The ‘09 Bordeaux En Primeur Campaign
The Bordeaux wine producers will be rubbing their hands together as another big year is upon us and the press and merchants are doing their best to bolster the hype. With all the journalists and merchants heading out to the region, it seems we’re being primed for a big campaign with equally large prices.
Big interest emerging from Asia mean that the en primeur market is very well subscribed and interest is growing that will very likely causes surges in price points. A preconceived recession hangover may not linger long enough to affect the business. Saying that, it does seem that web traffic being monitored for search related terms is not slowing down and London Wine merchant, Jeroboams, report that their enquiries for the 2009 Bordeaux en primeur are reaching the same as those of the vaunted 2005.
The phones will now be buzzing with merchants calling their regulars as well as host of newcomers into the wine futures market. We’ll be piping through as many reports as we can on our site at Bordeaux En Primeur.
A big name chateau getting preliminary scores already by big name wine writers are Lafite 100. Latour 99. Cheval 100. Haut-B 97. Margaux 98. Mouton 94. Ausone 97. Petrus 98. Yquen 99 points (@timatkin – Twitterfeed). But that is exactly the problem? Gary vaynerchuk wisely pointed out that the scores between the 2008 en primeur’s and the 2009 vintage is not that great but the trouble is, the price disparity is. This probably says more about the wine scoring conventions of people like Robert Parker et al. A hundred point scoring system that rates wines consistently in the high nineties and then announces a far superior succeeding vintage is running out of score to give. Does this mean that we are meant to look at every score within a certain context? If so, then as the years draw on, the wine scoring system becomes more confusing and a deeper level of knowledge is required about the vintage by the buyer.
Are these scores we can count on? Surely a score given at a given time that is a universal scoring method, should be just that… a universal scoring method. So what’s the solution? I expect that getting out to the tastings and sampling them yourself is a good but not often workable solution. A second might be to follow a number of experts and compare and contrast the reports to get your shortlist. Obviously, if you’re in the investing rather than the drinking business then you’ll not care – just buy the most famous chateau in the best vintages and your investment will be safe.
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