Bordeaux, prices continue to fall, but popularity seems unassailable

With the end of the en primeur tastings of the 2019 vintage in Bordeaux, for the first time from “remote”, given the international health crisis, which has marked an inevitable drop in prices for practically all top labels, with cuts that have almost and sometimes exceeded 30% on the 2018 vintage, for the most prestigious of France’s wine territories, it is already time for the balance sheets, which are detailed in Wine Lister’s annual report “For better, for worse”. From which emerges, quite surprisingly, a clear disconnection between the popularity of Bordeaux and its most prestigious Châteaux, and price trends. From May 2014 to date, in fact, the wines of Bordeaux have shown the slowest growth index, on the fine wines market, among all the major territories analyzed, with a drop of -5% from May 2019 to May 2020, while the labels of Piedmont have proved by far the most performing, followed by those of Burgundy - united by great attention of the media and the rarity of the most important bottles - while California and Tuscany are further behind, but still ahead of Bordeaux.
Which, however, in the common imagination remains by far the most popular wine territory. Proof of this, as we can still read in the report, is the research on “Wine Searcher”, the world’s largest wine database, with 400,000 labels, which tracks more than a million searches a day, which in terms of popularity (calculated in the number of searches), sees the wines of the Gironde widely in the lead. Only in the top ten, six are the Bordeaux labels (Château Mouton Rothschild, Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Margaux, Château Latour, Pétrus, Château Haut-Brion and Château Pontet-Canet) among the most searched. Behind, the wines of Burgundy, Tuscany, California and Piedmont. The difficulties on the markets and the very long slowdown in prices, therefore, do not seem to have affected the fame of Bordeaux, but certainly the competition from territories capable of reaching increasingly important quality peaks continues to narrow the field on the fine wine market and, at the same time, the price boom of a few years ago, driven mainly by Asian markets, has proved to be a bubble that, over the years, could not do anything but deflate.