Buying an unfinished work? Barrel futures at a glance
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The Future. The World of Tomorrow. The Great Unknown.
Sitting there, sipping on the glass of whatever you have in front of you, oenologically speaking, you are already in the future, which is to say, the present, or whatever. Let’s not get to philosophical.
But the point is, the wine you buy on the shelf, online, or at the restaurant is the future, the vision of the winemaker, vineyard owner, and the investors, all realized to finality in a shiny glass bottle with a pretty little label.
But there is a way to get a better price on your wines. And yes, there is a risk involved.
The futures market is something casually know to most serious wine collectors, and intimately known to others.
So what is it? Well quite simply it is a bet, a risk/reward put out there by the winery to get some money up front for their wines that aren’t even in the bottle.
So let’s get this straight – you are buying an unfinished bottle of wine, one that has been barrel aged, but not bottled.
Safe bet right? Well, sort of. First of all, there are about what, four internationally known and regarded outlets for reviews of Bordeaux futures? Then from each of these four you have to take their reviews with a grain of salt as they will 1) unknowingly tend to favor certain styles (bold versus say, balanced) over others 2) not always give you full disclosure on whether or not they think this barrel sample is age-worthy.
Add to that the recent and sometimes scandalous examples where a wine was reviewed at an incredibly high barrel score (why most reviewers now use a plus/minus rating of five points when grading barrel samples) only to “settle” into a final rating of almost fifteen points less. That makes a difference when the barrel sample was rated at one hundred perfect points and the wine settled down to below ninety. Those scores drive the price of the futures up, up, and away, and the resultant score scares away buyers at that inflated futures price, and may even turn buyers off of subsequent vintages from that producer.
Keep in mind that these writers and reviewers have a difficult task of grading wine at all, which is subjective at best, only add to that the task of having to grade on a curve.
By grading on a curve, I mean that they have to take a given barrel sample and basically guess, based on years of such tasting and subsequent tasting of the finished product, in good and bad vintages, just where this wine is going in one, five, even thirty years.
No pressure, right?
Now if you have spent your last decade tasting every vintage, good and bad, of a given region, year in and year out, both in the barrel and in the bottle, as well as older vintages to get an idea of where they are going, plus any other examples that were made by the same winemaker, the same vineyard, perhaps independent of the chateau, then you are about as well equipped as anyone to make that call. Provided you have a palate to begin with.
So how do you, John Q. Buyer get a hold of a futures offer? If its Bordeaux, the short answer is, you don’t. Not directly anyway. Now with other, smaller wineries, it is possible to buy them direct. Just last week I was in Willamette Valley, on a bit of a scouting run, and noticed that over the Memorial Day weekend, a bunch of wineries, large and small, will be offering barrel samples with the hopes of selling you the wine before it is bottled. So it’s not just the realm of the Bordeaux Blue Chip producers, you can be a part of it yourself.