Investors sniff a profit from Bordeaux

Lafite en primeur, or still in the barrel, selling for £10,000 a case and there has been zero subsequent appreciation, merchants say.

“2011 is not going to compete in terms of quality and certainly needs to be cheap,” said Joss Fowler, who handles fine wine sales at Berry Bros & Rudd, one of the biggest UK buyers of Bordeaux.

“With the two very expensive years we have just had where wines have not necessarily appreciated in price much, people will need financial incentive to buy . . . Some wines are going to have to be half what they were last year.”

Bordeaux-producing châteaux are expected to start pricing their wine later this month in what Antoine Gimbert, who runs the UK and Hong Kong operations for wine merchant Millésima, refers to as “a kind of poker game . . . it’s a tiny world so you have to be careful targeting the right price”.

This year that exercise will be more finely poised still. Asian buyers have just begun buying en primeur in the past couple of years, said Mr Fowler, meaning their experience to date is unimpressive. To be fair, an investment in the Hong Kong or Chinese stock markets in the past two years would have been still less impressive.

“If they just bought 2009s and 2010s and have not seen any monetary appreciation, they will say ‘What’s the point?’ The risk for Bordeaux is to totally alienate a market that’s going to be very important to them in the future,” he said.

Drinkers in China and other parts of Asia have proved a boon to purveyors of wine, Scotch whisky and Cognac among other alcoholic drinks by forking out for pricey bottles – as much a status symbol among the recently rich as a designer handbag.

Gary Boom, managing director of merchants Bordeaux Index, puts this year’s vintage on a scale of “6.5 to 7 out of 10: nowhere near as good as 2009 and 2010”. But like his peers he reckons that the latter was, in hindsight, overpriced and left very little room for appreciation.

By contrast, he points to the 2008 vintage which was priced cheaply and generated returns, and the 2000 vintage which he describes as “the holy grail: great quality but also low pricing”.

A case of 2000 Château Lafite, bought for £2,000, is now worth £16,000, he says. Other wines from that year have increased four- and five-fold in value.

While wine merchants say truly bad vintages have been rendered obsolete by improved technology and knowledge, vintages are still subject to variation due to weather. Last year, says Mr Gimbert, the milder summer prevented grapes ripening properly and some were subject to rot.

That has also hit yields, he added, with year-on-year declines of 15 to 20 per cent at some estates. But such is the nature of weather, soil variations and the resources of an individual Château that “just across the street a neighbouring estate will have completely different yields”.