2009 Bordeaux Wine Futures: The Best Vintage For A Century
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.
Despite the preconception that the recession has left people to broke to support the en primeur business, it seems that new buyers are emerging from around the world with a second BBR office opening in Hong Kong and many Aisan buyers plugging the gaps that the Western investors have had to pull back on. 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.
The phones will now be buzzing with merchants calling their regulars as well as host of newcomers into the wine futures market. We’ll be piping through as many reports as we can on our site at Bordeaux En Primeur.
A big name chateau getting preliminary scores already by big name wine writers are 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? Gary vaynerchuk wisely pointed out that the scores between the 2008 en primeur’s and the 2009 vintage is not that great but the trouble is, the price disparity is. This probably says more about the wine scoring conventions of people like Robert Parker et al. A hundred point scoring system that rates wines consistently in the high nineties and then announces a far superior succeeding vintage is running out of score to give. It forces us to take a more contextual view of wine scoring to ascertain the true quality level? It seems that as we look back over the vintages and compare the scores, we also need a hell of a lot of notes to make the scores a meaningful representation of the vintage to 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 respected industry standard. So what’s the solution? Visiting the numerous tastings that are put on for potential buyers could be a tried and tested solution. A good idea is to hand pick a couple of wine critics both from the UK and the USA and closely compare and contrast their scores and notes to inform your selection. 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.
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