The rise and fall of Bordeaux

This year’s Bordeaux en primeur season is getting under way – but do wine drinkers care any more? Plus: what I've been drinking this week

Tasting the top: a Union de Grands Crus de Bordeaux en primeur tasting, 2020

NEXT week upwards of 5,000 wine buyers and critics will descend on Bordeaux for the first big en primeur tastings of the 2023 vintage. It is a ritual as confusing to outsiders as it is annoying to many critics. But there are signs that this year, the system may be at crisis point. That says something of wider importance about the wine world’s journey over the past 20 years.

First, an explainer for non-wine geeks. If you buy en primeur – other wine regions sell in this way too – you’re ordering at least a year ahead of the wine actually being shipped. You pay up front, minus the taxes, which you pay the following year once the wine has arrived in your country.

The advantage for producers is clear: en primeur sales improve their cash flow, bringing in money at a point when a vintage will still be tied up in their cellars for another year or more. For wine drinkers, it’s a chance to secure sought-after bottles early before they sell out.

For example, I regularly buy Rhône wines en primeur from the Wine Society. Each year they offer around 150 wines, mostly from smaller producers, already bottled but not yet ready to drink. This February they offered wines from the 2022 vintage, which will mostly be delivered in spring 2025. A few of these will be offered later on the Society’s normal list – but most won’t.

Bordeaux is different: the wine is shown very early, in the Spring after harvest, when it still isn’t finished, let alone bottled. First offered in 1982 in this way, this means that critics taste only barrel samples offering indicative blends. Red Bordeaux wines generally evolve in a more predictable way than, say, red Burgundies. Still, even for expert tasters, if you’re being offered an unfinished “cuvée des journalistes” from one of the better barrels, predicting what the wines will taste like on someone’s dinner table in a decade is a guess.

That is one reason why there has been a growing chorus of criticism of the Bordeaux en primeur system from wine critics and UK merchants. The other reason is soaring prices.

Bordeaux is easily the largest source of fine wine on Earth: there is a lot of money at stake. When the celebrated US wine critic Robert Parker famously called the 1982 vintage as a great one, he put rocket boosters under international demand for high-end claret. In the 1980s and 90s, Parker’s scores out of 100 came to be the international standard – and a market mover in Bordeaux. High Parker points – over a 95 – would guarantee huge demand from Europe, the US and Japan.

In the same period, Bordeaux also started to experience the effects of climate change: the poor years became rarer. Meanwhile, prices drove investment in new wineries and techniques. Catastrophic vintages such as 1956, 1963 or 1972 are now more-or-less a thing of the past. Even in a terrible year like 2013, top-flight châteaux make good wines, albeit for earlier drinking.

And with the stellar 2009 and 2010 vintages came a huge influx of Chinese money. The Liv-Ex wine exchange says that for the 2009 vintage, the top 20 UK merchants – the British wine trade is the biggest market for en primeur – took over £200 million in sales.

There is great anticipation in the wine world every April about the new release prices. Every year, critics and merchants say that the price hikes just can’t continue – and almost every year, they do, despite the fact that most of the Chinese long since pulled out of the market.

Thus in last year’s en primeur “campaign”, producers put up prices for the (excellent) 2022 vintage by an average 15 per cent on 2021. St-Emilion star Château Angélus was up almost 38 per cent, offered by the international trade at £358 a bottle or £4,296 for a case of 12 (meaning over £432/bottle after UK taxes.) Margaux star Château Palmer hiked its release price by more than 25 per cent. Indeed many top 2022s cost more at that point than ready-to-drink, decent vintages such as 2016.

Of course, most Bordeaux is much cheaper than that and there are still some en primeur bargains. But it used to be that en primeur guaranteed the chance to buy young wines at a discount on what they would cost years later, when mature. Not any more, at the top end: you might well lose money.

The fact that Robert Parker retired from tasting in 2014 has made no difference: the top producers now seem less bothered by critics’ scores. Some are now also holding back most of their stock each year, thereby creating false scarcity, while they wait for a later moment to release more. They certainly don’t have cash-flow problems these days.

These are the conditions which have led to criticism known in French as “le Bordeaux bashing”.

But there is disquiet in Bordeaux itself too. Take the so-called Place de Bordeaux, the arcane, middlemen-heavy system whereby most châteaux sell not directly to foreign merchants, let alone consumers, but via brokers (courtiers) to wholesalers (négociants) who in turn sell to the world’s wine merchants. A négociant effectively gets an allocation from a given château: if they turn it down, they risk being snubbed the following year.

So they take their allocation, even at an inflated price. But if they then can’t shift the wine, not only do they not make money; they are spending more on storage and interest on the loans they took to buy the stock. Colin Hay of The Drinks Business reported last week that “a number of well-established négociants are in great difficulty and… many more of them are ready to refuse allocations… to avoid finding themselves in the same situation.”

Moreover en primeur week looks cruelly irrelevant to the majority of Bordeaux vignerons, whose plight was highlighted by huge demonstrations and civil disobedience earlier this year (see my piece from February.) Bordeaux’s biggest market is vast quantities of entry-level supermarket wine – and it is in crisis. It’s true that many Cru Bourgeois châteaux – a step up in quality but not in the superstar league – take part in big April tastings even if they aren’t selling en primeur, in the hope that they get a favourable rating from a big critic. But with hundreds of growers so desperate that they’re taking government money to pull up their vines, the antics of the blazer-clad wine aristocracy look insultingly arrogant.

Hay concludes that the Bordeaux en primeur system is “at breaking point” and that only serious price cuts this year– perhaps as much as 35 per cent – will kick-start the market. Justin Gibbs, co-founder and Deputy Chairman of the Liv-Ex wine exchange, thinks that “if it’s less than 20 per cent, [the wine] will be hard to shift.”

There are some signs of a cut: a number of leading châteaux have scheduled their price announcements early in the campaign, for the weeks beginning 29 April and 6 May. Yet in recent times they have cut prices only under exceptional circumstances: in 2009, after the financial crisis and in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic. They weren’t happy. Says Gibbs: “In retrospect they felt they gave their wines away.” And there is no economic crisis today.

Indeed the strategy of the top châteaux since the late 2000s has been to position themselves as luxury products aimed at the international elite, rather than as an agricultural product for well-heeled wine lovers. For producers of any such products, from wine to cars to watches, freedom to determine high price points is key.

“It’s kind of ingrained in the Bordeaux psyche that prices should go up every year,” says wine critic Anthony Rose, “and there’s a kind of arrogance about that that often defies market conditions.” But as Liv-Ex’s Bordeaux en primeur report warned this week, “the châteaux will be releasing a good, but not great, vintage into a weak market.”

Yet the wider fine wine market has changed. It started to shift after 2011, when Bordeaux wines were at their most over-valued and collectors and investors began to look elsewhere. Whereas in 2010, Bordeaux accounted for 95 per cent of the secondary fine-wine market –wines re-sold by merchants or investors in the years following their release – last year it was just 40 per cent of those sales. Burgundy and the Rhône have made big gains, as have high-end wines from Italy, California and elsewhere.

“Bordeaux just doesn’t have the allure it did,” says Rose. “Quality is going up so much elsewhere. But even though we have a far wider spectrum of great wines to choose from than in the early days of Bordeaux en primeur, only the more forward-looking Bordelais seem to have taken that reality on board.”

There is also a generational aspect. A lot of UK Bordeaux en primeur buyers tend to be older, buying every year out of habit. Gibbs reports some concern in the trade about how to get the next generation of wine enthusiasts interested.

“The new generation don’t have the patience to wait [for fine Bordeaux to mature], and they drink less, and they have different buying habits,” he says. “There’s great wine being made in every corner of the world.” Meanwhile wine merchants fretting that the younger generation don’t have cellars to mature Bordeaux in might want to remember that many don’t even own their own flats.

None of this will make much difference to the hoop-la in Bordeaux next week: most of the UK fine wine trade still go every year. It’s partly inertia, partly because a lot of rich people are willing to pay silly prices: the top 20 UK merchants still took £72 million in en primeur Bordeaux sales last year. Plus, it’s a massive jolly for wine trade attendees. But there are clear signs that the party isn’t going to go on forever.

Show me the money: Château Angélus 2022, St-Emilion, in limited-edition bottle inlaid with 20 carat gold and mother-of-pearl

What I’ve been drinking this week

G.D. Vajra Langhe Nebbiolo 2022 - I drank this classic Piemonte in one of my favourite Italian restaurants, Highbury’s Trullo. From a noted producer, this boasts classic rose Nebbiolo aromas and bright, juicy red berry fruit. Made from young vines whose grapes will be used in Barolo when they’re older (London End Wines, Vinum, Eton Vintners, elsewhere in bond, from £23.)

Marks & Spencer Petit Chablis 2022 - Petit Chablis is the lesser of the Chablis appellations, and historically could be pretty thin. But in a warm vintage like 2022 it’s the match of many a Chablis proper. Lots of bright apple and citrus fruit, underpinned with crisp, lip-smacking acidity. What’s not to like? (M&S, Ocado, £13.)

Château Rocher Bellevue Figeac 1989, St-Emilion Grand Cru - just to prove that I’m not a knee-jerk Bordeaux basher, here’s an interesting wine that my neighbour Steven pulled out of the depths of his cupboard-under-the-stairs at the weekend. From a great vintage on the Right Bank, this was firmly on its downward slope but still delicious, its fruit still expressive and supple, overlaid with earthy, tobacco and leather notes - amazing after 35 years (N/A UK.)