Vintage en primeur

En primeur is one of the biggest fixtures on the European calendar. Rebecca Gibb MW explains how it all works.

Château de Lamarque
Château de Lamarque

Sitting on the runway ready to depart Bordeaux airport at the end of en primeur week, the aeroplane was packed with members of the wine trade. There were a few notable exceptions: in the window seat, a Dutch lady wearing leopard-print heels and who sold lingerie for a living complained that she couldn’t find anywhere to stay in the centre of Bordeaux and had been quoted double the normal price for a hotel room.

She wasn’t alone in struggling to find a place to rest her head for the night. More than 5,300 registered visitors descended on Bordeaux during the first week of April to taste the new vintage that still lies maturing in barrel. According to the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce, occupancy rates in the metropolitan area during previous en primeur weeks can exceed 100% in the first two days.

The official en primeur week is an opportunity for wineries to impress journalists and fine wine merchants with their latest offering. Winemakers and château directors dust off their designer suits, polish their shoes, prepare their statements about the latest harvest, and throw open their doors, sometimes erecting marquees and red carpets for the influx of visitors eager to get the first taste of their new wines.
Alain Raynaud, president of the Union des Grand Crus de Bordeaux (UGCB) from 1994 to 2000 and founder of the Grand Cercle des Vins de Bordeaux, a promotional grouping of more than 160 estates from across Bordeaux that sit outside the UGCB, calls it “the biggest week of the year” for Bordeaux wine producers. “More than 5,000 people come to Bordeaux and they need a place to stay. The hotels are overbooked, the restaurants are full. Economically speaking, it is a good thing for everybody.”

Welcoming journalists and wine merchants in their thousands to taste the new vintage that is currently in barrel during one week in late March or early April is now a part of the wine trade’s calendar, but this is a relatively new tradition.

Olivier Bernard, current president of the UGCB, started work at Domaine de Chevalier in 1983 and recalls a rather more freestyle approach to tasting barrel samples at that time. “During the two months of March and April it was just merchants that came to the property [to taste]. There was no special organisation for journalists and maybe a dozen or so came. But in the early 1980s there was a new interest in Bordeaux. The UGC[B] saw that there were lots of people coming and perhaps we should try to organise something.”

A long tradition

Selling wine when it’s not yet ready to be bottled is something of a tradition in the Bordeaux region. The Bordelais sold their wine grapes off the vine (sur souche) at times. For example, in 1868, it was estimated that as much as five-sixths of the harvest had already been purchased before the grapes had finished fermenting. This practice has since been consigned to history – the last time it was widely practised being 1961. Another form of securing wine supply was ‘abonnements’: in the early 20th Century, châteaux and négociants teamed up. In The Wines of Bordeaux, the late Edmund Penning-Rowsell explained that négociant Schroder & Schyler secured a contract to buy Château Kirwan’s entire harvest over the next decade. A similar contract was signed between Calvet and Château Mouton Rothschild.

However, the sale of Bordeaux wine as futures to consumers is a relatively new phenomenon. It really gathered momentum in the 1980s with the arrival of Robert Parker, but ask any senior members of the Bordeaux wine trade to pinpoint the start date of en primeur sales to private individuals and there’s plenty of divergence: late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are all cited. However, Penning-Rowsell claimed that the 1970 vintage marked the turning point with an influx of private investors keen to get their hands on the wines from the abundant 1970 harvest after several off years. He explained, “There has been a fringe of private speculators too, and this fringe certainly broadened in the latter half of the sixties, as the ever-rising prices in the London wine auction rooms demonstrated.” The investment in wine movement has its beginnings in this vintage. 

The future present 

Fast forward to 2017 and the UGCB offers a full itinerary for members of the press, but many dip in and out of the schedule, going on independent visits across the right and left banks. However, it pays to be organised. Polite emails must be sent weeks or months in advance to châteaux to request visits at specified times – with a full list of everyone in the party. If a name has been mistakenly been left off a single list, the doors are closed, as one well-known British journalist found out to his astonishment last year. He later received an apology from the embarrassed château owner. The experience can be varied. Depending on how important the château considers each visitor, they might be ushered into a private tasting with the owner or winemaker or shown to a barrel to stand and taste without any human contact.

For those who buy wine from a négociant, it’s possible to visit their offices and taste widely. They often gather hundreds of samples from across Bordeaux – such as Ulysse-Cazabonne in Margaux – at their headquarters, and put on a hearty lunch. Others will organise the itinerary for visitors. Charles Sichel of the eponymous négociants explains, “We might have a motorcade of about 20 cars driving around to tastings. It’s taking an increasing amount of time to organise visits, particularly to the dissident members of which there are more and more – those who prefer to show their wines at the property like the first growths and the super seconds.”

The formality of en primeur week is a far cry from Sichel’s early years in the trade. “Anyone that wanted to come to Bordeaux could come and drive from château to château unannounced and would meet whoever was there at the time – they might not speak each other’s language. They would go to a barrel – sometimes it was blended, sometimes it might have been a single variety.” The move towards more professional barrel tastings of the new vintage coincided with the rise of Robert Parker, and Sichel believes the two are inextricably linked. “The Bordelais realised this guy had a lot of influence and they said, ‘We need to be careful what we put in front of him. We need to control the message.’ And from the 1983 vintage onward things started being a bit more structured.”

It wasn’t until 1996 that the UGCB organised its first official en primeur week. Today, the week costs the organisation around €100,000.00 ($112,000.00), according to Bernard, which he puts at around 5% to 10% of the organisation’s annual budget. The sum covers official events and press dinners, serving 1,500 meals across the week, while member châteaux also put on their own events – thousands more meals produced by outside caterers are served in hired marquees across the region. The week’s activities also cost the Grand Cercle approximately €100,000.00, but Raynaud explains, “If you divide the cost between our members, it’s not so much – you’d pay more for an advert in a magazine that your customer might not see.”

In a good vintage and in a buoyant market, the money is well spent. However, in a lesser-quality vintage and a weak economy, the cost-benefit analysis isn’t so rosy. “In difficult years like 2013, 300 grands crus [estates] proposed their wines,” says Bernard. “With the 2016 vintage, there are 450 crus selling en primeur.” He added that since 2016 was an excellent vintage, châteaux produced more grand vin than in the lesser 2013 vintage. What’s more, the higher prices attained for a fine vintage mean that turnover for the 2016 campaign could be “three times higher” than the 2013 vintage, yet the organisational costs of the two en primeur weeks were similar.

While it’s difficult to ascertain the value of en primeur to individual châteaux due to widely divergent production volumes and pricing strategies, one négociant suggested, “In a bad vintage, it could go from a loss which could run into tens or hundreds of thousands of euros. In a good vintage, it could generate a profit of a few million euros.” Whatever the weather, it seems to be worth getting dressed up and putting on a good show for the journalists and media: en primeur sales account for at least 50% of a château’s annual revenue, notes another négociant.

Future in doubt

Yet, for all the visitors and the column inches filled, buying wine en primeur has become less attractive. The prices charged by many châteaux en primeur have given buyers little reason to part with their cash upfront when prices have failed to increase – or have even fallen – subsequently. The London-based fine wine trading platform Liv-ex published a 100-page report regarding en primeur pricing in 2016. It found that the most-recent vintages (2009 onwards) had been loss-making for the final buyer with the exception of 2012. It is no wonder that en primeur’s share of annual trade on this exchange fell from a peak of 15% in 2009 to just 1% in 2014.

And with the high-profile departure of first-growth Château Latour from the en primeur system in 2012 and other high-profile châteaux reducing the volumes they release, there has been plenty of speculation about the future of futures. What’s more, the end consumer’s main reason for buying en primeur – getting a good deal – has largely ceased to exist, raising the question of why so many trade members continue to attend. Meanwhile, local hoteliers hope that en primeur week continues to attract thousands of extra visitors to fill their bedrooms, but lingerie sales reps would rather put a sock in it.

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