Mathieu Chadronnier
managing director of négociant house CVBG, Bordeaux.
It has become a significant event in the Bordeaux trade calendar. Everyone comes back from holiday and we focus on the releases of these wines in the first weeks of September. It all started back in 1998. The first non-Bordeaux wine to choose the Place de Bordeaux for its distribution was Almaviva (a joint venture between Bordeaux’s Rothschild family and Chile’s Concha y Toro). Because of the link to Bordeaux, and the fact there was no similar distribution system in Chile, the producers decided to ask the Place de Bordeaux négociants to do it for the debut 1996 vintage. In 2004 came Opus One, another joint venture of the Rothschilds, this time with California’s Mondavi family. In this case, they already had an established distribution, but found that the Place could help them expand their export presence. And it proved a very successful move. Their export sales have more than doubled since then. The next one to join was Italy’s Masseto, which was the first with no link to Bordeaux. They came to a select group of négociants to discuss the project.
They see our system as the benchmark for fine wine distribution, and they wanted that for Masseto – the visibility, the dynamism – with each new release becoming a real event, as well as the broader distribution that this offers. They were joined by Italy’s Solaia, made by the Antinori Family, the following year. Then came Rhône Valley’s iconic wine, Hommage à Jacques Perrin and, finally, Seña, another Mondavi project with Viña Errázuriz in 2011. These ones all joined for much the same reasons as Opus One and Masseto did, to enhance their profile, and expand their reach. The wines are all in the €60.00 ($75.00) to €250.00 per bottle price range, wholesale to the international trade.
What makes it important for us is that it’s still relatively new and yet, it’s also quite consistent. The market for these wines is less vintage sensitive than Bordeaux. It’s also an area with lots of room for growth. I can’t say who might join next, but the fact that producers of such internationally known and respected wines choose Bordeaux’s Place has made the Bordeaux system more visible and its value better understood.
Laurent Ehrmann
managing director of négociant house Maison Barrière Frères, Bordeaux.
This is really a significant event in the wine calendar. The timing of these half-dozen wines has become almost as important as the En Primeurs. Every year at 8.00am on September 1st – although not this year due to the death of the late Baroness Philippine de Rothschild – the wine that opens the festivities is Opus One. The rest follow roughly every second day from September 1st to September 15th. That means we have time for ‘haute couture’ distribution.
Time to discuss with each client the individual vintages and the allocations. Compared to the En Primeur where we do 10 to 15 wines a day, this is very serene.
Demand for these wines is always going to exceed supply and, although our job is to find the widest possible distribution, it’s also to find the right fit for each wine according to the desires of each winery. What we are really doing, you could say, is bringing greater oxygen to the distribution of these brands, versus their previous ‘closed’, exclusive, networks. That’s our mission. And you can see the results. If you look at Opus One for example, most high-end Californian wines probably sell at most 5% of their production internationally. Thanks to the Place de Bordeaux, Opus One sells about 50% of its production internationally. That’s success. I’d be willing to bet that other iconic wines will join us. It would be a logical evolution that would be in the interest of all the ‘foreign’ wineries and the Place de Bordeaux.
Although the clients we sell to are importers, retailers and ultimately collectors, there is a secondary market for these wines. Masseto for example, which was released to the trade earlier this month at €245.00 per bottle ex-négociant is already trading at about €400.00. Opus One has moved from €158.00 to €190.00 per bottle. Our margins are similar to the En Primeur margins. But the margins are really irrelevant compared to the joy of working with these wineries. There is a real symbiosis between us. As well as distribution, our role is to manage supply, to keep these wines in stock for when clients need them. If they were selling direct from the wineries, they’d be sold out in a week or two. Instead, by keeping them available year round, the wines have much greater visibility.
Max Lalondrelle
fine wine and Bordeaux buyer for wine retailer, Berry Bros. & Rudd, UK
It’s good to kick off in September with the non-Bordeaux releases. They invigorate the market and form a sizable part of our September turnover, say between 25% and 40% in the month, depending on the vintage. There’s a much more interesting profit margin in them than in Bordeaux En Primeur, although the volumes are lower.
In the early days, the Bordeaux trade was unfamiliar with the distribution of non-Bordeaux wines and so were our customers. Most of the stock was funneled to the more demanding Asian market (mainly Japan) and nobody was too sure how it was all going to work. We were mainly buying the wines from the Bordeaux négociants for direct resale to Asia. But gradually our UK customers got interested and now we sell the majority of what we buy directly to UK customers. Opus One and Almaviva are sold by about 25 to 30 négociants, mainly the biggest ones. The others, Solaia, Hommage à J Perrin, Masseto and Seña are sold by only about six or seven négociant houses, so it’s quite a tight network. It’s definitely a vote of confidence in the Place de Bordeaux and for us it has improved our access to the wines. With Masseto for example, before it was on the Place de Bordeaux, we could only get say nine bottles of it via the UK distributor. Now, because it’s in the Bordeaux system we can get around 100 of the three-bottle cases.
The only problem now is because these wines’ profiles have risen, and they are selling more, the producers are putting the prices up. It’s the same problem that we’ve seen with the En Primeur system. The system only works as long as the margins are fairly spread between the producer, the Bordeaux négociants and the other wholesalers in the supply chain. The trade prices for Masseto have moved up over the last five years from about €110.00 per bottle to about €250.00. That makes it harder for us to sell, although in this case it still works, because there is such a small volume and there’s plenty of demand. Solaia, at €130.00 a bottle wholesale, is more of a problem. That’s too high to really generate enough interest. So, of the six, I would say only three are really still working. Opus One, Hommage à J Perrin and Masseto.
Justin Gibbs
sales & marketing director and co-founder, Liv-ex
We are a big fan of the Place de Bordeaux. In our view, it’s the best distribution system in the world, so the fact these producers chose it just seems like a very good idea. In fact we find it remarkable that anyone would want to leave that system. It’s fast, it’s low cost, broad, deep, and it gets the wine around the world very efficiently, leaving the growers to get on with growing. If you are not using the Place de Bordeaux you have to find an agent or spend a lot of money on marketing, and neither of those would be as good an option. Of course a wine needs a certain gravitas to be on the Place – you can’t pump anything through it. For the Place itself, it also makes sense to spread the risk a bit. We all know how tough 2013 was, so having some highly regarded wines like these helps the books of the negociants, which is in everyone’s interest, particularly the châteaux. We also see a bit of a jump in trading because of it – at least when the wines are well priced. Last year (the 2010 vintage release) was a very good year for Opus One, Solaia and Masseto. This year it’s the 2011 so it might be a bit quieter, but in terms of current activity, Masseto has traded already, and both buyers and sellers remain active. It was released at €245.00 per bottle ex-négociant and on Liv-ex it began trading at £1,020.00 ($1,640.00) per three bottles. It last traded at £1,062.00, so that’s almost double.
