At last, the 2010 en primeur campaign is over. Even for people who are fascinated by what happens in the world’s largest fine wine region, it had become a bore by the end. Our in-boxes groaned with daily emails from merchants desperate to flog a few cases of generally over-priced claret.
As someone who has added to the verbiage about 2010, I promise this will be my last blog on the subject.
What lessons can we draw from the campaign? It’s only my opinion, but these are the themes that emerged.
- The campaign was relatively, but only relatively, successful. It is difficult to sell two back-to-back “vintages of the decade/century”. There was less enthusiasm from consumers than there was for 2009.
- In the UK, a lot of merchants worked on lower than ever margins (5% on some wines) to stay competitive. For them and the négociants (but not the châteaux), en primeur is not the cash cow it once was.
- Anyone who took the best deal on offer, ignoring the advice of responsible critics to buy from established merchants, was crazy. The shenanigans at the Bordeaux Wine Trading Company should give them pause for thought.
- Prices were up on 2009 by an average of 10%, although a few châteaux dropped them. The increases were partially justified by smaller volumes, but only partially. There was a lot of short-term thinking by the Bordelais this year, which may yet come back to bite them on the buttocks.
- More than ever, the wine trade and we journalists tasted the wines too early. Some were mid-malolactic fermentation in early April. Why not taste them in May, given that the most important châteaux didn’t release their prices until June? Better still why not taste them a year later? I am more convinced than ever that tasting immature barrel samples does not work to consumers’ interest.
- I also believe that samples need to be audited to prevent fraud. One winemaker told me that the tastings are effectively a “competition between coopers”. I think the CIVB, the region’s generic body, should take action.
- This is not an investment vintage, at least not in the short to medium term. The prices are generally so high that it’s hard to see them going up for some time. 2000 and 2005 both increased in price while the wines were still in barrel. That surely won’t happen this time.
- There were a number of real successes in 2010. Pontet-Canet, Grand-Puy-Lacoste, Lynch-Bages, Léoville-Poyferré, Vieux-Château-Certan, Ducru-Beaucaillou, Pichon-Baron and Domaine du Chevalier all sold well.
- Château that sold less well, at least in the UK, included Figeac, Lascombes. Yquem, Smith-Haut-Lafitte (red) and Cheval Blanc, all of which were priced too high.
- Latour, not Lafite, was the most sought after wine in 2010. The First Growths generally sold well, even at astronomical prices. They have become luxury brands, thanks to world-wide demand.
- The Chinese market is not (yet) buying large quantities of Bordeaux en primeur. The Chinese appear to want to buy physical wine rather than a piece of paper.
- The American market is still quiet for Bordeaux and has been since 2000.
- Robert Parker remains the most powerful critic for Bordeaux but, in the age of the internet, his influence is less than it once was. Some wines that Parker didn’t rate sold well despite his lack of support.
- Talking of Parker, a critic who has always championed the consumer, why doesn’t he release his scores after the prices have come out? On his website, he argued that this would be like “asking for my retirement” but I don’t follow the logic of his position. Parker could lead the way here; many critics (me included) would follow him. More to the point, consumers would be the winners. Will it happen? It’s unlikely. But things do change. And change rapidly sometimes. Just ask Rupert and James Murdoch.
Good post, Tim.
I agree with most of what you say, and I fully support your final point that critics should not publish their scores until the prices have been released. No price, no comment. The current system makes fools out of critics and consumers alike.
Whether Parker will agree is a different matter, but without him on board, no-one in Bordeaux will give a monkeys for the rest.
As for the timing of the tastings, I don’t have a problem with tasting the new vintage in the April following the harvest. No major change is needed there, I’d suggest, although Chateaux should respect all the press and the trade by not showing their wines to critics whose intention is to publish before anyone else – with no benefit whatsoever to the consumer.
As for the samples, the system is open to abuse but most leading Chateaux are pretty clear, if questioned, about whether the blend is the final blend, such as Léoville-Barton, Ducru and so on – or whether what you are tasting is a ‘representative’ sample. Representative samples are the norm for all the wines that Michel Rolland consults on, including, say, Léoville-Poyferré. Rolland’s advice, as you know, is always to blend in the final stages before bottling and wines like Pontet-Canet and Malescot show that he knows what he’s doing on the Left Bank. It is for the critics to ask and inform their readers but maybe this is what has been lacking. Perhaps I should draw up a checklist, for anyone who’s interested, to access on Liv-ex. (Or send me a tweet @GavinQuinney).
Finally, please, please don’t ask the CIVB to get involved. Let’s get the critics to stand together before insisting on tighter regulation – the authorities would never be able to agree on who controls what anyway.
Yquem didn’t sell well but wasn’t overpriced. It abandoned it’s link to First Growth prices but by that stage market confidence was too low for it to take off. Sauternes generally suffered during this campaign despite some reasonable pricing across the board. It is not a fashionable wine when compared to the reds and suffers from being marketed in the same manner. It is, however, incredibly popular when tasted by consumers – new marketing required.
For me the key here is the scoring. The feeling is that critics like Parker have essentially got into bed with the Bordelais. As a merchant it was an increasing sense of irony I saw the criticisms of the pricings coming from sources like Neal Martin, Jancis and Sir Bob of the Parker when all have contributed to the increasing prices through their support of this extremely early en primeur campaign (given that both Burgundy and the Rhone wait significantly longer, despite that generally the wines require less elevage and cellaring). The guilt of the tripling of the price of Beausejour Duffau can be squarely laid at one door with its unlikely 96-100 and is most indicative this vintage of the influence these scores have on pricing.
I read a nice piece from Mark Savage MW which alas I cannot find where he states explicitly he doesn’t believe these wines at such an unfinished stage can be properly evaluated and scored, and I am pleased from the tone of this blog you seem to be agreeing with that point of view. Given the attention critics get during the en primeur months, could there be a trace of the ego-manical in the desire to rush out scores for these embryonic wines? Certainly the subsequent media reaction to the pricing, fueled in part by tweets and comments from influencial critics, made for a very negative atmosphere for us merchants to sell the wine. As you point out, margins are mostly tiny for us.
For me the Bordelais have essentially chopped the legs off investors, the price hikes meaning they’ll have to wait five or more years for the wines start top appreciate, but perhaps that is no bad thing: investors did not labour in the vineyard and winery all year long to produce these wines. For me wine investment should be about shouldering the cost of storing these wines until they are close to their ideal drinking wine, rather than being bought and sold like gold or shares. Investors may complain that there aren’t any bargains anymore, that they aren’t seeing the wines move in price while still in barrel, but perhaps the shouldn’t be. Why do investors deserve the returns that some saw in 2008, for Lafite and Mouton? 600% in 12 months is unhealthy surely, both from expectations of the investors and the annoyance of the Chateau, who had simply given away a lot of profit.
I would agree with the above point on investors, in particular, when attempting to understand some of the considerations taken by chateaux vs. v pricing policy; as evinced by 2008.
As touched on elsewhere in Tim’s blog, en primeur is not really aimed at the public (consumer), rather it is designed to shift a lot of high-priced wine quickly and, typically, is a trade-off between a buyers and a sellers market.
It is an imperfect system, whereby no pubic-friendly model has thus far been conceived – ‘though the Chinese appear to be developing one.
With regards to scores, one of Jancis Robinson’s recent FT articles confirms her attempt to initiate this, intimating a certain level of interest among British writers; unsurprising, a round no came from the US.
I would not under-estimate the potential for the capacity of the British trade to affect something here. In particular, given that perhaps the most intriguing thing of all is that the role of Robert Parker as market maker is increasingly under question.
We have already seen the emergence of ‘Chinese brands’ and indeed off-vintages thereof (2002, 2006, 2007), outperforming their Parker scores to initiate a nascent, albeit unpredictable, Asian consensus within the 1855 Classification.
Indeed, Parker has recently broken with tradition (in an apparent attempt to affect pricing policy?) stating “I hate to see the image [of Bordeaux being great] damaged by the fact people tend to think it’s too expensive,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘Bordeaux is focused too much on the wealthy Asian market”.
There is, perhaps, more than a passing resemblance between this and the pricing out of the British and other European markets in favour of wealthy Americans in the 1980s. The ball, it would appear, is firmly on the other foot. Today, it is the Chinese businessman who is profiling as the single most important market maker and indicator of future prices.
Indeed, in a recent article in Belgium-based magazine, Tong No. 10 Bordeaux, Filip Verheyden, its editor, published a rather interesting piece predicting the replacement of Parker. Verheyden argued that it was Parker’s preferred style, concentration, backed by a points system that really underpinned his success, that style, he states, has gone its course.
Personally and also from a trade perspective, I would see no reason why the British trade shouldn’t take the initiative here.
Hi Tim,
Interesting blog as ever. The Bordeaux en-primeur campaign seems to generate plenty of headlines each year and a lot of them are similar: prices are too high, wines are too young to evaluate. Nothing much seems to have changed. I recall the 1997 campaign, where prices were considered – rightly – ridiculously high and the wine press was predicting that this would damage Bordeaux in the long-run. It doesn’t seem to have done, unless by ‘long-run’ the media means 50 or 100 years, not 13: we have heard the same argument about pricing a number of times between 1997 and 2010 and yet the prices are higher than ever.
Anyway, working for a producer in Piemonte, I got to thinking about it from the producer’s perspective. As a wine drinker, I can appreciate the frustrations of writes and merchants alike – I would love to be buying first-growths but can not afford them. As a producer, however, I can well understand the view that “if it sells it is not over-priced”. A producer’s view would be that they have done all the work in growing and making the wine, so, if it is able to command €100 a bottle – or 10 times that… – retail, then why should they sell it at €10 a bottle and see a negociant and a merchant taking, say, €15 each essentially for shuffling pieces of paper or e-mails. This may be an over simplification, but it can still be what a producer might think.
Then I hit upon an idea that I suspect is far too ‘socialist’ ever for anyone to take it up and it probably has a spectacularly obvious flaw that I am too stupid to have spotted. Why don’t the producers release their wines en-primeur and have a deal, like Alec Guinness did for his payment for Star Wars, with the negociants that they share the profits generated thereafter? If Latour was released at say, €1,000 per case and, due to the quality of the vintage, the price immediately shot up to €5,000 a case, then the negociant and merchant have the opportunity to make good money, but with a deal like this, the chateau would also see a healthy reward for their efforts and good fortune with the weather. If they release at €1,000 and the price does not move then they get no more reward and this might have the effect of giving them pause for thought the next year since they received no extra income following the inital release. Perhaps with this sort of system there might also be a chance to break down the clear ‘them and us’ culture where the merchants think the producers are trying to screw them on margin and the producers think the merchants are trying to profiteer on the back of someone else’s work.
As I say, I am sure that no-one will take it up – it would require all producers and all negociants/merchants to agree I think before it could even be ‘tested’ – but it did strike me as a potentially more balanced way of organising en-primeur sales.
As for tasting the wines too young, this is obviously the case – wines that have yet fully to finish or shed their malolactic character are almost impossible to taste even in isolation. Taste several dozen at a time and it is a significant challenge…