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.

Big interest emerging from Asia mean that the en primeur market is very well subscribed and interest is growing that will very likely causes surges in price points. A preconceived recession hangover may not linger long enough to affect the business. 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 that is exactly the problem? The prices between the 2008 vintage and the 2009 are going to be significant but the scores only show a very small variation. This probably says more about the wine scoring conventions of people like Robert Parker et al. a 100 point wine rating convention that has a tendency to score wines in the high 90′s and then announces a special vintage does leave it self much room for differentiation. It forces us to take a more contextual view of wine scoring to ascertain the true quality level? If so, then as the years draw on, the wine scoring system becomes more confusing and a deeper level of knowledge is required about the vintage by the buyer.

Are these scores we can count on? Surely a score given at a given time that is a respected industry standard, should be just that… a benchmark that investors can trust. How do we solve this dilemma? Visiting the numerous tastings that are put on for potential buyers could be a tried and tested solution. A second might be to follow a number of experts and compare and contrast the reports to get your shortlist. Drinkers tend to have a different outlook to investors; the taste and style and aging potnetial will be paramount. For investors, the best route is to buy the top chateau in the big vintages.

Technorati Tags: 2009, bordeaux, en primeur, Lafite, Latour, margaux, Medoc

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 7:11 am and is filed under Food and Drink: Wine Spirits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.