EN PRIMEUR SALES, AFTER THE DISAPPOINTMENTS IN RECENT YEARS AND THE MEDIOCRE HARVEST, THE CHATEAUX BORDEAUX 2014 CAMPAIGN SEEMS INEVITABLY DOOMED. IS THIS THE END OF AN ERA?

There is one period in the year that for years the wine world waits for with bated breath, the frantic weeks of en primeur sales, when the Châteaux of Bordeaux announce the prices that wine from the latest harvest will hit the market. These are the futures, which give the measure of quality of the vintage and the wine, but also a way to raise selling prices, create expectations and hope for speculation and price increases.

These dynamics have given tangible results year after year, and the value of major wines growing over the years by 450%. Then, something started not working. The wine producers aimed too high even in definitely not memorable years, the crisis did the rest, and the en primeur sales bubble burst. The magazine “The Drinks Business” conducted a study revealing the last profitable year in terms of investment was 2008, at least according to data from Liv-ex 100, the most precise wine index, while 2009 is losing 17% on average, and the following years are certainly not performing well.

After such a difficult harvest, marked not only by its scarcity, but also by mediocre quality at best, the dilemma for many is whether or not to continue focusing on en primeur sales. On the one hand, the risk is a predictable failure (many investors are on the war path after the disappointments of the last campaign); on the other, giving up is not easy. And some provokingly suggest a third even more drastic and difficult solution, to give up going on the market with top wines and downgrade wine production to a lower range, in the footsteps of what Quintarelli did with Amarone years ago.