The ‘09 Bordeaux En Primeur Campaign
The 2009 vintage en primeur campaign has gotten off to a flying start with early hype predicting another bumper year for the Bordeaux region. 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.
It is early days yet but the allocations will soon be allocated and the sellers will be hitting the call back buttons to the early enquirers and staple diet customers of yesteryear. We’ll be piping through as many reports as we can on our site at Bordeaux En Primeur.
Top Bordeaux chateaux early scoring indications by big name writers include the Lafite 100. Latour 99. Cheval 100. Haut-B 97. Margaux 98. Mouton 94. Ausone 97. Petrus 98. Yquem 99 (Tim Atkin MW from Twitter feed). But isn’t that the rub? The prices between the 2008 vintage and the 2009 are going to be significant but the scores only show a very small variation. It does highlight that the scoring methods for wines by trusted industry stalwarts like Robert Parker or Jancis Robinson need closer attention. a 100 point wine rating convention that has a tendency to score wines in the high 90’s and then announces a special vintage does leave it self much room for differentiation. It forces us to take a more contextual view of wine scoring to ascertain the true quality level? 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.
Is all this making sense? Surely a score given at a given time that is a benchmark that investors can trust, 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.
