only to find out a few years down the line that the wine has fallen in value, those losses further exacerbated by broker commissions. If you end up with enough buyers “under water” goodwill built up painstakingly over time evaporates.
In this campaign some merchants are saying things like:
Qualitatively, 2015 has been compared to previous greats of this century - 2010, 2009, 2005 and 2000 – when looking at price compared to these greats, the wines of 2015 have broadly represented good value with most estates benchmarking against these years and releasing at lower prices – which is quite refreshing.
Not only is the premise wrong, it encourages irrational buying behavior based on unrealistic expectations and stores up future negative sentiment.
This is a shame, for Bordeaux has the greatest, largest single body of wine in the world to offer. The greatest expressions should bring the greatest joy, not deliver disappointment.
by Wine Owners
Posted on 2016-02-18
Looking ahead to the forthcoming Bordeaux En Primeur release, it seems like there’ll be plenty to be excited about, at least from a quality perspective, and there’s already a good deal of speculation about release strategies.
It’s fascinating that Chateau Mouton Rothschild has come out with a similar announcement to Chateau Latour’s 2013 En Primeur campaign withdrawal. It amounts to essentially the same thing, nuanced differently.
“Sales of our wines in bottle are growing a lot and we’ve got to the point where we don’t have enough bottles left in our cellar."
“We won’t be buying our wine back but we will be releasing less of it en primeur as we have to rebuild our inventory.”
“We haven’t lost faith in the en primeur system but you have to be reasonable with your pricing as there are so many reference points for consumers now.”
This roughly translates, into words that you and I will understand, as: "in an increasingly transparent world where discerning consumers can analyse and evaluate young wines by their relative value to past vintages, the only way we can get an en primeur campaign away is by pricing at a discount to comparable previous vintages, that recognises the end-user buyer needs a reason to buy early. That doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense if we wish to capitalise on growing worldwide demand. Going forward, we would rather not give that discount away to more than a tiny number of en primeur buyers who will help us establish (hopefully higher) future secondary market pricing. That will create the preconditions for us to capture a much bigger slice of the downstream value of our wines, satisfying shareholder requirements for income growth and capital (land) appreciation.”
With Latour and Mouton effectively ‘out’, how will the remaining Firsts respond next year?
Last year there were only a small handful of wines worth buying early. That’s not to say there were not plenty of lovely wines made in 2014, but very few were sufficiently well priced to justify tying up cash. Given the overall superior quality of 2015, producers will hike up their prices, possibly quite a bit. Given that, it’s quite likely that savvy wine buyers will do well to continue to focus on relative values from comparable back vintages and revisit 2015 in a few years’ time. Meanwhile the impending campaign is bound to throw a spotlight on 2000, 2005 and even the better values within 2009 and 2010.
