All of the major speculation is over now as the majority of the chateaux have released just enough of their wine in a half-hearted attempt to create a first tranche. The prices? They were downright scary on some items, a good 30% higher on average than the record breaking 2005’s were when they were released. As we said in the lead article, the euro is lower than it was for the 2005-2006 releases, the world economy is seriously bruised right now, and there is certainly no reasonable expectation that it is going to improve greatly any time soon. Yet here are the Bordelais not only setting records with their opening prices, but clearly trying to manipulate the market to push them even higher. We can cite lots of examples, but one will suffice. We’ll call it Chateau XYZ that released their opening “tranche” at $300, supposedly sold out, and had the second tranche available at $340…one hour later. Just how much was released at that initial price? No one knows. Will folks come back right away and bite on the next round? We can say we didn’t.
More surprising, folks seem to be of the opinion that if they are not in early, they’ll miss out or be facing even more outlandish pricing. Only time will tell that story, but the early rounds of the name brands are selling and people seem interested. It is not our place to judge what is reasonable, I guess, because if the stuff sells out, than obviously the price wasn’t too high. As merchants, we are facilitators first. The trick is to get people as much wine as they want to buy, or at least as much as we can provide. But when the market decides it is sated, which is unpredictable, we definitely don’t want to be the ones holding a lot of $10,000-12,000 cases because those aren’t going to be easy to move.
Another thing that has been frustrating for us and consumers alike is the difficulty formulating offers. There’s a reason for it, though it is not easy to explain. From our perspective, it is hard to formulate a plan if you have anticipated demand for an item at, say, 50 cases, and you can only get a firm confirmation on 10 within a given time period, and that confirmation is slow in coming. With the internet, people are reading Bordeaux release news and expecting full fledged, detailed offers within seconds of that information becoming public. They don’t know how much of an item has been released, or what the demand is, they just know that it’s out there so someone must have some answers. Would that it worked so smoothly.
That brings us to, well, now. Where does it go from here? Hard to say. It depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for some of the greatest Bordeaux ever made, they are out there. But prices are all over the map. If you are looking for surprising deals, those are there, too. But there’s no way to tell for how long as a lot of the best score-to-value wines were made in very modest quantities. The market is hard to predict right now, and we have been at this a long time.
