Chinese buy, Americans shy away from Bordeaux 2009

(Adam Lechmere is editor of decanter.com, (www.decanter.com), the web arm of Decanter, the leading British wine magazine. The opinions expressed are his own)

By Adam Lechmere

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - As the dust settles on the most fevered Bordeaux en primeur campaign in living memory, it's becoming clearer who has been buying the great 2009.

Some predictions have not come true. The Chinese haven't changed their buying habits this year. Earlier this year Gary Boom at Bordeaux Index, a London merchant and Bordeaux specialist, said 25 percent of their en primeur sales would go east. The reality, he admitted, was more like 10 percent.

On average the Chinese accounted for 60 percent of value sales as they snapped up the extraordinarily expensive First Growths and their siblings, as they usually do, but in volume they bought only 15 percent.

Other crystal balls proved more accurate.

At the end of last year Gary Vaynerchuk, owner of New York-based web retailer Wine Library and the pioneer of winelibrary TV, said Americans would stay away from 09, and they have.

"The exorbitant prices ... have prompted a remarkable outpouring of indignation,' Michael Steinberger said in Decanter magazine (www.decanter.com) while U.S. merchants from Washington D.C. to California are lukewarm.

Most are taking the words of Robert Parker, the owner of Maryland-based Wine Advocate and one of the world's leading wine critics, to heart.

Disingenuous as ever, he has labelled the 2009 probably "the finest vintage I have ever tasted in 32 years of covering Bordeaux," He sat back and watched the prices climb, and then blasted the Bordelais in a tweet as "stupid and arrogant" for setting prices so high.

But British merchants aren't losing any sleep over the American market. They're too busy working out their profits. Bordeaux Index has made 1 million pounds ($1.55 million) a month gross profit since January, and sold some 16 million pounds worth of en primeur.

Farr Vintners announced 53 million pound sales, with just over 30,000 cases sold at an average of 1760 pounds per case.

Eighty percent of these wines have been bought by private British collectors and drinkers.

If private customers account for the lion's share of the volume sold this year, investment funds have also been much more active than usual. Wine funds look for the 'bankers' wines that will end up with 100 Parker points, in the 100-point based rating system, when the critic retastes the vintage after bottling a year from now.

"A red Bordeaux with 100 Parker points is automatically the ultimate collectible," Farrs' chairman Stephen Browett said, adding that there are no 100-pointers, in any vintage, that sell for less than 3000 pounds a case.

So wine funds have snapped up at least half Farrs' allocation of Cos d'Estournel, which Parker gave 98-100 and called "one of the greatest young wines" he had ever tasted.

While the Parker-rated wines are expensive, and the blue-chips stratospheric, all the evidence still points to 2009 as a vintage that is all things to all wine lovers. Petrus, at more than 30,000 pounds a case, might be out of your reach, as are all the first growths and their peers.

But the list of superbly drinkable and age-worthy wines at less than 25 pounds a bottle is long, and many of the small to medium-sized merchants are thanking their stars that that's the case, because they can't get their hands on anything else.

It's impossible to get concrete information on allocations - the amount of wine merchants can buy from the Bordeaux middlemen - but this year all are agreed they have been tiny. Gary Boom jokes that if his allocations shrink any further he'll be getting one case of each of the First Growths.

For one particularly disgruntled mid-ranking British merchant who did not want to be identified, that wasn't a joke.

"Our first growth allocation this year? It's about what a private client would expect to get," he said, referring to about five cases.

For him, the luminous quality of the vintage outweighed his pique at missing out on the top stuff.

"We've done fantastically well. We've sold 3000 cases so far - more than in 2005," he said.

And he's selling wines like Chateau Cantemerle. It has everything going for it: a classed growth with a solid base in the Britain, with a good Parker score of 92-94.

"At 20 pounds a bottle, where can you go wrong?," he said.