Bordeaux 2016: Buying En Primeur
As is customary, I round off this intorduction to the vintage with some words on buying en primeur. Further down the page is a brief guide to the concept and process of buying wine en primeur, as well as some hints and tips on how to avoid en primeur pitfalls (in other words, how to avoid losing your money). First, however, I have some advice of a different kind.
When I started buying Bordeaux for drinking, many years ago, the basic concept was perfect. Buyers handed over money, little more than an unsecured loan in exchange for wine to be delivered two years later, but the advantage to consumers was that you obtained the best price, while the châteaux improved their cash flow. The acceptable disadvantages to the consumer included the unfinished nature of the wines, their ‘value’ therefore an unknown quantity, and the buyer had to be guided by critics’ scores (there is also an unacceptable risk, that you lose you money when a business in the supply chain goes bust in that two-year period). The acceptable disadvantage to the châteaux was that they although they raked in some profit at this time, it was perhaps less than they could have achieved had they sold later.
In recent years the Bordelais have eaten away at this loss of profit so that wines are now released at prices more expensive than ever. In recent years the release prices have been so high that consumers who buy wines en primeur now mostly lose money. This has been true for almost every vintage over the last decade, notable exceptions including 2007 and 2008, the latter vintage marked by unusually low release prices when the Bordelais misjudged the appetite for the wines against the backdrop of economic decline (perhaps they also under-rated the quality of the vintage) and then Robert Parker came out with some really confident scores, creating aftermarket demand and profit for buyers. Clearly we won’t ever see this sort of scenario again, as there is no critic today with the pulling power of the now-retired Parker. Better pricing and a weaker Euro also helped the 2012 vintage to generate some advantage for the consumer. But on the whole, if you buy en primeur, you will lose out.
