Why buy en primeur?
There's no instant gratification, many additional costs, and everyone moans that it doesn't work. Why buy Bordeaux en primeur?
This year’s en primeur campaign is upon us.
A new vintage of uneven (though by no means terrible) quality that the Bordelais want to be rid of in seemingly indecent haste, like a skunk in a lift.
But why buy en primeur? What’s the point when many other great wines aren’t sold that way?
Not so long ago, buying Bordeaux futures was the ‘thing to do’ for anyone interested in collecting wine.
But the answer today is less likely to be so clear-cut.
En primeur is meant to be an opportunity to buy the new vintage before it’s bottled, at the best possible price.
Over the past decade, however, there has been a lot of recrimination around en primeur – mostly the pricing.
Bordeaux’s two bodies
The 2009 and 2010 vintages were a blockbuster pair that hit the market at the height of Asia’s new wine obsession.
Demand super-inflated prices but Asian buyers ultimately preferred ready-to-drink vintages and the en primeur game didn’t stick.
The problem was that the Bordelais had tasted the high life. Like a medieval noble who’s seized a throne, there was an added layer of tension between the châteaux’s kingly ambitions as new luxury products and their feudal obligations as agricultural ones.
Flush with cash and grandeur, they didn’t readjust their pricing for old markets in Europe and the US, and many buyers felt priced out.
Subsequent en primeur vintages have generally felt like a continuous war of words and opinions between producers and trade, and spawned the term ‘Bordeaux bashing’.
It took until the offering of the 2019 vintage during the 2020 lockdown for both sides to feel as though a good middle ground had been found.
Only for the very next vintage to sour relations again.
A loss of purpose
The problem is that these post-Asian boom years have seen many wines badly priced on release and then fail to appreciate in value or indeed decline in value afterwards, sometimes very seriously so.
Not all wines have ‘sold through’ during these campaigns either, and so older vintages are readily available on broking platforms.
This is the complete antithesis of what en primeur is for. If you can buy the wines later and potentially for less, why buy en primeur at all?
And it’s a fair point, there are problems with the system at present and how campaigns are pitched and it would be foolish to deny them.
But there are aspects of en primeur that still work, and it can be much more accessible than people think.
Price relativity
We’ve established that the chief criticism of Bordeaux today is price.
Of course, wine is always perceived as more expensive ‘than it used to be’, but you’ll find writers in the 1970s and 1980s bemoaning exactly the same point.
Price, after all, and what one might deem ‘fair’ value, is relative.
A high price doesn’t equate to bad ‘value’ if the quality of the wine and demand from the market are in step, and new releases look well-priced relative to other vintages – especially those of a similar quality and which have appreciated since their release.
Releasing good volumes, having a good track record and high critical praise make some estates appealing to buyers with the money to purchase them.
And I’m sure those wines will bring their buyers much happiness. At least I hope so, otherwise, why buy them?
But you don’t have to spend a lot of money to partake in primeurs and, most importantly, find wines that will bring you joy.
The crux of the matter
I buy wine for pleasure; in the same way people buy clothes or rare LPs, and primeurs has a certain sense of occasion to it.
It’s also fun, you’re buying something you like and will be able to enjoy.
I’m still enjoying some of the first Bordeaux I ever bought en primeur from the 2014 vintage. They’re excellent, not a blockbuster vintage but mighty fine all the same.
It’s the culmination of a little investment I made when I was younger and a little more impecunious, so it very much felt like a big deal at the time.
Buying en primeur still has something of the rite of passage about it.
It’s a formative step in collecting wine, in ‘building a cellar’, and there’s an undoubted pleasure in tending to a collection like a kitchen garden or well-curated wardrobe.
Adding a bit of this and a bit of that, replacing one thing with another and cherry-picking what you want when it’s ready to consume and you need it for a certain dish or occasion.
My buying power remains somewhat limited. I wish I could afford a first growth like Haut-Brion, but I can’t, tant pis.
On the other hand, I can afford a decent amount of other Bordeaux – and good stuff it is too.
Buy smarter
The key to buying en primeur now, for the less high-flying but still keen collector-drinker, is to buy smart.
One accessible avenue is the petits châteaux and crus bourgeois where the quality has got much better and where some labels and domains – such as Capbern, Angludet or Lalande-Borie – are part of the ‘stable’ of much more prestigious (and expensive) properties.
These generally sit in what I would call a very ‘fair’ sub-£200 to sub-£300 per dozen bracket, enough for me to buy a case or two a year and keep my small cellar ticking over with proper ‘lunchtime’ claret.
So why buy en primeur?
Benefitting from the winemaking expertise of the technical teams from their famous parent estates but at a fraction of the price, I would argue that in many a vintage it is absolutely the time to go looking for these drinking wines.
They’re the sort of thing that, once the campaign is over, become difficult to find.
And why? Because these are the wines people – like me - are buying, not for financial gain, but to drink.
Because, even if they don’t have the pedigree of Mouton Rothschild or Margaux or Petrus, they still offer what all proper claret offers; beautifully-made wines that you can drink at your leisure over the better part of a decade or more to the point that you not only perfectly forget what you paid for them – you don’t care.
VPQ