There is a particular kind of arrogance that only manifests when someone hands you more money than you have ever seen and asks for more of the same. Bordeaux in 2009 and 2010 demonstrated it with a thoroughness that the region has spent the subsequent fifteen years trying to live down, and largely failing.

The story of what happened in fine wine between 2008 and 2011 gets told in two ways: as a triumph of market expansion, or as a cautionary tale about what happens when producers confuse a demand shock for a permanent revaluation of their product. The first version is the one you’ll find in château press materials. The second is the one the trade actually learned from.

Hong Kong Opens the Door, and Everyone Rushes Through

The mechanism was simple enough. In February 2008, Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Tsang abolished wine duties entirely — the culmination of a two-stage process that had already cut the rate from 80% to 40% the previous July. The reasoning was economic: position Hong Kong as a trading and hospitality hub for an increasingly wealthy region. The effect was more dramatic than anyone in Whitehall or the Quai des Chartrons had predicted.

Overnight, Hong Kong became the finest wine shop in Asia. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Acker Merrall relocated their ambitions accordingly, and by 2010, Hong Kong had surpassed both New York and London as the world’s largest wine auction market. The mechanism through which mainland Chinese buyers — whose appetite for luxury goods was in its most aggressive expansion phase — could access premier Bordeaux at zero duty was now frictionless. All that remained was product.

The timing was, from the Bordelais perspective, providential. They were sitting on a trilogy of vintages that critics would spend years outdoing each other to praise.

Three Vintages, Three Decisions

The 2008 vintage deserves some sympathy as a casualty of circumstance. Released in spring 2009 against the background of the global financial crisis, the châteaux priced cautiously — First Growths around €130–€140 ex-château, roughly £1,950 per case. The prices were not acts of generosity so much as acts of market reality. Nobody knew what the world looked like yet, and a few châteaux had witnessed what happens when you release into a collapsing market with maximum ambition.

Then China’s 4-trillion-yuan stimulus arrived, and the calculus changed.

What the châteaux could not have fully anticipated was Château Lafite Rothschild’s contribution to speculative mythology. In October 2010, Lafite announced that bottles from the 2008 vintage would carry the Chinese character for eight — 八, a number whose cultural resonance with prosperity and good fortune in Mandarin requires no elaboration here — etched directly into the glass. The effect on secondary pricing was immediate and not subtle. A wine that had been acquired at under £2,000 per case was trading above £14,000 by early 2011. For buyers who had taken the 2008 at release, this was a windfall without precedent in fine wine history. For buyers who arrived late to the party, it was a different experience entirely.

The 2009 vintage brought Robert Parker and his colleagues to levels of critical superlative that were beginning to strain the available vocabulary. It was, depending on which publication you read, a “vintage of the century,” a “generational achievement,” or various combinations of those words. The growing season had cooperated in ways that Bordeaux producers remember with something approaching reverence.

What the châteaux elected to do with this critical consensus is where the story becomes instructive. Seeing the Asian market absorbing everything it could lay hands on, and watching secondary prices demonstrate the distance between their release prices and what the market would bear, they concluded the obvious thing: raise prices substantially and capture what speculators had been capturing on their behalf.

First Growths released the 2009 at €550–€600 ex-château. In case terms, that translated to £8,500 to £10,000 and upward. The En Primeur community, which had spent years operating on the foundational premise that futures pricing represented a discount to anticipated physical market value, absorbed this with something between shock and resignation. The implied deal — buy now, tie up capital for two years, receive wine at a price below what it will later fetch — had been materially renegotiated. Buyers were now paying at or near what the châteaux expected the wine to be worth at maturity.

The 2010 vintage, a second consecutive monumental growing season, removed any remaining pretence. First Growth release prices nudged above €600–€660 ex-château, exceeding £11,000 to £12,000 per case. The châteaux had, with admirable efficiency, priced the buyers out of any prospective capital appreciation and kept it for themselves. Whether this was good business or spectacular short-sightedness depended entirely on what the market did next.

What the Market Did Next

The Liv-ex 100 peaked in June 2011 and then demonstrated, with considerable vigour, that wine markets are not exempt from the arithmetic that governs other speculative assets.

The causes of the collapse were several and compounding. Chinese buyers had acquired at scale and speed, filling warehouses with bottles they had no particular intention of consuming; the demand was speculative rather than driven by any meaningful cellar culture, and when sentiment shifted, the inventory sitting in bonded facilities across Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta found no buyers. More significantly, President Xi Jinping’s anti-extravagance campaign, launched seriously in late 2012, eliminated with a single policy stroke the gifting culture that had made first-growth Bordeaux a form of high-end currency in mainland business and government circles. Giving someone a case of Lafite had been a recognisable transaction; it was now a liability.

The counterfeiting problem, which had proliferated alongside the market’s expansion, added further pressure. When buyers began questioning whether the Lafite they were purchasing was the Lafite described on its label — a well-founded concern given the scale of documented fraud — the premium attached to trophy bottles began to reflect authentication anxiety alongside underlying wine value.

Between mid-2011 and 2014, fine wine indices fell 30% to 50%, with First Growth Bordeaux among the steepest declines. The 2008 vintage peaked near its secondary high and then surrendered much of those gains; buyers who had acquired at £14,000 on the Lafite speculation faced losses that no eight-character engraving could offset. The 2009 and 2010 vintages spent the better part of a decade trading below or barely at their original release prices — a remarkable achievement given that both are, by any objective vinous measure, exceptional wines.

What Bordeaux Actually Broke

The more durable damage was not to secondary pricing but to the intellectual premise of En Primeur itself.

The system had functioned, for decades, as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Buyers committed capital two years before bottling in exchange for a price that anticipated but did not fully capture the wine’s likely appreciation. Merchants could offer clients genuine value on release; châteaux received guaranteed revenue against harvest costs. The model required discipline from producers: release prices had to leave room for others to make money, because the buyers needed a reason to participate.

The 2009 and 2010 campaigns demonstrated that the largest châteaux had no structural obligation to maintain this arrangement when Asian demand provided an alternative. They priced to extract maximum value for themselves, leaving the trade with wines that offered no discernible advantage over mature back-vintages already available in the secondary market — in some cases at lower prices than the En Primeur releases.

The collector response was entirely rational: if buying a 2009 Mouton Rothschild en primeur meant paying more than one could acquire a physical 2000 or 2001 at auction, then En Primeur was no longer the mechanism for accessing value; it was a preorder service for people who preferred patience to pragmatism.

Château Latour reached this conclusion publicly in 2012, withdrawing from En Primeur entirely and announcing it would release wines only when ready to drink at prices reflecting current market conditions. The decision was framed, with some elegance, as a philosophical commitment to quality and readiness. It was also an entirely coherent commercial response to a system that no longer served its participants equitably.

The Legacy, Stated Plainly

The 2008–2010 Asian bull run produced several categories of winner and loser with uncommon clarity.

The initial 2008 En Primeur buyers, those with the nerve to commit capital into a post-crisis market and the discipline to hold through the peak, made returns that remain without precedent in fine wine collecting history. The châteaux that priced 2009 and 2010 at levels beyond what the market could sustain extracted short-term revenue against long-term reputational cost. The speculative buyers who arrived at the top of the Lafite mania absorbed losses that took a decade to recover. Latour, by leaving the system when it became broken, arguably preserved more brand integrity than those who stayed and continued extracting.

The broader En Primeur model has never fully recovered the confidence it enjoyed before 2009. Each annual campaign now generates versions of the same conversation: are these prices realistic, is there any upside left for buyers, and would it not be simpler to wait two years and purchase physical stock? In most years, for most châteaux, the honest answer to all three questions is the same, and the trade knows it.

That is what happens when you discover the market will pay whatever you ask and decide that asking more is obviously the correct response. Sometimes it is. Sometimes you price yourself out of the system that made you valuable in the first place, and spend the following decade wondering why the phone rings less often.

The author owns no 2009 First Growth Bordeaux on the grounds that doing so would require having purchased it en primeur at the time, which would have required an optimism about that campaign that was not, in retrospect, warranted.

The fine wine market in the first half of 2026 has done something it hasn’t managed convincingly since the correction began: it has steadied. Not recovered — steadied. The distinction matters. What the Liv-ex indices are showing, across all major regions, is a migration from steep negative trajectories toward flat or tentatively positive territory. Whether this constitutes a floor or merely a pause before the next leg down is the question serious collectors should be asking, and the one most commentary is carefully avoiding.

Here is what the numbers actually say.

Burgundy: The Region That Cannot Lose, Or At Least Cannot Lose Badly

The Burgundy 150 Index is the sole major fine wine benchmark showing meaningful positive movement year-to-date, up roughly 1.1% — modest in absolute terms but leading the field by some distance when the competition is effectively treading water. Grand Cru and top Premier Cru segments have registered monthly technical rebounds in the 0.7% to 1.2% range, driven less by speculative enthusiasm than by the simple arithmetic of constrained supply meeting a collector base that has decided, with some justification, that prices aren’t going meaningfully lower.

The auction market for elite domaines operates in its own category entirely. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Armand Rousseau continue clearing 30–35% above pre-sale estimates — which either validates the thesis that trophy Burgundy occupies a liquidity class immune to macroeconomic friction, or suggests that the people bidding at these levels have made their peace with paying a premium for the privilege of ownership. Probably both.

The structural story hasn’t changed: supply is finite and shrinking as bottles are consumed; the collector community most devoted to this region is also the most resistant to selling; the quality differential between a great Burgundy vintage and a merely good one is sufficiently well-documented that it sustains a credible long-duration investment thesis even at current valuations. The ceiling on further appreciation is capped by sustained borrowing costs and weak Asian luxury demand — neither of which are arguments for a violent rally — but the downside at Grand Cru is effectively floored by scarcity alone.

Champagne: The Correction Has Run Its Course

The Champagne 50 Index spent much of 2023–2025 in a condition that analysts generously describe as “seeking a base.” The blunter characterisation is that it fell hard — down roughly 9% over a 24-month window — and is now doing the quiet work of persuading the market it won’t fall further. Recent months have offered isolated positive readings, driven by selective trading in prestige vintage cuvées rather than any broad resurgence of confidence.

The tiering within Champagne is sharp and widening. Rare vintage releases from Bollinger, Dom Pérignon, and Krug continue to attract meaningful secondary trading volume, with buyers who understand that great Champagne ages in ways the category’s own marketing has consistently undersold. Below that tier, non-vintage and commercial cuvées face sustained consumer pullback; with household budgets under pressure across every significant consumer market, the reflexive bottle of Brut NV now competes against Cava and Crémant producers who have no shame about their value proposition.

The tactical argument for prestige vintage Champagne at current prices requires no elaborate construction. These bottles are sitting at multi-year lows, Q4 historically lifts Champagne pricing across the board, and the quality case for cellaring Dom Pérignon 2012, Krug 2008, or Taittinger Comtes 2012 speaks for itself. The only thing required is the discipline to buy while a category is being ignored rather than celebrated.

Bordeaux: An Honest Account of a Divided Market

Bordeaux is where the numbers are most complicated and the narrative least satisfying. The Bordeaux 500 is essentially flat year-to-date after declining roughly 12% over two years; the Liv-ex Fine Wine 50, tracking First Growths, has settled at -0.1% YTD. Neither figure represents recovery. They represent the market’s acknowledgment that the correction that began in late 2022 has largely done its work at the mature end, while certain recent releases are still repricing toward where buyers will actually transact.

The vintage divergence within the region is the defining feature. Physical 2015 and 2016 has found its footing, holding within 3% of adjusted values; collectors who have been waiting for a rational entry point into this pair now have their clearest window in several years. By contrast, the 2020 and 2021 vintages have declined 7–8% over twelve months in secondary trading, with numerous labels now sitting below their original en primeur release prices — an uncomfortable fact for sellers and for the châteaux who set those prices with confidence the market has since declined to match.

The en primeur campaign itself continues to generate friction. Producers who maintained ambitious release pricing through the correction are now contending with UK trade buyers who have margin structures to protect and alternative labels to fill their allocation space. Several châteaux have conceded ground, which is the correct response — but it does not suggest the primary market has found its footing so much as it has accepted the reality that buyers have options.

The Pressures Being Discussed Too Quietly

Two structural forces are reshaping the economics of fine wine ownership in 2026, and the trade press has been notably reluctant to quantify them with any directness.

The maritime disruption originating from the Strait of Hormuz crisis has not, in strict geographical terms, rerouted French wine — Vessels rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope have added one to three weeks to transit times across major trading corridors; container shortages and fuel surcharges have driven freight forwarders to apply emergency premiums on beverage shipments; and the specific requirements of temperature-controlled reefer containers for fine wine — which cannot be swapped onto alternative vessels without meaningful cost consequences — have compressed margins at every step between cellar door and destination warehouse. For Asian buyers, higher landed costs have suppressed demand on everything outside the trophy tier, which is precisely where demand was already softest.

The US tariff environment is a more direct wound. America remains the dominant export market for French wine by value, and the tariffs introduced and escalated over the past eighteen months have done what tariffs reliably do: raised landed costs for importers, raised retail prices, and reduced volume demand for mid-market Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Rhône that were already competing against domestic producers unburdened by the same duties. Total French wine and spirits export values to the US have contracted sharply. The inventory sitting in European warehouses as a result has created deflationary pressure at entry-level price points and accelerated the arrachage subsidy programmes quietly reducing planted vineyard area across multiple appellations. At Grand Cru level the effect is more muted; in the £30–£80 bottle range where commercial volume underpins many producers’ financial viability, it is palpable.

Positions Worth Taking

• Physical secondary Bordeaux remains the most compelling near-term value proposition in fine wine. The en primeur buyer who acquired 2020 and 2021 on release has endured an uncomfortable eighteen months; the buyer entering those same labels through secondary channels at 7–8% below release price occupies a structurally different position. For benchmark vintages — 2015, 2016, and 2019 — secondary platforms and the established London merchant community are offering physical stock at prices that fully account for the correction without discounting the long-term quality case.

• Holding wine in-bond in UK or European bonded facilities is, under current conditions, an active hedge rather than a passive storage decision. Acquiring in-bond and storing at a professional facility defers VAT and UK duties, sidesteps US tariff exposure entirely for non-US buyers, and preserves provenance integrity in ways that affect resale value meaningfully. Impeccable in-bond records are worth more now than at any point in the last three years, because buyers are more fastidious about documentation when liquidity is harder to come by.

• Prestige vintage Champagne deserves more allocation than most collectors are currently giving it. Dom Pérignon 2012, Krug 2008, and Taittinger Comtes 2012 are available at prices last seen before the category’s speculative run between 2020 and 2022. These are not obscure bottles; they are among the most consistently traded labels in secondary markets globally. Acquiring them at the trough of a category correction, ahead of a Q4 that historically produces the year’s strongest Champagne demand, is a straightforward thesis. It requires only the willingness to act against current sentiment — which is, without exception, when the better purchases get made.

The Mid-Year Outlook

The fine wine market in July 2026 is neither as damaged as the pessimists contend nor as recovered as the major auction houses’ promotional copy implies. Burgundy leads. Champagne is bottoming. Bordeaux is bifurcating by vintage in ways that present risk and opportunity simultaneously, depending entirely on which labels one holds or intends to acquire.

Those who bought carefully and held patiently have collections that are less glamorous than at the 2022 peak, and more resilient than the headline index figures suggest. Those buying now have better entry points across most categories than at any moment in the past four years.

Burgundy has always rewarded the obsessive. Bordeaux has always rewarded the patient. Champagne has always been underestimated as a long-term holding.

None of that has changed.

All index data sourced from Liv-ex.

Burgundy criticism has a persistent problem, which is that it tends toward the ecstatic without being especially useful. You will read, across the publications that cover this region with the reverence normally reserved for papal elections, that a given vintage is “precise,” “complex,” “a triumph of the appellation,” and various other formulations that convey enormous enthusiasm while delivering almost no actionable information to anyone trying to decide whether to buy six bottles, sixty, or none at all.

This piece attempts something more practical. We are examining three consecutive quality tiers — 2017, 2019, and 2022 — across production volume, growing conditions, en primeur launch sentiment, and secondary market performance through July 2026. The data draws on BIVB harvest records, Liv-ex Burgundy 150 sub-indices, and global auction and merchant pricing across all classification tiers from Grand Cru to generic village.

The conclusions are, frankly, less complicated than the discourse surrounding Burgundy usually implies.

What the Ground Produced: Three Very Different Harvests

The first number that matters, before any question of quality, is volume — because in Burgundy, the relationship between supply and eventual secondary market price is not merely correlated, it is essentially deterministic.

The 2017 harvest produced approximately 1,508,000 hectolitres across all Burgundy appellations, representing a 4.7% surplus over the ten-year average. Growers who had invested heavily in frost protection equipment following 2016’s near-catastrophic freeze were rewarded with a generous, healthy crop; Chablis was the one significant exception, where low-lying plots suffered 50% yield cuts from April frost. Across the Côte d’Or, Mâconnais, and Côte Chalonnaise, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay both delivered in quantity.

The 2019 growing season, by contrast, produced 1,230,000 hectolitres — down 14.6% from average, and down 18% from 2017’s headline figure. Two distinct events drove the collapse: severe April frost hit with unusual geographic breadth, and subsequent cool, erratic flowering caused millerandage, producing small, unevenly developed berries that further suppressed yield. The summer that followed was a record-breaking heatwave, which concentrated what survived to an extraordinary degree but did nothing to recover lost volume. Every subregion recorded a below-trend harvest.

The 2022 vintage swung the pendulum hard in the opposite direction, delivering roughly 1,700,000 hectolitres — approximately 7% above average and the most abundant harvest since 2018. Violent June hailstorms caused genuine destruction in northern Côte de Nuits, particularly Gevrey-Chambertin, but the damage was plot-specific rather than regional. Against the three consecutive shortage vintages of 2019, 2020, and 2021, 2022 represented a substantial correction in aggregate supply. It also produced the earliest harvest in modern Burgundian record, with picking beginning in August.

The supply hierarchy, in descending order of abundance: 2022, then 2017, then 2019 — and the gap between 2019 and its two comparators is wide enough to be the primary explanation for almost everything that follows.

The Weather and What It Produced: Quality Without the Usual Hagiography

2017: Very Good, Honest, and Widely Underestimated

The 2017 season followed a classic early-ripening template. A cool dry winter gave way to early budbreak, the Côte d’Or narrowly escaped April frost damage, and a warm dry summer with intermittent modest rainfall drove even ripening into a September harvest. The resulting reds are textbook Pinot Noir in a register that critics often undervalue precisely because it lacks drama: bright red cherry, wild strawberry, fine silky tannins, and natural acidity in the 12.5–13% alcohol range. Terroir reads clearly. There is no overripeness and no structural heroics.

Grand Crus scored 94–97 points across critical consensus; Premiers Crus in the 90–94 range. The whites — fresh citrus, white peach, chalky mineral — overdeliver relative to their prices, particularly in Chablis and Mâconnais. The peak drinking window for top-tier reds runs roughly 2027 to 2035; village wines are broadly ready now.

The honest assessment of 2017 is that it is an excellent service vintage — consistently enjoyable, accessible, not demanding of ceremony — rather than a connoisseur’s obsession.

2019: The Vintage That Earns the Superlatives

Critical hyperbole is Burgundy’s default register, which makes it genuinely difficult to calibrate when a vintage actually deserves it. The 2019 does. What makes it unusual is not that it scored well but that it scored consistently well across fundamentally challenging conditions. The April frost and cool flowering that destroyed yield should, theoretically, have produced uneven quality. Instead, the survivors — concentrated, intensely flavoured berries harvested after a record summer — combined textural density with the kind of precise natural acidity that hot vintages typically sacrifice.

The reds carry black cherry, violet, and wild blackberry against velvety tannins and near-perfect acid-fruit integration. Whole-cluster fermentation was widely deployed, adding aromatic depth without obscuring varietal character. Top Grand Crus from DRC, Armand Rousseau, and Mugnier received 97–100 point assessments; the consensus across James Suckling, Neal Martin, and Jancis Robinson positions 2019 as the standout vintage of the entire 2010–2030 cycle. Multi-decade ageing potential — a genuine 2030–2050 peak drinking window at the Grand Cru level — is not being stretched for effect here.

The whites are equally significant. Montrachet and Bâtard-Montrachet 2019 have already entered the conversation about landmark white Burgundy in the modern era. Chablis delivers tropical ripeness without surrendering its characteristic flint.

2022: Excellent by Any Measure Except the One Immediately Preceding It

The 2022’s challenge is purely relative. In isolation, it is a very fine vintage. Against 2019 as an immediate benchmark, it occupies the uncomfortable position of being measurably better than most years and still definitively second.

The growing season was the driest and sunniest of the century to date — 285 additional sunshine hours versus the average — with record heat through July and August driving that early harvest. The reds deliver ripe plum, rounded tannins, and a warm balsamic finish; growers used early picking to manage pH and largely succeeded in maintaining structural integrity, though natural acidity sits marginally below both 2017 and 2019. Grand Crus scored 93–97 points; Premiers Crus 89–93. The drinking window extends to roughly 2029–2038.

The whites perform best where early picking was prioritised — Meursault and early-harvested Chablis cuvées retain precision and limestone-driven mineral character. Late-harvested whites are fuller, occasionally verging on soft, and will date more quickly.

The Market: From Release Through July 2026

En Primeur Opening Positions

The 2017 launched in spring 2018 into a market that read its abundant supply clearly and priced accordingly. Grand Cru opening prices rose 12% against the 2016 baseline — itself a high-price, low-yield vintage — while Premiers Crus gained 9% and village generics 6%. Merchants discounted entry-level Bourgogne to shift surplus inventory. Collector enthusiasm was measured at best.

The 2019 released in spring 2020, in the middle of global pandemic lockdowns, and still generated the most aggressive en primeur pricing the region had seen in years. Grand Cru opening prices jumped 38–42% against the 2018 vintage; Premiers Crus 28%; village wines 18%. Top domaines imposed strict allocation limits. Serious collectors — reading the quality-scarcity combination with the clarity that distinguishes the devoted from the merely interested — treated 2019 as a foundational cellar holding and competed aggressively for available stock even as borders were closed and restaurants were empty.

The 2022 launched in spring 2023 into a materially different climate: global inflation, rising interest rates, and softening Asian luxury demand combined to suppress acquisitive appetite. Opening prices rose 22% at Grand Cru, 16% at Premier Cru, and 11% at village level — solid, but without conviction. Generous allocations left unsold en primeur stock at mid-tier merchants, an occurrence that would have been unthinkable for 2019 and rare for 2017.

Five-Year Secondary Market Trajectories

The 2017’s secondary market growth over its first five years was steady rather than spectacular. Grand Crus gained 29% cumulatively; the Premier Cru tier, where discerning collectors sought depth and value outside the inflated Grand Cru market, performed better at 37%; village and generic wines gained a modest 8%, suppressed by continuous surplus stock entering resale channels. A -7% peak-to-trough correction during the 2020 COVID disruption was fully recovered by late 2021.

The 2019’s five-year trajectory occupied a different category entirely. Grand Crus gained 74% cumulatively; Premier Crus 58%; village wines 24% — a figure that itself exceeds the 2017 Grand Cru return and illustrates just how completely scarcity overrode tier hierarchy. Flagship DRC 2019 bottlings gained over 110% in five years. The COVID dip was a negligible -3% peak-to-trough, recovered within six months. A -5% pullback during the 2022–2023 rate-hiking cycle was absorbed and reversed by the following year.

The 2022 has three years of secondary market data through July 2026. Grand Crus have gained 21%; Premiers Crus 28%; village wines 12%. The trajectory has slowed rather than accelerated as weak Chinese luxury demand and sustained high borrowing costs have dampened acquisitive flow. A -9% peak-to-trough correction for Grand Crus during 2024–2026 is the largest short-term drawdown of any of the three vintages examined here.

Cumulative Returns: En Primeur to July 2026

Eight years after release, the 2017 has returned 41% at Grand Cru, 53% at Premier Cru, and 14% at village level, for a vintage average of approximately 36%. The Premier Cru figure is the standout — the tier where value-seeking collectors concentrated their attention has been rewarded accordingly, while Grand Cru growth was capped by persistent supply.

Six years after release, the 2019 has returned 89% at Grand Cru, 67% at Premier Cru, and 29% at village level, for a vintage average of roughly 62%. The inversion of the usual Grand Cru/Premier Cru growth hierarchy — Grand Crus outperforming Premiers Crus by 22 percentage points, in contrast to the 2017 pattern — reflects the degree to which committed collectors specifically sought trophy-tier 2019 bottles rather than spreading across classifications.

Three years after release, the 2022 has returned 21% at Grand Cru, 28% at Premier Cru, and 12% at village level, for a vintage average of 20%. On an annualised basis this is respectable but trails both comparators; the macroeconomic context has been genuinely unhelpful, and the structural question is whether recovery in Asian markets and a lower-rate environment will accelerate the 2022’s trajectory in the years ahead.

Against the Liv-ex Burgundy 150 Index, the 2019 sub-index has outperformed the broader benchmark by 31 percentage points since release — the strongest vintage-specific performance of the period. The 2017 sub-index has tracked the Burgundy 150 average, neither outperforming nor underperforming meaningfully. The 2022 sub-index has underperformed by 12 percentage points through mid-2026.

What Each Vintage Is Actually For

The three-vintage comparison resolves into a fairly clean segmentation by intended purpose, which critics and merchants would do well to state more plainly than they typically do.

2017 is the drinker’s vintage. Its abundant supply, early-drinking profile, and consistent quality across all price tiers make it the obvious answer to the question “what should I be pouring at dinner over the next few years?” Restaurant wine lists globally are heavy with 2017 and 2022 for exactly this reason — they are approachable now, they pair without demanding meditation, and they are available in quantities that make consumption rather than curation the rational response to owning them. The ceiling on long-term appreciation is visible: with abundant stock continuously entering resale channels, secondary market growth through 2027–2035 will remain modest.

2019 is the collector’s vintage, full stop. This is not a recommendation to buy it — Grand Crus at £1,200 to £2,400 per bottle and rising 74% in five years are beyond the reach of anyone approaching this with a sensible budget — but rather a statement of the market’s own determination, expressed over six years of consistent price action. Every meaningful collecting demographic has reached the same conclusion simultaneously: historic quality, irreplaceable supply, a multi-decade ageing horizon, and the kind of conviction among serious cellaring devotees that tends to sustain price floors through corrections that would damage other vintages more severely. Its ideal consumption window begins in earnest around 2030; acquiring it now is either an act of long-range cellar stewardship or romantic self-delusion about whether it will ever actually be opened. Often it is both, and there is something rather admirable about that.

2022 occupies genuine middle ground, though “middle ground” in Burgundy is not a pejorative. It is an excellent vintage producing wine that will give serious pleasure from the late 2020s through the late 2030s, available in quantities that make building a meaningful case stock feasible, priced at levels that have not yet required collectors to choose between acquisition and equanimity. Its underperformance against the Liv-ex Burgundy 150 through mid-2026 reflects macroeconomic timing rather than a quality verdict; when interest rates normalise and Asian luxury demand recovers, the 2022 Premier Cru tier in particular — consistently the strongest performer relative to entry cost across all three vintages examined here — is likely to draw the attentive collector appetite that has been parked elsewhere.

Projections and the Honest Caveat That Accompanies All of Them

Looking toward 2040, the trajectories are, at least in directional terms, legible.

The 2017 will peak as a drinking proposition by 2035 and then decline; secondary market appreciation will slow as village and generic stocks continue to satisfy demand without ever generating the scarcity that transforms a good vintage into a coveted one. Those who bought at en primeur in 2018 and hold Grand Crus are sitting on 41% returns after eight years — acceptable rather than remarkable, and very much in keeping with what the vintage always promised.

The 2019 will compound. Scarcity increases mechanically as bottles are consumed and cannot be replaced; the devoted collector community will continue treating Grand Cru 2019 as a long-duration crown jewel worthy of the most temperature-controlled corners of the finest cellars in the world; the quality, by all available evidence, will be confirmed rather than questioned as the wine enters its full maturity. The projection that 2019 will remain the pre-eminent vintage through 2040 is not a bold call — it is simply the extrapolation of dynamics that have been consistent and reinforcing for six years.

The 2022 will deliver steady single-digit annual appreciation at Premier Cru and above through the 2030s, provided the macroeconomic environment improves. Its ceiling is lower than 2019’s by structure — the supply is sufficient that genuine scarcity premiums will take longer to accumulate — but its floor is higher than 2017’s because quality at the top tier is real and the Côte d’Or drinking window is long enough to sustain passion over an extended period.

The Final Rankings, Without Further Ceremony

On secondary market performance and long-term cellar value: 2019 decisively, then 2017, then 2022.

On vintage quality and ageing potential: 2019, then 2022, then 2017.

On present drinking pleasure and approachable value: 2017, then 2022, then 2019 — though “affordable” in Burgundy remains a relative term, and the person for whom a £35 village Bourgogne represents a considered purchase is reading a different newsletter.

Whether this constitutes a recommendation depends on what you are building toward. If the answer is a cellar to drink rather than to venerate, 2017 village wines at their current valuations remain among the better-value Burgundy propositions on the market. If the answer is legacy — bottles destined for an occasion that may be decades away, opened by people who may not yet be born — then 2019 remains the benchmark against which everything else in this region is measured for the foreseeable future. Which is, admittedly, the least useful counsel to offer someone whose annual allocation did not survive contact with their merchant’s mailing list.

Burgundy has always been this way. That is, simultaneously, the most annoying and most honest thing one can say about it.

All market data sourced from Liv-ex Burgundy 150 sub-indices, BIVB official harvest records, Wine-Searcher global resale averages, and auction pricing through July 2026. Production figures represent total regional hectolitres across all appellations. Market performance data splits by Grand Cru, Premier Cru, and Village/Generic tiers throughout. The author holds modest quantities of 2017 Premier Cru, somewhat less modest anxiety about this, and absolutely no 2019 Grand Cru — which is either a confession of budgetary reality or a failure of romantic nerve, depending on one’s generosity.

There is only one wine, when described as “100% Sangiovese, Toscana IGT,” that elicits the most quickening of the pulse of seasoned wine collectors. It has a name.

The name is Soldera.

More precisely, the name is Gianfranco Soldera, who was born in 1937 in Treviso, Italy, spent the early and middle portion of his professional life selling insurance in Milan, and then did something that requires a very specific combination of conviction, capital, and the kind of magnificent stubbornness that the Italian language has probably approximately seventeen words for, none of which translate with adequate force into English. With his wife Graziella, he bought Podere Case Basse in the southwestern reaches of Montalcino in 1972, decided, with the absolute certainty of someone who has spent precisely no time second-guessing himself, that this was the place from which the finest Sangiovese on earth would one day emerge, and proceeded to spend the next forty-seven years proving it.

He was, from all available evidence and the testimony of everyone who encountered him, not a relaxing person to deal with. He was also, from all available evidence and the testimony of everyone who has drunk his wine at the right moment in the right glass in the right company, entirely and devastatingly correct.

This is the story of how he built something extraordinary, how someone tried to destroy it, how an appellation lost its most famous rebel, how the man himself eventually died in the most improbably dramatic circumstances, and how, in defiance of every market logic that the death of an irreplaceable founder is supposed to trigger, the wine became more valuable, more sought-after, and more almost annoyingly impervious to everything the global fine wine market has thrown at it in the years since.

It is also, inevitably, the story of 62,600 litres of wine flowing down a cellar drain in the dark of a December night.

The Ecosystem and the Obsession: What Soldera Actually Built

Imagine that you are starting entirely from scratch, that you have no inherited assumptions about how a Tuscan estate should operate, that you regard the conventions of Italian winemaking circa 1972 with the same scepticism that an intelligent outsider brings to any established orthodoxy, and that your reference point for quality is not your local competition but the greatest vineyards on earth.

What do you build?

Gianfranco Soldera’s answer to this question was, first and most visibly, a garden. Not a garden in the decorative sense — not the manicured topiary and gravel paths that one associates with the Tuscan agriturismo aesthetic — but a living, breathing, deliberately complex ecological system, containing upwards of 1,500 species of roses, insects, birds, and plants, designed according to the principle that a vineyard exists within a broader biological context and that the health of the vine cannot be separated from the health of everything that surrounds it.

The roses were not ornamental. They were not there for the photographs, though the photographs of Case Basse’s vineyards, with the roses in bloom against the backdrop of the rolling Montalcino hills, are genuinely striking in a way that the marketing departments of any number of Napa estates would pay considerable sums to replicate. The roses were there because they are susceptible to the same fungal diseases that attack Sangiovese, and so function as an early warning system — canaries in a considerably more photogenic coal mine — that give Soldera time to respond to disease pressure before it reaches the vines. More broadly, the entire botanical complexity of the estate was constructed on the principle that a diverse ecosystem generates its own natural defences, makes chemical intervention unnecessary, and produces the kind of genuinely living soil that expresses itself with unmistakable individuality in the finished wine.

This was not fashionable thinking in 1972. Organic viticulture was not yet a category with a name that serious wine people used seriously. The notion that biodiversity in a vineyard was an asset rather than a management nuisance was, in the context of Italian winemaking at the time, eccentric at best and probably, in the circles where Soldera moved, regarded as the kind of thing one humoured in someone who had made his money in insurance and didn’t know any better.

Soldera did not appear to be troubled by this. He hired Giulio Gambelli — the legendary Sangiovese consultant who was, in the 1970s, already regarded as the foremost interpreter of Brunello’s potential, and who would eventually be known, with considerable accuracy, as the last person who truly understood what Sangiovese was capable of from the inside — and proceeded to make wine in large Slavonian oak casks, with native yeast, no temperature control, aging periods that extended to five or six years before release, and an absolute refusal to make any concession to the fashion for international varieties, modern oak, or any of the other strategies through which other producers were, in the same period, attempting to make Tuscany legible to a global market that spoke primarily in the language of Cabernet Sauvignon.

The production was tiny. The yields were deliberately suppressed to a level that would make most agricultural economists weep quietly. The wine that emerged was, from very early on, something that the people who tasted it found very difficult to talk about in the normal vocabulary of Italian wine. It tasted like somewhere specific. It tasted like someone specific. It tasted, people said, with the slightly helpless tone of those confronted with quality that exceeds their descriptive framework, like Burgundy — and then immediately corrected themselves, because it didn’t taste like Burgundy at all, it tasted like Montalcino, but it had the same relationship to its terroir, the same transparency, the same quality of being a precise report from a specific piece of earth rather than a constructed product with a consistent house style.

This is, as it turns out, very hard to do. It requires complete conviction about what you are trying to achieve, complete willingness to lose money in the short term in pursuit of it, and complete indifference to the opinions of everyone who tells you that you are approaching the problem incorrectly.

Gianfranco Soldera possessed all three of these qualities in abundance. The fourth quality he possessed, which proved equally important and considerably more complicated, was an absolute refusal to separate the quality of the wine from the integrity of the conditions of its production. He did not make concessions. On anything. For anyone.

This personality trait is, as we are about to see, both the source of everything magnificent about the Case Basse story and the cause of essentially everything difficult about it.

December 2012: The Night Someone Tried to Erase Six Vintages

I want to approach the 2012 sabotage carefully, because it is one of those events in wine history that risks being retold as pure drama at the expense of the actual weight of what happened. But underneath the drama is something that is, when you think about it with the right kind of attention, genuinely devastating.

A former employee — disgruntled, the subsequent reporting established, in the manner of someone who had been dismissed and had decided on a form of revenge that was, whatever one’s view of the employment dispute that preceded it, wildly disproportionate — entered the Case Basse cellar in December 2012 and opened the valves on the aging casks. All of them. Six vintages. 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. Sixty-two thousand, six hundred litres of wine that had been aging, in some cases, for years. Wine that was, by any measure, irreplaceable — not in the financial sense alone, though the financial loss was variously estimated at around 4.5 million pounds, but in the sense that a vintage, once gone, is simply gone.

The global wine community, to its considerable credit, reacted with something approaching genuine grief. Messages of solidarity came from producers across France, Italy, and beyond. The Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino — the governing body of the appellation whose most famous producer Soldera had been in, whose rules he had followed and occasionally argued about, such as 2008 “Brunellogate” scandal (when several major Montalcino estates were investigated for illegally blending international grapes, like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, into their Brunellos to make them darker and fruitier) but also within whose framework his wines had been sold — offered what it presumably intended as a gesture of communal support. The Consorzio proposed that member producers donate wine so that Soldera could bottle and sell it under his name to offset his financial losses.

Gianfranco Soldera’s response to this offer has been described by various observers variously as principled, extraordinary, and completely unhinged, depending on where one stands on the relationship between integrity and pragmatism.

He declined. He declined in terms that made clear he regarded the offer not as generosity but as a fundamental misunderstanding of what Case Basse was. To bottle other producers’ wine under his label — however well-intentioned the impulse, however genuine the sympathy — would have been to suggest that “Soldera” was a brand that could be filled with interchangeable contents, a vessel whose value lay in the name rather than in the specific wine made from the specific vines on the specific hillside that he had been tending for forty years. He rejected this not because he was ungrateful but because he understood, with absolute clarity, that accepting would have destroyed the thing the gesture was meant to protect.

He then resigned from the Consorzio. Publicly, pointedly, and permanently.

This decision — withdrawing his wines from the Brunello di Montalcino DOCG and releasing all subsequent vintages as simply “Toscana IGT, 100% Sangiovese” — was, from a conventional wine business perspective, an act of spectacular self-harm. Brunello di Montalcino is one of Italy’s most prestigious and internationally recognised appellations. The DOCG designation carries weight in markets that use appellation structure as a shorthand for quality. Removing his wine from that framework meant that Soldera would be selling what the appellation rules technically classified as a table wine — an utter irrelevance in regulatory terms — from the same vines, the same cellar, the same grapes that had previously produced some of the most celebrated Brunello in the region’s history.

The market’s response to this regulatory reclassification was approximately what you would expect from a market populated primarily by people who understood the wine rather than what was printed on the label. It was entirely indifferent to the IGT designation. It continued to treat the wine as what it was: the most singular expression of Sangiovese produced anywhere on the planet, made by a man who had spent four decades perfecting it, from a terroir that he had spent the same four decades learning with an intimacy that no appellation committee’s rulebook could either confer or revoke.

The sabotage had tried to erase six vintages. The Consorzio exit, paradoxically, added to the mystique. Soldera, in defiance of the event that was supposed to break him, had emerged with his philosophy not just intact but sharpened. The wine, going forward, would carry no institutional imprimatur other than his own name. Which, by this point, was more than sufficient.

February 2019: The End and the Beginning

Gianfranco Soldera died on February 16th, 2019, at the age of eighty-two, suffering a heart attack while driving near his vineyards. It is, for a man whose entire life had been an act of continuous engagement with a specific piece of land, perhaps not the worst way to exit — though I am aware this observation may strike those who knew him as entirely too neat a literary note to strike about a real death.

The wine world paused. And then it held its breath.

The question that hangs over the death of any founding figure of this particular kind — the singular, domineering, irreplaceable genius whose personality is so completely fused with the product that the two are functionally inseparable — is whether the thing they built survives them. The answer, in wine, is more often no than yes. The technical skills can be passed on. The vineyard management philosophy can be documented and followed. But the quality of absolute conviction — the thing that makes someone capable of refusing to sell to people they don’t like, or building a 1,500-species botanical garden when everyone around them thinks it’s an eccentric irrelevance, or telling the Consorzio to keep its donated wine — that quality does not transfer by inheritance. It is either present in the next generation or it isn’t.

Graziella Soldera, his wife. Monica and Mauro, his children. Paolo Tenti, his son-in-law, who had been working the vineyards alongside Gianfranco for years with the kind of patient attentiveness that suggests genuine understanding rather than dutiful compliance. They pledged, in terms that were specific and verifiable rather than the usual succession platitudes, to maintain every aspect of the estate’s philosophy — the ecosystem, the native yeast, the Slavonian casks, the extended aging, the tiny yields, the complete absence of compromise on anything.

The market, which in cases like this typically sells first and asks questions later, chose instead to watch.

What it observed, over the eighteen months that followed, was a family operating with a precision and seriousness that silenced most of the doubt. The 2019 vintage — the first produced and bottled entirely without Gianfranco’s physical presence, which gave it a symbolic weight that the critics did not resist noting — was extraordinary. Reviews at the 98-point level from both Vinous and Robert Parker. Descriptions that reached for vocabulary about elegance and exotic spice and structural complexity that Brunello critics do not deploy unless they mean it. The wine was, in the consensus of the people who tasted it early, not a diminished version of what came before. It was, possibly, a continuation that added something of its own.

The secondary market’s response to the 2019 vintage was, in retrospect, the opening statement of what was about to happen to Soldera’s price profile broadly. The 2019 settled into the £550 to £700 range. A wine whose predecessor vintages had previously traded from £300 to £500. A premium on the vintage that was most likely to have been weaker, if the death-of-founder logic had applied, than what came before it.

The logic had not applied. The family had not merely maintained the estate. They appeared to have — quietly, without press releases — upheld the thing itself.

The Soldera Exception: A Fortress in a Falling Market

The fine wine market is, in periods of correction, an extremely egalitarian destroyer of price premiums. When the Liv-ex 100 falls, it falls across categories, vintages, and reputations with a comprehensiveness that tends to reveal exactly which price premiums were anchored in genuine quality conviction and which were anchored in speculation and the momentum of a rising market.

Between late 2022 and late 2025, the fine wine market corrected with a thoroughness that produced genuine distress across a spectrum of portfolios that had been assembled on the premise that blue-chip Burgundy and first-growth Bordeaux were effectively inflation-proof stores of value. The Liv-ex 100 fell 20% to 30% from its peaks. Domaines that had seemed untouchable gave back years of gains. Merchants who had built businesses on the assumption of continuous appreciation began restructuring. It was, for the investment wine world, an unpleasant education in the limits of the store-of-value thesis.

Soldera, during this period, rose 15%.

Not held flat — which would itself have been remarkable in the context of what was happening around it. Not declined modestly. Rose, by a measurable and verified 15%, while the broader index declined by a figure in the same range. The divergence between Soldera’s performance and the fine wine market’s performance in this period is, on a chart, the visual representation of exactly what uncorrelated, quality-anchored pricing looks like when the surrounding market removes the liquidity that was inflating everything else.

Then, in 2025, the wine that had already outperformed a falling market during the correction proceeded to appreciate by 36% in a single year. The 2020 vintage, in the first half of 2026 alone, gained a further 18.4% as the broader market began its stabilised recovery.

The reasons for this behaviour are, when you examine them, not mysterious, though they are unusual in combination. The production quantities are finite in a way that most fine wine is not — there is simply a ceiling to how many bottles of any given Case Basse vintage exist, and that ceiling is very low, and it cannot be raised by any act of human will or capital investment. The quality is genuinely non-replicable — not because Montalcino doesn’t produce other excellent Sangiovese, but because the specific combination of Soldera’s terroir, the biological ecosystem he spent decades constructing, and the winemaking philosophy that has been refined and passed down with unusual fidelity, produces something that does not have a convincing substitute. And the narrative is, to use the appropriate term without embarrassment, perfect — the insurance broker who built the greatest Sangiovese estate in history, the sabotage that tried and failed to break him, the rebellion against the appellation, the death in the shadow of his vineyards, the family that upheld everything.

You cannot manufacture that story. You cannot acquire it, as the Pinaults acquired Bouchard’s Grand Cru parcels and renamed them into a luxury brand identity. The Soldera story is the Soldera story and it belongs, specifically and irreducibly, to the Case Basse estate and the family that built it. This is part of what the market is pricing when it prices Soldera. It is pricing the certainty that there will never be another one of these.

What the Pre-2006 Bottles Represents: The Last Brunellos

There is a category of Soldera that deserves separate consideration, and it is the category whose value proposition is perhaps the least complicated to explain and the most impossible to act upon for most collectors: the pre-2006 vintages, released under the Brunello di Montalcino DOCG designation before the Consorzio rupture, and in particular the legendary Riserva bottlings from years like 1990, 1997, 2001 and 2004.

These bottles are, in the most literal sense, finished. There will not be more of them. The 1990 Riserva, which was produced from vines that Soldera had been tending for nearly twenty years by that point, from a vintage that the Montalcino region generally regards as one of its finest of the modern era, exists in whatever quantity it currently exists in and will only ever decrease. It now trades at £2,800 to £3,600 and above in bond. This is not speculation about future appreciation. This is the market applying basic arithmetic to a finite quantity of something that serious collectors regard as among the most significant bottles of Italian wine ever produced.

The fact that these bottles carry the Brunello DOCG designation — the appellation that Soldera subsequently abandoned — gives them a historical dimension that the post-2006 IGT bottlings, magnificent as they are, cannot precisely replicate. They are the record of the estate’s first era, made by the founder with the mentor he most trusted, under the institutional framework he later rejected. They are, in a sense, the Before, and they will always be irreplaceable for the same reason that everything that happened before a particular moment is irreplaceable: because time moves in one direction only, and the past is not available for revisitation.

If you have them in your cellar, the only intelligent question is when to open them, and the answer is probably: before you feel ready to.

What Soldera Means, Beyond the Price Charts

I want to resist the pull toward pure market commentary here, because Soldera is ultimately a wine story and not a financial story.

What Gianfranco Soldera built at Case Basse is, at its core, an argument about what wine can be when the person making it refuses to separate quality from integrity. When the yield is not determined by what the market will absorb but by what the vineyard can produce without being pushed beyond its natural expression. When the aging is not determined by the release schedule that maximises cash flow but by the time the wine actually requires to be ready. When the distribution is not determined by the demand but by whether the person seeking to purchase the wine has demonstrated, to the maker’s satisfaction, that they understand what they’re buying.

This is an argument that is difficult to sustain under normal commercial conditions. It requires either private wealth or the willingness to operate at such a small scale that the revenue, while insufficient by conventional standards, is enough to keep the operation running on the philosophy it was built on. Soldera managed both — the insurance career had produced capital, and the scale was always deliberately small — which allowed him to make wine on terms that most producers can only fantasise about.

The market has, in its characteristically blunt way, confirmed the argument. The most uncompromising estate in Italian wine, the one that most aggressively refused to accommodate itself to commercial convenience, is the one that has produced the most extraordinary market performance, in both absolute terms and relative to everything else in the Italian fine wine category. This is either a vindication of the principle that genuine quality, expressed without concession, will always find its price, or it is a coincidence of extraordinary proportions.

I believe it is the former. I am aware that this is a convenient belief for someone who writes about wine with the conviction that what’s in the bottle is what matters. But the evidence is, at this point, rather difficult to argue with.

In Summary and I am Already Priced Out of It

The 2019 vintage is trading between £550 to £700 in bond. The pre-2019 Soldera standard bottles are at £560 in bond to more than £5,000 in auction depending on the vintage and format. The 2020 has just added another 18.4% in the first half of this year alone.

Soldera is no longer a wine that one discovers on a list and orders on impulse. The wine that comes out of the Case Basse estate is, from every account of every serious taster who has drunk it in conditions that allow honest assessment, one of the most beautiful things produced anywhere in the world from Sangiovese. It is transparent in the way that only wines made with absolute honesty about their terroir can be transparent. It is complex in the way that only wines made from old vines, in genuinely living soil, with no technological intervention to smooth the difficult edges, can be complex. It is, to use the word that Gianfranco Soldera would probably find insufficiently specific, alive.

The family that inherited it has demonstrated, in the years since 2019, that they understood what they were given and have not wasted the inheritance. The 2019 vintage is proof of this. The 2020’s performance confirms it. Whatever Gianfranco’s private opinions about posthumous success might have been — and I suspect they would have been characteristically conflicted, because he was not a man who liked to be proved right by anyone other than himself — the evidence suggests that Case Basse is now more firmly established than it has ever been.

The sabotage failed. The Consorzio exit became the foundation of a myth. The death did not diminish the wine. The correction did not touch the price. Gianfranco Soldera built something that has proven, across every test the last fifteen years have provided, essentially indestructible.

I find this extraordinarily comforting. I also find it extremely expensive.

The author was lucky to have been in the employ of the merchant which sold Soldera when it was still heavily undervalued in Asia (pre 2019) and managed to buy vintages 2013, 2014 and 2015 with employee’s discount. The bottles remain in bond, in storage and she will not be selling them.

“8000”

Eight thousand is, depending on your frame of reference, either a very large number or a very small one. It is larger, for instance, than the number of people who have read this newsletter with the attention it deserves, and smaller than the number of people who have, in the past eighteen months, described a glass of prestige Champagne as “toasty with hints of brioche” to someone who was trying to have a conversation about something else. In the context of Champagne production, where the major houses release annual volumes measured in millions of bottles and where even the most constrained prestige cuvées typically achieve five-figure production runs across their full formats, 8000 magnums (and a limited amount of standard bottles) of a single vintage is a quantity so small that serious collectors, upon learning of it, experience the particular physiological response — the slight elevation in heart rate, the narrowing of focus, the sudden recalculation of social priorities — that is indistinguishable from mild panic.

That is what Salon, the monomaniacal single-vineyard, single-vintage, single-varietal Champagne estate that has been making the case for Le Mesnil-sur-Oger with unbroken fanaticism since 1905 (the first commercial vintage is 1921), chose to produce of the 2008 vintage — a vintage that William Kelley of Wine Advocate had, by the time of its release, awarded a perfect 100 points, a critical consensus that in the contemporary fine wine market functions less as aesthetic assessment than as the starting pistol at a very expensive and frequently undignified foot race.

And then, having produced eight thousand magnums of the most critically acclaimed Champagne of the twenty-first century, Salon’s president Didier Depond made a decision that was either an act of commercial genius, an act of genuine provocation, or both simultaneously, depending on how much money you subsequently spent and whether it worked out: he declined to sell the magnums individually. You could not, at release in September 2019, simply call your Salon allocation contact and order a case of 2008 magnums. You could purchase the 2008 magnum only as part of a seven-bottle Oenothèque assortment — a constructed case that bundled the new release alongside disgorged 2019 editions of the 2007, 2006, and 2004 in standard format — priced at £7,950 at Corney & Barrow’s release price up to 9,100€ at other European merchants.

This was, by any measure, a remarkable opening position. A newly released Champagne case — not a Burgundy grand cru, not a First Growth Bordeaux cellar allocation, not a retrospective collection of ancient library releases, but a box of seven bottles of wine that had been disgorged within the previous few years — retailing for such a price was without direct precedent in the prestige Champagne market. The implied value of the 2008 magnum at the time of release, derived by working backward from the case price and assigning reasonable current market values to the accompanying bottles, was somewhere in the range of £3,450 to £3,750 per magnum. Which is to say that even at its initial pricing, before the secondary market had formed an opinion about the situation, the 2008 Salon magnum was priced as an object of consequence. Salon had, with the precision of a house that had spent more than a century watching the world underestimate Le Mesnil, decided that the world had been getting the pricing broadly wrong and that the appropriate moment to make this observation was now.

The market, to no one’s genuine surprise who had been watching the convergence of a hundred-point critical consensus, a production volume of 8000 units, and a collector universe that had been systematically underpaying for serious Champagne relative to equivalent-quality Burgundy for the better part of a decade, agreed with considerable enthusiasm.

What Eight Thousand Magnums Becomes When You Open Some of Them

The secondary market’s response to the 2008 Oenothèque case release has a quality of mathematical inevitability that is almost soothing in retrospect, though presumably less soothing if you were a collector who hesitated at the release price and watched the implied value of a single magnum travel from £3,450 toward the range up to £5,800–6,400 at which single bottles at its peak in the HK and international auction market — representing, with the admirably unambiguous language of the price index, a return of more than 1.8x the release valuation over a period of approximately six years.

The structural logic is transparent and worth stating simply: eight thousand magnums is a finite number, the 2008 Salon magnum production does not replenish. The pool does not grow. Every bottle opened is a permanently removed unit of supply, and the demand for the remaining bottles is underwritten by a critical rating and a production figure that together constitute the most legible scarcity story in contemporary Champagne.

The Oenothèque case itself settled in the range around £7,400–8,000 — nothing compared to the individual magnum’s trajectory, but which is striking in its refusal to soften even as the wider prestige cuvée market underwent the substantial correction that this article will shortly address. The case holds because its contents are irreplaceable and because the people who own it, having paid the release price or something close to it, have no compelling reason to sell into a market that is offering them a premium they can compare unfavourably to simply continuing to own a bottle of 2008 Salon magnum. The logic of holding is, in this instance, more persuasive than the logic of liquidity.

The Confidence Problem: Or, What Happens When a House Mistakes One Transcendent Vintage for a Permanent Mandate

Here is where the story becomes considerably more interesting, and where the wine trade’s tendency to confuse a specific exceptional circumstance with a durable structural entitlement produced consequences that were, viewed from any analytical distance, entirely foreseeable.

The 2008 Oenothèque case had demonstrated, with the clarity of a well-conducted experiment, that collectors would pay unprecedented prices for Salon when the vintage was genuinely extraordinary, the production was genuinely constrained, and the commercial structure of the release engineered scarcity rather than satisfied demand. Its implications, correctly understood, were specific to the precise conditions that had generated it: a once-in-a-generation vintage, a production decision that created genuine scarcity, and a critical reception that provided external validation for a price that would otherwise have required collectors to make their own assessment.

The conclusions that Salon’s subsequent pricing strategy appears to have drawn from this experiment were somewhat less specific. The 2012 vintage, released in late 2022, launched at approximately £1,450 for a three-bottle pack — roughly £483 in bond per bottle, a figure that represented a significant departure from the pre-2008 pricing landscape where Salon typically entered the market at and collectors considered this a fair exchange for one of the finest Blanc de Blancs produced anywhere. The 2013 vintage, following in September 2023, pushed the logic further still: £2,745 for a three-bottle case, a figure that placed a newly released standard Salon standard bottle in the pricing neighbourhood previously occupied by secondary market trading in significantly rarer and more historically significant material.

This is not, to be scrupulously fair to Salon, a completely unreasonable aspiration. The 2012 and 2013 vintages are, by any serious critical assessment, wines of genuine distinction from a house with an unimpeachable address. Le Mesnil-sur-Oger’s Grand Cru chalk produces, in the right years, Chardonnay of a precision and longevity that has no precise equivalent anywhere else in Champagne, and Salon’s mono-obsessive commitment to expressing that specific terroir through that specific variety in that specific format has produced, across a century of releases, an argument for single-site Champagne that would be compelling at higher prices than it has historically commanded. The case for repricing Salon was real. The question was whether the repricing had arrived at the right number, in the right sequence, with the right relationship to the market conditions obtaining at the time of release.

The answer, delivered with the characteristic efficiency of the fine wine index, was: not quite.

The Champagne Market’s Intervention

The Liv-ex Champagne 50 index, which tracks the secondary market performance of the major prestige cuvées and functions as the closest available approximation of a real-time collector confidence indicator for the category, fell more than 33% from its late 2022 peak to its low point in late 2025. This is a significant correction by any standard, and it occurred across a period that was distinguished, for the fine wine market generally, by the convergence of interest rate normalisation, inflation-driven consumer caution, and the specific dynamics of a category — prestige Champagne — that had experienced a bubble of considerable dimensions during the Covid-era luxury spending surge and was now discovering, with the methodical impartiality of all financial corrections, the difference between prices sustained by genuine collector demand and prices sustained by momentum and the temporary elevation of discretionary spending among people who would, under different macroeconomic conditions, be allocating those funds elsewhere.

The 2012 and 2013 Salon releases had the considerable misfortune of arriving into this environment at release prices that were calibrated to a market that had ceased to exist. Merchants found themselves holding inventory at prices that the secondary market was unwilling to validate. Collectors, confronting the choice between new-release 2013 Salon at £915 in bond per bottle and a range of established back-vintages at comparable or lower prices whose quality propositions were thoroughly documented, made the decision that any rational allocation of limited capital suggests: they bought the back-vintages, or they waited, or they spent the afternoon deciding that perhaps they would revisit the Champagne allocation question when the market had had sufficient time to compose itself. The softening was not catastrophic — these are genuinely fine wines from a house with genuine credentials — but it was visible and, in Liv-ex data terms, documented with the kind of precision that makes for uncomfortable reading if you are a prestige Champagne house whose pricing strategy had been predicated on the assumption that the post-2008 luxury ceiling was the new floor.

The Correction, the Pivot, and the Return to Something Resembling Rationality

Global prestige Champagne shipments fell -17% in 2025. This is not a statistic that the major houses publicised with enthusiasm, but it is a statistic that concentrated attention on the question of whether the post-2008 pricing trajectory had been properly calibrated to the composition of the collector base that was actually buying, drinking, and trading the wine, as distinct from the collector base that existed in the optimistic projections of sales departments that had recently observed eight thousand magnums achieve a five-times return and concluded that the sky had revised upward its position on limits.

The resulting adjustment was, if the data is taken at face value, substantial. The average release price for prestige Champagnes in 2025 and 2026 fell -16.2%. Salon, leading the retreat with an energy that suggests either genuine strategic reconsideration or the vigorous working-out of a lesson that the market had been attempting to teach for approximately two years, reduced its newest vintage release price by -40% compared to the high-water mark set by the 2013 release. The 2015 vintage — released at approximately £550 per bottle — is finding considerably more traction than its immediate predecessors, partly because the quality is there and partly because the price has been set at a point where the collector’s calculation produces a different result than it did when the same quality argument was being made against a backdrop of -33% index decline.

Where the market currently stands is illuminating in its structure. The 2008 magnum trades at £3,620 in bond and is immovable in any direction except upward, because eight thousand magnums minus the ones that have been consumed is a number that only goes one way. The Oenothèque case sits at £7,400–8,000 in bond and shows no signs of distress, because the people who own it are the people who bought it at release or close to it, and their incentive to sell into a market that is offering them a modest return on a genuinely irreplaceable asset is limited. The 2012 and 2013 vintages have stabilised at prices that represent a modest correction from their release highs and that the market is now treating as a reasonable baseline for material of this quality from this address.

What This Is Actually About

The arc of Salon’s pricing history from 2019 to 2026 is not, at its core, a story about Champagne. It is a story about the specific category error that luxury markets make, with impressive regularity, when a single exceptional data point is treated as a permission structure for a general repricing rather than as evidence of the precise and unrepeatable conditions that generated it.

The 2008 Salon magnum earned its market valuation. It earned it through the convergence of a production decision of genuine scarcity, a vintage of genuine greatness, a critical consensus that was genuine and not merely fashionable, and a release structure that concentrated demand on a limited supply in a way that made the resulting price trajectory almost mechanically inevitable. These conditions were not transferable to the 2012 and 2013 vintages, however fine those wines may be, because fine wines from a prestigious estate are not scarce in the same way that eight thousand magnums of a perfect-hundred-point Champagne is scarce. The category of “excellent Salon release” is not self-limiting in the way that the category of “2008 Salon magnum” is self-limiting, and prices that are appropriate for the latter category are, in a rational market, inappropriate for the former.

The collectors who pushed back on the 2012 and 2013 release prices were not being irrational or insufficiently appreciative of Salon’s Le Mesnil terroir expression. They were applying, with reasonable competence, the distinction between genuine irreplaceable scarcity and manufactured luxury pricing, and finding that the latter did not survive the scrutiny of a market that had recently become considerably more attentive to the difference.

The -40% price reduction on the newest releases represents Salon’s acknowledgment, however tactfully expressed through the medium of commercial strategy rather than public statement, that the market was correct. The recalibration has worked. Collector confidence has returned. The 2015, priced at a level that treats its quality honestly rather than aspirationally, is selling. The market is stable.

The 2008 magnums, unreachable at the release price for anyone who did not act in 2019, sit above all of this in a category that requires minimal recalibration, correction, and repricing. They are simply there, growing rarer by opened bottle, doing the thing that genuinely scarce wine from genuinely exceptional vintages does when the collector base finally understood what it was holding: appreciating quietly, requiring no narrative, answerable only to the chalk and the vintage.

Didier Depond took the gamble in 2019. The market took until 2026 to fully agree. In wine, as in most things that matter, the gap between knowing something and the market pricing it correctly is where the interesting stories live.

Let me describe two scenarios, and you can tell me which one represents a collector making a serious decision about wine.

In the first scenario, a person who wishes to purchase a case of 2022 Gevrey-Chambertin for their cellar consults a guide produced by the company that publishes road maps, cross-references the result against the tasting notes of three critics whose palates they have spent years calibrating against their own, checks the vintage report from their most trusted Burgundy source, and rings the négociant to inquire about availability before the allocation closes.

In the second scenario, the same person decides where to spend a long weekend based on whether the winery has a Frank Gehry-designed roof, swimming pool and a spa. Both of these people are engaged with wine. Only one of them is doing something that the other needs to know about.

I am not saying that the Michelin Grape is without merit, and I am emphatically not saying that the World’s 50 Best Vineyards is without audience. What I am saying is that neither of these guides does the specific thing that the person building a cellar, allocating a budget, assessing a vintage, or making the irreversible decision to pull the trigger on a wine they will not drink for fifteen years actually needs a guide to do. Understanding why requires examining what each of these guides actually is, which is something that the enthusiastic press coverage surrounding their launches has been somewhat less rigorous about than the occasion demands.

The Michelin Grape: A Serious Effort in the Wrong Direction

The Michelin Grape — formally “la Grappe” in the original French, which is either charming or slightly self-conscious depending on your tolerance for Gallic branding exercises — was announced in late 2024 and unveiled, with the theatricality the Michelin organisation has always understood to be part of its value proposition, at the Palace of the Dukes of Burgundy. This is a location that announces its intentions with some clarity. You are not, the venue communicates, being asked to think about Languedoc cooperative wine. You are in the heartland of the only wine region that the international fine wine market has, over the course of several decades, elevated to something approaching the status of secular religion. The first rollout covered Burgundy and the inaugural selection recognised 94 estates in total, of which 9 received the highest Three Grape distinction, 20 received Two Grapes, and 33 received One Grape.

The nine Three Grape recipients include names — Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Leroy, D’Auvenay, Roumier, Lamy, Jean-Marc & Thomas Bouley, Coche-Dury, Dugat-Py, Cécile Tremblay, — that require no introduction to anyone reading this publication and that will prompt either reverence or the particular form of market anxiety that serious Burgundy drinkers have lived with since these wines became effectively impossible to acquire through normal commercial channels. I will return to this point, because it is the point.

First, the system itself deserves a fair hearing, because it has been designed with genuine thoughtfulness and it represents a meaningful departure from the critical orthodoxy it is implicitly challenging. Rather than assigning a numerical score to an individual wine from an individual vintage — the 100-point framework that has dominated the English-language critical establishment since the 1980s and that carries all the authority and all the limitations of a system designed to translate a sensory experience into a consumer-legible ranking — the Michelin Grape rates the estate as an ongoing enterprise, evaluated against five criteria: the quality of agronomy, the technical mastery of the winemaking, the identity and cultural personality of the producer, the balance of the wines across their structural components, and — most interestingly — the consistency of quality across multiple vintages rather than the performance of a single wine in a single year.

This last criterion is, intellectually, the most defensible part of the system, and it represents a genuine critique of the 100-point model’s characteristic weakness: its tendency to reward the most extravagant expression of a given vintage’s characteristics rather than the estate’s ability to make something genuinely excellent from whatever the weather provides. The Three Grape designation comes with the explicit assurance that “wine lovers can buy these bottles with absolute confidence regardless of how difficult the weather or harvest vintage was that year,” which is either a ringing endorsement or an extraordinary hostage to fortune depending on your view of the 2024 Burgundy vintage, which Michelin’s inspectors are presumably going to have to navigate with the confidence they have pledged.

The inspectors themselves are, in the Michelin tradition, anonymous — former sommeliers and veteran wine critics, the organisation tells us, conducting their assessments without the estate’s knowledge in the manner of the restaurant inspectors whose anonymity is the foundation of the system’s claimed independence. This is admirable in principle and genuinely unusual in the wine world, where the relationship between critics and the producers they assess has historically been characterised by the kind of proximity that makes the word “independent” do rather more work than it can comfortably sustain.

The collector who wants to buy Domaine de la Romanée-Conti does not need Michelin to tell them that Domaine de la Romanée-Conti is exceptional. The collector who does not already know this is not in a position to acquire Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, because the allocation of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti has been spoken for by people who have been on the relevant lists since before the Michelin organisation had completed its deliberations about whether to enter the wine business at all. The estate produces a quantity of wine that is, relative to the demand for it, essentially zero. The Three Grape designation does not create supply. It creates attention, which in this market is indistinguishable from creating demand, which is to say that the Michelin Grape’s highest honour, applied to wines that are already among the most sought-after and least accessible in the world, has the practical effect of making them harder to obtain for everyone except the people who were already going to obtain them regardless.

This is not Michelin’s fault, exactly. It is the inevitable consequence of applying a consumer guidance system to a market in which the guidance cannot move inventory because the inventory is not available for the guidance to move. The restaurant that receives a third Michelin star becomes, in the following weeks, extremely difficult to book. But it remains bookable, for the person with sufficient persistence and flexibility. The wine estate that receives Three Grapes for wines that have been allocated through mailing lists and négociant relationships for the past twenty years offers the recipient of this intelligence nowhere to direct their newly confirmed enthusiasm except the secondary market, where the bottles have already been priced by people who knew what they were long before Michelin arrived.

Where the Michelin Grape could be genuinely useful, because the system has real merit and deserves a fair account of where it might develop, is in its application to the One Grape and Selected tiers, specifically in regions that the critical establishment’s attention has historically distributed unevenly. The promise of the criteria, particularly the agronomic quality assessment and the identity criterion that explicitly rewards “unique personality and cultural heritage over corporate polish or generic commercial styling”, suggests a system capable of identifying serious producers who are not yet on the allocation radar of the collectors who currently dominate the market for top Burgundy and Bordeaux. If the guide’s expansion into other French regions, and eventually beyond France, results in the surfacing of excellent estates in Beaujolais, the Jura, the Loire, the southern Rhône, and the increasingly serious producers of Corsica and Savoie who have not received the critical attention their quality warrants, then it will have performed a genuine service.

That is a guide for a different kind of buyer than the one reading this article. For the collector operating in the appellations the inaugural guide covers — Burgundy — the Michelin Grape tells you nothing you did not already know and confirms allocations you will not be able to access. File it under “intellectually interesting, operationally irrelevant,” and spend the time you would have devoted to reading it on a second pass through Jasper Morris instead.

The World’s 50 Best Vineyards: A Tourism Guide That Has Been Mistaken for a Wine Guide

I want to approach the World’s 50 Best Vineyards with the same fair-mindedness I brought to the Michelin Grape, because it deserves to be described accurately rather than dismissed, and dismissing it for the wrong reasons would be as intellectually dishonest as endorsing it for the wrong ones.

The World’s 50 Best Vineyards is a tourism guide. It is a good tourism guide, managed by the same organisation responsible for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, powered by a voting academy of 720 anonymous travel and wine tourism experts distributed across 20 geographical regions, each with an Academy Chair overseeing a local panel of 36 specialists who nominate the most exceptional public wine experiences they have personally encountered. The methodology is transparent, the geographic coverage is genuinely global, and the organisation has demonstrated, through its restaurant guide, a capacity for identifying experiences of genuine distinction in categories where experience is the appropriate unit of evaluation.

The problem is definitional, and it is a problem the guide has built into its foundations with the calm confidence of an organisation that knows exactly what it is doing and is doing something entirely different from what the wine collector needs done.

The guide defines a “vineyard” — and I want you to read this definition carefully, because it contains the entirety of what follows — as an estate that is open to the public during the voting period. A vineyard, in the World’s 50 Best methodology, is not primarily an agricultural operation producing wine of specific quality from specific soils using specific methods over multiple decades. It is a destination. It is a place you can visit, and the criteria by which it is judged are the criteria by which destinations are appropriately judged: the quality of the tour, the ambiance of the tasting room, the knowledge and hospitality of the staff, the accessibility of the estate, the value proposition of the experience, the quality of the architecture, the amenities available — hotels, restaurants, spas, art galleries — and, with a candour that at least has the virtue of transparency, “scenery, landscape design, and panoramic views.”

The current Number One vineyard in the world, by this guide’s assessment, is VIK in Chile’s Millahue Valley, celebrated for its futuristic ultra-luxury winery designed in the manner of Frank Gehry, its glass-floored pavilion, and its dramatic Andean backdrop. Number Two globally and Best in Europe is Schloss Johannisberg in the Rheingau, which has genuine historical significance as the estate credited with planting the world’s first Riesling vines and which can offer guests access to an 11th-century subterranean cellar — an experience of undeniable power, for the person who finds the experience of descending into an 11th-century subterranean cellar to be the primary unit of wine value. Number Three is Bodegas Ysios in Rioja, specifically celebrated for Santiago Calatrava’s wave-like roof, designed to echo the surrounding mountains. The previously reigning Number One, Zuccardi Valle de Uco in Mendoza, held the top position for three consecutive years, its stone architecture and high-altitude setting constituting a visitor experience apparently unmatched in the Southern Hemisphere for three consecutive years running.

I have nothing against any of these estates, and I mean that sincerely. Calatrava’s buildings are extraordinary objects. Schloss Johannisberg’s historical significance is real, and the Rheingau Riesling tradition it represents is among the most compelling in German wine. Zuccardi is producing Malbec of genuine seriousness from high-altitude Mendoza fruit that rewards the attention of anyone interested in South American wine at its most ambitious. These are not frauds or pretenders. They are estates that have made, in some cases alongside genuinely excellent wine, a strategic investment in the visitor experience, and the guide rewards them for that investment in the only way consistent with its methodology.

However here is what the guide does not tell you: it does not tell you whether the wine is excellent. It does not evaluate the wine against a critical framework. It does not provide vintage analysis, tasting notes, comparative assessments, or any of the other forms of information on which a collector makes a decision to purchase wine for the purpose of drinking wine.

The economic impact data the organisation reports — top-ranking wineries experiencing near-immediate spikes in international tasting room bookings, luxury hotel stays, and direct-to-consumer sales within days of the ceremony — reveals the guide’s actual function with admirable clarity. The spike is in tasting room bookings and hotel stays. It is in direct-to-consumer sales, which are a category of wine purchase that the serious collector does not primarily rely upon, because the wines available for direct-to-consumer purchase from wineries with world-class architecture and luxury spas are, almost by definition, wines priced and positioned for the visitor market rather than the allocation market. The collector buying Pétrus is not doing so because they enjoyed the hospitality of the tasting room. The collector buying Domaine Leflaive is not on a waiting list because they once stayed overnight and found the spa to be of acceptable standard.

There is a version of this guide that a serious drinker might find personally useful: as a framework for planning a wine travel itinerary that combines genuine quality with the kind of experience that justifies the travel itself. If you are going to Rioja, Ysios is likely worth a visit, and the roof will be genuinely impressive in person. If you find yourself in the Rheingau, Schloss Johannisberg’s cellars are the kind of thing that wine travel exists to provide. I would not discourage anyone from using the guide for this purpose, and for the wine-curious traveller who is not yet a serious collector, it may serve as an entry point into the world of serious wine estates that has real value.

But for the collector? The collector sitting at a desk in February, trying to decide whether to allocate cellar space and budget to a 2023 Chambolle-Musigny from a producer they have not previously followed, or assessing whether the 2020 vintage in Pauillac justifies the secondary market premium over the 2019 that is currently being asked? The World’s 50 Best Vineyards is the architectural equivalent of a wine list — impressive to look at, important for the ambiance of the room, and entirely distinct from the question of what is actually in the glass.

What Collectors Actually Need (And Where to Find It)

Having described, with what I hope is appropriate precision, the specific ways in which both guides fail the collector, I want to briefly acknowledge the obvious response: that both guides were not designed for collectors, that the serious collector has always had and continues to have access to the information they require, and that criticising the Michelin Grape and the World’s 50 Best Vineyards for failing to serve collector needs is like criticising a sommelier for their inability to perform gymnastics.

Nevertheless both guides will shape the market that collectors operate in, whether collectors find them useful or not. The Michelin Grape’s Three Grape designations are already being absorbed into the vocabulary of fine wine commerce. The estates that receive them will — not all of them, not the Coche-Durys and the Dugat-Pys that were already allocated to the horizon and beyond, but the Two and One Grape recipients who were previously known primarily to the initiated — experience meaningful increases in attention, demand, and secondary market pricing. The collector who ignores this development entirely will find, in two or three years’ time, that a tier of wines they had been quietly acquiring at reasonable prices has been discovered by a new wave of buyers who arrived via a Michelin Guide rather than via the cellars of the Côte de Nuits, and that the allocation they had been receiving has become considerably more competitive.

The World’s 50 Best guide’s economic impact on direct-to-consumer sales, meanwhile, does something subtler and more insidious: it helps establish the visual and experiential vocabulary through which the next generation of wine consumers first encounters fine wine estates, and that vocabulary — architecture, landscape, luxury hospitality — is not the vocabulary of what makes wine great. The person whose first encounter with Burgundy is through a beautifully produced guide ranking estates by the quality of their tasting rooms is being given a map of the region that does not show the roads that lead to the wines worth drinking.

So yes: both guides are operationally irrelevant to the serious collector. But neither of them is ignorable, for the collector who wishes to understand the market they are operating in and the audience that is arriving to share it with them.

The wine does not care about the architecture. The wine does not care about the spa. The wine does not care whether Michelin has assigned it three small clusters of grapes rendered in whatever typeface the Michelin design team selected for the occasion. The wine cares — if we are permitted to speak this way about fermented grape juice — only about the vineyard it came from, the season that produced it, the hands that made it, and the cellar that has kept it until the moment you open it.

Every other consideration is, in the final reckoning, tourism.

The author’s cellar contains no wines selected on the basis of architectural distinction, panoramic view rating, or spa quality. It does contain several bottles allocated through relationships that predate the existence of both guides discussed above, which is either a statement about the collector’s priorities or an admission about how long they have been doing this. Probably both.

One has observed, with the particular mixture of satisfaction and mild impatience that attends the contemplation of any institution one holds in considerable affection, that the British fine wine merchant trade is without serious rival in the civilised world. This is not mere national chauvinism — though one confesses that national chauvinism, when applied to subjects that genuinely warrant it, is a vice one is entirely prepared to defend — but rather a statement of historical and commercial fact that any dispassionate examination of the evidence will rapidly confirm. The French may grow the wine. The Italians may grow a very great deal of other wine. But it is the British merchant, with his centuries of accumulated expertise, his unmatched relationships with the producing estates, his cellars full of properly stored provenance, and his somewhat idiosyncratic but ultimately rather excellent approach to client service, who has for generations constituted the indispensable intermediary between the vineyard and the serious collector.

For one who is serious about building a cellar of lasting merit — and one does not, frankly, see any point in building a cellar that is not of lasting merit, for the half-hearted accumulation of middling bottles is a waste of both money and the not inconsiderable intellectual effort that proper cellaring requires — the selection of one’s merchants is a matter deserving of considerably more careful thought than it typically receives. This is not simply a question of who offers the most agreeable discount on a case of Chablis, though pricing is naturally a consideration one would be foolish to ignore entirely. It is a question of allocation access — that is to say, one’s ability to obtain the genuinely rare and sought-after bottles before they are absorbed by the secondary market at prices that reflect the tax levied upon those who failed to establish the correct relationships in advance — of storage reliability, of the technological infrastructure for managing one’s cellar with appropriate rigour, and of what the more commercially minded among us have taken to calling exit liquidity: the capacity to convert one’s wine back into currency when the occasion demands it, at a price commensurate with the wine’s quality and provenance.

One has given this matter the extended consideration it deserves, and proposes to share one’s conclusions in the form that follows.

The Blue-Chip Titans, Being Those Houses of Unimpeachable Historical Distinction Upon Whose Stability and Pedigree One May Repose the Fullest Confidence

These are the great houses. They predate, in several cases, not merely the living memory of any current participant in the market but the entire apparatus of modern commerce as we understand it. Their relationships with the producing estates of Bordeaux and Burgundy are of the kind that one does not establish by spending liberally for two or three seasons and expecting to be treated as a valued client: they are the product of decades and in some cases generations of continuous engagement, mutual trust, and the specific kind of commercial reliability that only the passage of considerable time can establish. It is these relationships that translate, in practical terms, into the primary allocations of the most sought-after bottles — and it is access to those primary allocations that separates the serious collector from the person who is merely rich.

Berry Bros. & Rudd

Established in the Year of Our Lord 1698, in the reign of King William III, and operating from the same premises in St. James’s Street to this day

One must begin with Berry Bros. & Rudd, not because one is in the habit of permitting sentiment to override analytical rigour, but because in this particular instance sentiment and analytical rigour arrive at precisely the same destination. Berry Bros. & Rudd is the oldest wine merchant in Britain, which is itself the world’s most distinguished wine merchant nation, which makes it, ipso facto, the oldest wine merchant of any consequence in the civilised world. This pedigree is not merely of historical or decorative interest: it represents three hundred and twenty-seven years of continuous operation during which the house has survived wars, revolutions, the Reformation’s long aftermath, the rise and fall of empires, the entire industrial revolution, two world wars, and the progressive destruction of the British class system that constituted its natural social habitat, and has emerged from each successive challenge with its reputation not merely intact but, on the whole, enhanced.

The practical benefits of this pedigree for the serious collector are considerable. BBR’s financial stability is of a kind that smaller or newer operations cannot credibly claim to match: one’s wine, stored in their cellars, is not subject to the risk of discovering one morning that the company through whom one warehoused a not inconsiderable investment has entered administration and that the question of who exactly owns what has become a matter for the courts rather than the stocklist. This matters. The wine trade has produced its share of commercial failures, and the collector who has not given adequate thought to counterparty risk is the collector who will eventually have cause to regret the oversight.

Their proprietary trading platform, BBX, is the most impressive development in the fine wine secondary market that this commentator has encountered, and one says this with full awareness that enthusiasm for digital commercial platforms sits somewhat awkwardly alongside one’s broader disposition toward the methods and manners of previous centuries. BBX enables one to list one’s wine for sale to fellow collectors, or to purchase wine that other collectors are offering, with a commission structure — ten per cent — that is, by the standards of the secondary market, genuinely reasonable. For the collector who wishes to sell a case to fund future acquisitions, or who wishes to acquire bottles at market price without engaging the services of a traditional broker, BBX represents a liquidity mechanism of considerable practical value.

The caveat, and it is a caveat of sufficient importance that one would be doing the reader a disservice to minimise it, is this: the top-tier allocations — the Rousseau, the Roumier, and the Romanée-Conti — are not distributed democratically. They are distributed to the clients who have demonstrated, over years and decades of consistent purchasing, the kind of financial commitment that justifies their preferential treatment. To expect, as a new client spending a few thousand pounds annually, that one will be offered one’s desired share of the allocation of a Chambertin Clos de Bèze is to misunderstand the nature of the relationship one is entering. The path to the finest bottles runs through years of purchasing the less exceptional ones with consistent loyalty and without complaint. This is, one suspects, a lesson that the more impatient members of contemporary society find rather difficult to absorb, which is, naturally, their loss.

Best suited to: Long-term cellaring of blue-chip Bordeaux and Burgundy, En Primeur purchasing, and any collector whose planning horizon extends beyond the immediate gratification of the present vintage season. Also indispensable as the home of one’s primary cellar account, for the exit liquidity that BBX provides.

Corney & Barrow

Holders of Two Royal Warrants, and the Exclusive UK Agents for Certain Bottles That One Does Not Obtain Elsewhere at Any Price

Corney & Barrow occupies a position in the fine wine firmament that is, from the perspective of the serious collector, both enormously attractive and, one must be candid, somewhat demanding of the commercial patience. They hold the exclusive UK distribution rights for the wines of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and for Petrus, which are, without engaging in hyperbole, the two most mythologised addresses in the wine world, and they hold these rights exclusively, meaning that if one wishes to purchase either of these wines at primary release price rather than at the secondary market premium that reflects their scarcity and desirability, one must do so through Corney & Barrow or one must do without.

This is, on its face, an extremely powerful commercial proposition. The difficulty — and one uses the word “difficulty” in the spirit of understatement that befits the gravity of what one is describing — is the method by which one qualifies for the allocation. Corney & Barrow distributes its DRC and Petrus allocations to clients who demonstrate their commitment to the broader portfolio, which is to say the wines that are rather less stratospherically sought-after and rather more accessible in price: the house Bordeaux, the regional whites, the perfectly agreeable bottles that one would purchase in any case if one were buying for immediate consumption but that represent, in this specific context, the commercial obligation one undertakes in exchange for the privilege of occasionally being offered something quite remarkable.

The arithmetic of this arrangement is such that the cost of maintaining one’s position in the allocation queue — the bottles one purchases not because they are the bottles one particularly wishes to drink but because purchasing them is the price of admission to the bottles one very much does wish to drink — is not inconsiderable, and must be weighed against the very substantial saving that purchasing DRC at release price, rather than at what the secondary market demands, represents. For the collector of genuinely ample means and long-term ambition, this calculation will resolve itself in Corney & Barrow’s favour. For the collector of moderate means who wishes to drink DRC on one or two occasions during their lifetime without the associated overhead, the secondary market is probably the more honest path.

Best suited to: Those of sufficiently considerable financial resource and sufficient patience to maintain the commercial relationship over the years required to secure meaningful allocations. Not, with respect, for the occasional collector or the budget-conscious enthusiast.

The Modern Powerhouses and Brokerage Establishments of the Present Century, Being Those Houses Which, Though Lacking the Antiquarian Charm of Their Elder Competitors, Have Brought to the Market Certain Commercial Efficiencies That One Cannot in Good Conscience Decline to Acknowledge

One confesses to a certain instinctive wariness of what the current commercial vocabulary describes as “tech-forward” enterprises, which phrase tends to indicate an organisation that has mistaken the velocity of its digital systems for the depth of its knowledge and the breadth of its relationships. This wariness is not, in the case of the houses below, fully justified: several of them combine the advantages of modern commercial infrastructure with a genuine expertise in fine wine that commands respect. One notes this with the specific pleasure of finding one’s prejudices rebuked.

BI Fine Wine & Spirits

Formerly Bordeaux Index, Though One Notes the Rebranding With the Mild Displeasure One Reserves for the Unnecessary Alteration of Perfectly Serviceable Names

BI Fine Wine, as they have chosen to call themselves since the rebranding that struck the purist in one as entirely unnecessary — Bordeaux Index was a perfectly good name, describing precisely what the business did, and one struggles to identify the improvement — is a global operation of considerable scale that approaches the fine wine market with what one can only describe as a trading-floor sensibility. This is not, let one be clear, an insult. The wine investment market is a market, and the rigorous application of market analysis, pricing transparency, and liquidity mechanisms to it is, when executed with the competence that BI demonstrates, a service of genuine value.

Their LiveTrade platform — a mechanism by which certain blue-chip wines may be sold back to BI at market price, instantly, without the delays and uncertainties of the peer-to-peer secondary market — is a commercial innovation that the investment-focused collector ought to regard with something approaching gratitude. The ability to convert a case of Lafite into its market-price equivalent in currency, at a moment of one’s choosing rather than at the mercy of the secondary market’s prevailing demand, is a form of liquidity that the traditional merchant model does not offer and that represents a meaningful practical advantage for the collector who thinks of their cellar as, in part, a portfolio.

One notes, with the mild melancholy that one cannot entirely suppress when contemplating what the fine wine trade has become in recent decades, that the BI experience is not what one would describe as romantic. There is no aged wooden counter. There is no slightly terrifying senior partner who has been selling Lafite since before you were born and who will regard your interest in natural wine with the polite disdain it deserves. There is a very efficient digital platform and some sharp pricing. For collectors who are honest with themselves about what they require, this is entirely sufficient and possibly preferable.

Best suited to: The investment-minded collector whose primary concern is transparent pricing, market efficiency, and the capacity to liquidate positions cleanly. Also excellent for collectors who wish to monitor the current market value of their cellar with the precision of a financial statement.

Farr Vintners

The Undisputed Sovereign of the Physical Brokerage Market, Operating With a Commercial Directness That One Cannot But Admire

Farr Vintners is, in the estimation of those who know the market with any depth, the dominant force in physical fine wine brokerage in the United Kingdom, and this dominance is earned rather than inherited. They operate not as a traditional merchant in the manner of Berry Bros. or Corney & Barrow but as a broker: they acquire large parcels of mature wine from private cellars — sometimes entire collections assembled over decades by collectors disposing of their holdings — and offer them to buyers at margins that reflect the efficiency of their operation rather than the overhead of maintaining a beautiful shop on a prestigious street.

The consequence of this model, for the buyer, is pricing that is frequently the most competitive available in the UK market for mature cases of serious Bordeaux, and access to back-vintages — the 2005s, the 2010s, the mature Burgundy that requires twenty years of patient cellaring to reach its apogee and that the impatient modern collector is unable to provide for himself — that is unmatched in its breadth and depth. When one wishes to drink a properly mature first growth or a grand cru Burgundy at something approaching a sensible price, Farr Vintners is, very often, where one begins the search.

The caveats are two. First: the minimum order values and storage thresholds that Farr imposes are structured around the serious collector’s budget and are, for the casual purchaser, somewhat restrictive. This is not a criticism so much as an observation about the appropriate audience. Second, and one advances this with all due delicacy: their digital presence is, by any contemporary standard, of a vintage considerably more advanced than that of the wines they sell. The website operates with a functional honesty that prioritises information delivery over aesthetic satisfaction, and one suspects that the firm regards this state of affairs with the equanimity of an organisation that knows perfectly well that its clients come for the wine rather than the user experience.

Best suited to: The acquisition of mature, properly cellared Bordeaux and top Burgundy at the most competitive prices available in the UK market. Not for the casual purchaser, and one does not recommend approaching them without a clear sense of what one wishes to acquire and in what quantity.

Goedhuis & Co., Now Trading as Goedhuis Waddesdon

Strengthened Considerably by Their Union With the Rothschild Interest at Waddesdon, and All the Better For It

The merger of Goedhuis with the Waddesdon wine operation — Waddesdon being, one need hardly remind the reader, the estate that Benjamin Disraeli assisted Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in establishing, and which remains one of the more magnificent expressions of Victorian plutocratic taste in the English landscape — has produced an entity of considerably greater commercial power than either constituent part could claim independently. The Rothschild connection provides, among other advantages, unparalleled access to Château Lafite Rothschild and the broader Domaines Barons de Rothschild portfolio, which is a relationship that money alone cannot purchase and that represents, for the collector with the appropriate inclinations, a significant argument in favour of Goedhuis Waddesdon’s services.

One has heard from those who deal with them that the quality of personal client service is of a standard that the larger, more digitally orientated operations struggle to match: the account managers are described, with the consistency that suggests genuine rather than merely diplomatic opinion, as genuinely knowledgeable, personally attentive, and willing to engage with the collector’s specific tastes and ambitions rather than simply processing orders efficiently. For the collector who wishes to conduct their wine purchasing as a conversation with an expert rather than as a series of online transactions, this distinction is not a trivial one.

The relative underdevelopment of their peer-to-peer trading infrastructure, compared to the rather splendid BBX mechanism at Berry Bros., is a practical limitation that one notes without excessive criticism: not every house can excel at every commercial activity simultaneously, and the depth of their client relationships and their portfolio quality more than compensates for what they have not yet built in this particular area.

Best suited to: Collectors who place a premium on the depth and quality of their merchant relationship, who wish for access to the Rothschild portfolio at advantageous terms, and who regard the personal expertise of an account manager as a genuine commercial resource rather than a luxury.

The Specialists in Burgundy, the Cult Producers, and the Discoveries That Reward the Collector Who Has the Discernment to Look Beyond the Established Appellations

If one’s tastes run — as one trusts they do, given that one has reached this far into the present document — toward the more interesting and demanding corners of the wine world: toward the biodynamic micro-domaines of Burgundy, toward the ancient vines of Château Rayas and the Rhône’s most elusive producers, toward the extraordinary Japanese and Korean vignerons who are, as the present author has had occasion to observe in other contexts, producing wines of remarkable finesse in Gevrey-Chambertin, then the houses in this tier deserve one’s serious attention and, where the relationship warrants it, one’s serious money.

Justerini & Brooks

Owned by Diageo, Which One Regards With the Ambivalence Appropriate to Corporate Ownership of an Institution That Predates, by Some Margin, the Corporation Itself

Justerini & Brooks, or J&B as the abbreviation-minded insist on calling it, holds Royal Warrant and a portfolio that, in the opinion of those best positioned to judge, constitutes the finest collection of Burgundy agency relationships of any merchant in the United Kingdom. Their exclusive agency for Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair alone would distinguish them from most of their competitors; that this is merely one jewel among a collection of considerable brilliance speaks to the quality of the relationships they have cultivated over many decades.

Their representation of Barolo and German Riesling — the two great wine traditions that the serious collector most frequently neglects in favour of the easier familiarity of Bordeaux and Burgundy, and most frequently regrets having neglected — is of exceptional depth and quality. The collector whose palate has evolved beyond the conventional hierarchy and who wishes to explore the serious wines of Piedmont and the Mosel will find that J&B has done a very great deal of the sourcing work on their behalf.

The familiar qualification applies: entry to the finest allocation lists is not accomplished instantaneously, and the new client who arrives expecting immediate access to the most sought-after bottles will be given, courteously but firmly, to understand that the queue is longer than they imagined and that patience is the required virtue. This is not a deficiency of the merchant but a natural consequence of the scarcity of the wines in question, and one would think considerably less of J&B if they distributed their finest allocations without regard for the established hierarchy of client relationships.

Best suited to: The serious Burgundy collector and, perhaps more particularly, the collector who recognises that Barolo and German Riesling represent, at this moment in the market, some of the most compelling value propositions in the world of fine wine.

Lay & Wheeler

Considerably Revitalised in Recent Years, and Representing the Most Agreeable Conjunction of the Established Merchant Tradition With the More Useful Aspects of Contemporary Commercial Practice

Lay & Wheeler is, in one’s estimation, the most interesting story among the established British merchants of the current period. Founded in 1854, they possess sufficient antiquity to have earned the respect of those who regard longevity as a proxy for quality — and it is, broadly speaking, a reasonable proxy, though not an infallible one — while having undergone in recent years a revitalisation sufficiently thoroughgoing that they combine historical credibility with a commercial dynamism that one associates more naturally with newer entrants.

Their particular strength, and the reason one commends them specifically to collectors whose tastes align with the more adventurous regions of the wine world, is their commitment to what one might call the discovery function of the fine wine merchant: the identification and introduction to the British market of producers of exceptional quality who have not yet achieved the widespread recognition that will, in due course, make their wines considerably more expensive and considerably more difficult to obtain. Their coverage of the new wave of Burgundy — the younger domaines working with biodynamic viticulture and minimal intervention, producing wines of the precision and soul that the appellation’s most distinguished addresses have always promised but that the less committed producers have not always delivered — is, by the standards of the established merchant trade, remarkable.

Their Cellar Circle storage programme offers the flexibility that the collector who is building a cellar across multiple regional focuses will find practically superior to the more rigid structures of some of their competitors. The digital platform is genuinely well-designed without sacrificing the human element that distinguishes a merchant relationship from an online retailer.

They do not, one notes in the interest of comprehensive accuracy, match the raw commercial muscle of Berry Bros. or Farr Vintners when it comes to the absolute first-tier Bordeaux: the Premier Cru Classé releases at competitive allocation prices are the province of those with deeper Bordeaux relationships, and one would not direct one’s Bordeaux purchasing to Lay & Wheeler if Bordeaux is one’s primary focus. But if one’s focus includes the rather more interesting territories of the Loire, South Africa, and the emerging micro-domaines of Burgundy, this limitation is of limited practical consequence.

Best suited to: The modern collector of broad and adventurous tastes, particularly one who wishes to identify and obtain allocations of emerging producers before the market has fully priced their quality into the secondary market.

The Correct Strategy for the Intelligent Collector: A Systematic Approach to the Deployment of One’s Resources Across the Available Options

One has observed, with the mild exasperation that accompanies the contemplation of an error committed with great frequency, that the majority of collectors who engage with the British wine merchant market make the elementary mistake of consolidating all their purchasing with a single house. This consolidation has a superficial appeal — it simplifies one’s administrative arrangements, concentrates one’s spending sufficiently to generate meaningful preferential treatment, and reduces the complexity of managing multiple account relationships — but it represents, on close examination, a sacrifice of significant practical advantage in the name of a convenience that is more illusory than real.

The sophisticated approach is not consolidation but specialisation: the deployment of each merchant according to its particular strengths, combined in a strategy that extracts the maximum value from each element of the market.

The first step is to establish one’s primary cellar account with Berry Bros. & Rudd, not necessarily because they offer the best prices — they do not always — or the most exciting portfolio of discovery producers — they do not, particularly — but because BBX, their secondary market platform, is the finest exit mechanism available to the British collector. One’s cellar, maintained as an In Bond account at BBR’s warehouse, is a cellar from which one can extract value whenever the occasion demands it, at market price, with minimal friction and a commission that is reasonable by the standards of any comparable service. This is worth, in the view of this commentator, a modest premium on the wines one purchases from them, and is worth maintaining even if the majority of one’s purchasing is conducted elsewhere.

The second step concerns the acquisition of mature wine — the bottles that have already undergone the years of cellar development that one wishes to consume rather than provide — and here one directs the reader firmly in the direction of Farr Vintners and BI Fine Wine rather than the retail lists of the traditional merchant houses. The price differential between a mature 2005 Bordeaux or 2010 Barolo purchased from a broker who has acquired it from a private cellar, and the same wine purchased from a traditional merchant’s retail offering, can be fifteen to twenty per cent, which is a sum that compounds very agreeably if one is making such purchases with any regularity. The slight inconvenience of navigating broker lists and managing deliveries from a less aesthetically pleasing digital interface is, one respectfully suggests, a reasonable price to pay for a twenty per cent saving on wine that costs several hundred pounds a case.

The third step is what one might describe as the allocation hunt, which is the activity of securing one’s desired quantities of the genuinely rare, genuinely sought-after bottles that define a collection of serious ambition. For this purpose, one ought to establish relationships with Lay & Wheeler and Goedhuis Waddesdon, and one ought to approach those relationships with the particular combination of transparency and strategic generosity that the allocation market rewards. Tell one’s account manager precisely what one wishes to obtain and at what annual budget one is operating. Indicate a willingness to purchase cases of their more interesting and less immediately obvious import agencies — the wines from producers one has not previously encountered, the regional bottles from appellations one has not explored — in exchange for access to allocations of the rare and highly sought-after producers one actually wants. This is not, one emphasises, a manipulation or a deception: the wines one purchases as part of this arrangement are invariably interesting in themselves, and the account manager who understands that one is a serious collector with genuine curiosity, rather than a speculator seeking to extract trophy bottles without reciprocal commercial engagement, is the account manager most likely to remember one’s preferences when an interesting parcel arrives unexpectedly.

The fourth step — and one cannot emphasise this with sufficient force — is to ensure that every bottle one purchases, regardless of through which merchant one purchases it, is stored In Bond. In Bond storage means that the wine is held in a temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled, HMRC-approved bonded warehouse — Octavian, BBR’s own facility, or several other excellent operations — without the payment of UK VAT and duty, which defers those costs until the wine is removed from bond for consumption. More importantly from the perspective of the serious collector, In Bond provenance is the gold standard for demonstrating to any future buyer that the wine has been stored correctly and continuously from its arrival in the UK to the moment of transfer. Wine of uncertain provenance — wine that has spent periods in private houses, in garages, in conditions that cannot be verified — attracts the suspicion of sophisticated buyers and commands, on the secondary market, a price that reflects that suspicion. Wine of impeccable In Bond provenance commands the full market price without reservation or discount. The difference, over a cellar of any significant value, is a sum that no one who has troubled to calculate it will be content to surrender through inattention.

A Concluding Observation, Which One Offers in the Spirit of Amplification Rather Than Summary

The British fine wine merchant trade is, as one has endeavoured to demonstrate, a landscape of considerable complexity, in which the correct navigation requires not merely the financial resources to participate but the knowledge and patience to deploy those resources with discrimination and strategic intelligence. It rewards those who take the time to understand the particular strengths and limitations of each house, who build relationships over years rather than seeking immediate gratification, and who approach the management of their cellar with the same rigour they would bring to any other significant long-term investment.

One has sometimes heard it suggested, by those who regard the fine wine market with a scepticism that one cannot wholly dismiss, that the elaborate apparatus of allocation lists, broker relationships, In Bond storage, and secondary market platforms represents an unnecessary complication imposed upon what is, at its heart, the simple pleasure of drinking good wine. This is not, in one’s view, an entirely unreasonable observation. The pleasure of drinking good wine is indeed simple, immediate, and requires no merchant strategy, no storage infrastructure, and no exit liquidity mechanism whatsoever.

The distinction between drinking good wine and collecting it is the distinction between a pleasure and an obsession, and one who has arrived at this point has almost certainly crossed that particular Rubicon some considerable time ago.

The only advice one would presume to add is this: having crossed it, one ought to cross it properly, and with adequate preparation.

The alternative is to find oneself, some years hence, in possession of a cellar of uncertain provenance, improperly stored, purchased from the wrong merchants at the wrong prices, with no clear mechanism for its eventual disposition.

This, if one may say so, would be a very great shame.

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There is a thought experiment I occasionally inflict on people at dinner, usually around the point where the Meursault has done its work and everyone is in a sufficiently philosophical mood to engage with it properly.

The thought experiment is this: if you took a parcel of Chevalier-Montrachet, vinified it with absolute technical precision, bottled it in glass of conspicuous weight, wrapped it in a label designed by someone whose previous commissions included a Swiss watch brand and a Parisian couture house, priced it at three times its previous release price, and gave it a new name — would the wine in the bottle be different from the wine that emerged from identical grapes the previous year under its original label?

The answer is obviously no. The grapes are the same. The terroir is the same. The limestone, the specific orientation of the slope, the accumulated centuries of viticultural intelligence embedded in the vines themselves — none of this responds to the design brief of a luxury rebrand. The wine does not know what it costs. It does not know what the label looks like. It is entirely, magnificently indifferent to the marketing strategy of whoever currently holds title to the parcel in which it grew.

This thought experiment has recently become considerably less theoretical, because the Pinault family and their vehicle Artémis Domaines have provided us with what may be the most lavishly funded and impeccably executed real-world test of its central proposition.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Vignoble des Cabottes.

The Pinaults, the Portfolio, and the Logic of Trophy Accumulation

François-Henri Pinault — chairman of Kering, architect of the luxury conglomerate that controls Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and a substantial portion of the world’s appetite for expensive things — acquired Château Latour in 1993 for a sum variously reported at approximately 86 million pounds. It established several things simultaneously: that Artémis Domaines was not a passive collector but an active accumulator; that the Pinault family’s approach to wine was governed by the same logic that governs their approach to everything else, which is to say the logic of the absolute top of the market; and that whoever ran Artémis was going to need a rather large business card.

The acquisitions that followed were consistent with this logic. Clos de Tart, in Morey-Saint-Denis, acquired in 2017 from the Mommessin family for somewhere between 220 million to 280 million euros — the entirety of a monopole Grand Cru, seven and a half hectares of some of the most ancient continuously cultivated vineyard land in Burgundy. Domaine d’Eugénie in Vosne-Romanée. Château-Grillet in the Rhône. Eisele Vineyard in Napa Valley. Each acquisition the same: the most prestigious available, purchased at a price that established the transaction itself as a statement of intent.

Against this background, the acquisition of Bouchard Père & Fils from the Henriot family in 2022 followed the pattern precisely. Bouchard is one of Burgundy’s largest and most historically significant landowners — 130 hectares of vineyards assembled over nearly three centuries, including parcels in essentially every significant appellation from Chablis to the Mâconnais, and most relevantly for our purposes, Grand Cru holdings of a scale and quality that would be quite simply impossible to replicate through any mechanism other than inheriting them, purchasing the company that owns them, or waiting for a geological event that reshuffles the Côte d’Or entirely.

The headline Grand Cru holdings that came with Bouchard are, and I say this with the slightly reverential pause that the subject warrants, extraordinary. Le Montrachet itself — approximately 0.89 hectares, making Bouchard one of the single largest holders in the most famous white wine vineyard in the world. Chevalier-Montrachet, specifically the parcel known as La Cabotte, 2.33 hectares of the premier sub-zone immediately above Montrachet on the slope, which is itself one of the most significant individual holdings in the Côte de Beaune. Corton-Charlemagne, in substantial quantity. Beaune Grèves Vigne de l’Enfant Jésus, the monopole whose name is so magnificently impractical to say in one breath that it has long since become a kind of Burgundy in-joke. Volnay Caillerets Ancienne Cuvée Carnot, another extraordinary old vines holding.

Any reasonable person examining this list would conclude that these are among the finest vineyard assets in France. That they have been producing wines under the Bouchard Père & Fils label for generations. That said wines have, particularly under the Henriot family’s stewardship from 1995 onwards, reached a level of quality that many critics regard as the finest the house has ever produced. And that therefore the logical thing to do with them, upon acquisition, would be to continue doing essentially what was working.

The Pinault family’s view, it appears, is rather more creative than this.

Enter Vignoble des Cabottes: The Trophy Label Takes Shape

The name itself is the first clue. “Cabottes” — drawn from Bouchard’s Chevalier-Montrachet holding ‘La Cabotte’ as well as the dry-stone shelters that dot the Burgundian landscape — detached from its Bouchard context and elevated to the title of a standalone domaine, applied specifically to the parcels that constitute the absolute crown jewels of what Artémis acquired.

The concept is as follows, as best as one can reconstruct it from the available information and the observable logic of everything the Pinault operation has done to date: Vignoble des Cabottes functions as a separate label applied to the wine from Bouchard’s most prestigious parcels presented under an entirely distinct brand identity, priced at a level commensurate with Artémis’s other flagship properties, and sold through channels suited to trophy wine rather than the broader Burgundy négociant market through which Bouchard wines have historically been distributed.

Bouchard Père & Fils continues to exist. The négociant operation continues. The accessible end of the portfolio — these remain Bouchard. What Vignoble des Cabottes represents is the extraction of the very tip of that portfolio, the parcels whose names alone are sufficient to produce a measurable effect on the blood pressure of the serious collector, and their repackaging under a new identity that carries none of Bouchard’s négociant associations and all of the cachet that a Pinault-owned, Latour-adjacent provenance now confers.

One might call this a sensible business decision. One might call it something less flattering. I intend to call it both, in sequence.

The Case For: What Artémis Gets Right, Reluctantly Acknowledged

It would be intellectually dishonest to write this piece without acknowledging that the Pinaults have, in their management of Château Latour and Clos de Tart, and to a lesser extent Domaine d’Eugénie, demonstrated a genuine and serious commitment to wine quality that goes considerably beyond the deployment of expensive labels.

Latour under Artémis has been, by any measurable standard, exceptional. The decision to withdraw entirely from the en primeur system in 2012 — releasing wines only when judged ready to drink, which in practice means releasing mature vintages at prices that have appreciated significantly in the interim — was commercially astute but also philosophically coherent. It reflected a genuine position on when wine should be drunk and a willingness to hold stock rather than extract early cash. This is not the behaviour of a company that regards its vineyards as purely financial instruments. It is the behaviour of a company that, whatever its other characteristics, takes the wine seriously.

At Clos de Tart, the investment since 2017 has been lavish in the best sense — a complete renovation of the cuverie, the appointment of winemaking talent of the first order. The wines that have emerged since Artémis took over are, by the consensus of people whose opinions on Pinot Noir I trust, pretty damn good. Not merely expensively packaged. The terroir that was always there, expressed with a clarity and precision that the parcel’s previous management had not consistently achieved.

This track record matters to the question of Vignoble des Cabottes because it is evidence that Artémis does not, in fact, only do marketing. They do marketing with considerable sophistication, but they also do viticulture and winemaking with a level of investment that produces generally better wine than was being produced before their arrival.

If Vignoble des Cabottes follows the Clos de Tart template — the premium label accompanied by genuine investment in the vineyard, genuine philosophical thinking about the wine, a winemaking approach that maximises what the terroir can actually achieve — then the question of whether the wine is “new” or merely “expensively rebranded” becomes rather more interesting to answer.

The wine will be from the same parcels. The terroir will be identical. But terroir is not a fixed quantity — it is a potential that is realised more or less fully depending on the human decisions made in expressing it. If Artémis spends whatever it takes to realise Le Montrachet’s potential more completely than Bouchard’s production at scale permitted, then what emerges from the bottle will be, in a meaningful sense, different wine. It will be wine from the same vines, the same geology, the same slope and orientation — but wine in which that combination is heard more clearly because the production chain has been tuned to listen for it rather than to manage volume.

This is the most charitable and also, the most intellectually honest version of the argument for what Artémis is doing.

The Case Against: The Luxury Machine and Its Discontents

And yet.

And yet the name is not “Bouchard Grand Cru Selection, Élite Parcels.” It is not “Bouchard Montrachet, Édition Artémis.” It is not anything that preserves any continuity with the three centuries of history that are, in fact, a significant part of why these parcels carry the value they carry.

It is Vignoble des Cabottes. A new name. A clean slate. A brand architecture designed not to inherit Bouchard’s legacy but to replace it, or at minimum to be entirely separable from it — to allow the wines to be presented to a buyer in Hong Kong or Singapore or New York or London’s Mayfair who may know little about Bouchard’s history and cares primarily to own something that sits in the same register as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Clos de Tart, and Château Latour.

The pricing, inevitably, will follow the rebrand rather than the track record. Bouchard’s Le Montrachet was, in the context of Montrachet pricing generally, reasonable. Vignoble des Cabottes Le Montrachet will be more expensive, because that is the point. The wine in the bottle will be from the same vineyard. The price in the marketplace will reflect the new brand positioning, not the quality trajectory of the previous label, because the two things have been deliberately separated.

This is where the luxury machine’s logic and the wine world’s logic come apart in ways that should concern anyone who thinks seriously about what Burgundy is and why it matters.

The Côte d’Or’s value proposition rests, ultimately, on terroir — on the idea that specific parcels of land, expressing themselves through specific grapes, consistently produce wine of specific and recognisable character. The price of Le Montrachet is a function of Le Montrachet’s geological and vinous reality, accumulated over centuries of observation and confirmed by comparison with every other parcel on the hill. It is, in principle, price anchored to intrinsic quality rather than to brand construction.

What the luxury rebrand model does is take that terroir-anchored value and add a brand premium on top of it — a premium justified not by what the wine tastes like but by who made the decision to put it in a different bottle with a different label. The wine is still Le Montrachet. The extra premium is pure brand. It is Kering applied to Chardonnay. It is the handbag logic — the raw material is leather, but what you’re paying for is the interlocked Gs — translated into viticulture.

This matters for several reasons that extend well beyond the bruised sensibilities of those of us who prefer our Burgundy unencumbered by luxury conglomerate positioning.

First, it contributes to the progressive extraction of Grand Cru Burgundy from the consumption market into the collection market. If Vignoble des Cabottes Le Montrachet is priced at a level that positions it primarily as a trophy asset — something to be photographed, discussed, exhibited, and possibly never opened — then the wine’s relationship with actually being drunk, with the physical reality of what it is, becomes attenuated to the point of irrelevance. This is, from a certain perspective, the endpoint of the investment wine logic: wine as pure store of value with the inconvenient perishability of a physical product, purchased for the status it confers and the price it commands rather than for the experience it provides. The fact that what’s inside is Le Montrachet becomes, in a sense, incidental. This is a real loss. It may be an acceptable loss in the context of everything that Artémis’s resources will enable them to do with the parcels. But it is a loss that should be named, and it is a loss that benefits primarily the rebrand at the expense of the historical record.

Second — and this is the most uncomfortable observation — there is a specific dynamic in the Burgundy market that this kind of luxury repositioning accelerates, and it is a dynamic that ultimately harms the broader reputation of Burgundy as the world’s most terroir-expressive wine region.

That dynamic is the decoupling of quality from price. Grand Cru Burgundy already occupies a price point at which the relationship between what’s in the bottle and what the bottle costs is, charitably, imperfect. The market for top Burgundy is driven by scarcity, speculation, and the collector instinct as much as it is driven by any coherent assessment of vinous quality relative to everything else one could drink. When a luxury rebrand adds a further layer of brand premium on top of an already speculation-inflated price, the wine becomes ever more thoroughly removed from any price signal that reflects what it actually tastes like. This produces a market that is less efficient, less connected to quality, and more vulnerable to the kind of speculative dynamics that, as the previous piece in this series has perhaps demonstrated, occasionally attract the attention of fraudsters.

The Question That Actually Matters: What Will the Wine Taste Like?

Having laid out the structural argument, I want to return to the question that should probably be first rather than last: will the wine be better?

The honest answer is that I do not know, and neither does most people yet, because the first vintages under the new label are by definition the first data points in what will require several years of comparative tasting to assess with any rigour. The question cannot be answered until the wine has been made, bottled, released, and opened — ideally alongside older vintages from the same parcels under the Bouchard label — and evaluated by people who are capable of evaluating it without being influenced by the label on the bottle or the price paid for it. Double-blind, properly structured, unhurried, with enough bottles to account for variation.

What I can say, with reasonable confidence based on the Artémis track record, is that the winemaking will be serious. The investment will be significant. The technical quality of production — the attention to vine management, to picking decisions, to fermentation and élevage — will be at the highest possible level, because Artémis does not cut corners on the things that affect the wine’s quality, even while being extremely attentive to the things that affect its price.

Whether this translates to wine that is meaningfully better than what Bouchard was producing from the same parcels under the Henriots’ oversight is a more open question. Bouchard’s Grand Cru wines, particularly from 2010 onwards, were already very good. The parcels are already extraordinary. The Henriot-era winemaking was already operating at a high level. The Montrachet was already tasting like Montrachet — which is to say, like the most arresting and complex dry white wine that a human being can put in their mouth in circumstances that do not also involve some kind of religious experience.

There is a ceiling above which improvements in winemaking technique cannot take you, because you are already against the ceiling. Le Montrachet from a great vintage, made with care and intelligence, already expresses everything that the parcel can give. Artémis’s resources may push it closer to that ceiling.

The new name will not push it closer to the ceiling at all. The new name is for the people buying the bottle, not for the wine inside it.

The Broader Gold Rush: Burgundy as Luxury Brand Category

Vignoble des Cabottes does not exist in isolation. It exists within a broader movement — one that has been gathering pace for at least a decade — in which Burgundy’s most prestigious appellations are being systematically repositioned as luxury goods in the full Kering/LVMH sense rather than as wine in the traditional sense.

The drivers of this movement are well-documented: the structural scarcity of Grand Cru Burgundy; the explosion of collector demand from Asian markets that had previously focused on Bordeaux and is now applying comparable collector instincts to Burgundy; the progressive concentration of domaine ownership in the hands of purchasers for whom the wine’s investment profile is at least as important as its vinous quality; and the general financialisation of fine wine as an asset class, which generates the expectation of price appreciation and therefore the collector behaviour that produces it.

Into this environment, the arrival of luxury conglomerate capital — not just Artémis/Pinault but the LVMH empire’s increasing involvement in various corners of the wine world — represents a qualitative change rather than merely a quantitative one. These are not wealthy individuals with a serious wine collection. These are companies whose entire operational logic is the creation, maintenance, and monetisation of luxury brand value. They know, with extraordinary sophistication, exactly what makes something expensive beyond the functional value of its raw materials. And they are applying that knowledge to wine with the same systematic methodology that built Vuitton and Dior and Gucci into the most valuable consumer brands in the history of commerce.

The question for Burgundy — for the region as a whole, for its identity, for the thing that makes it worth caring about as passionately as those of us who care about it do — is whether it can absorb this capital without losing its soul in the exchange.

The soul in question, if we’re being clear about what I mean, is the idea that the wine is the point. That what matters is not the label or the price or the brand architecture or the billionaire behind the portfolio, but the wine that comes out of a specific piece of ground on a specific hillside in eastern France and expresses, with a clarity available in no other product of human effort that I am aware of, both the specificity of a place and the character of a year. The idea that Chambolle-Musigny tastes like Chambolle-Musigny because of what grows in Chambolle-Musigny and not because of the identity of the company that owns the parcel. The idea that the luxury is in the liquid rather than in the packaging that surrounds it.

This idea is under pressure. It has been under pressure for some time. Vignoble des Cabottes is not the cause of that pressure. But it is a particularly lucid expression of the direction its going.

A Verdict, Offered With Full Acknowledgement That I Will Drink It Anyway

I think Vignoble des Cabottes will make excellent wine, because the parcels are already fantastic and Artémis takes winemaking seriously, and those two facts together make great wine fairly likely. It will be among the best white Burgundy produced in a given vintage, because Chevalier-Montrachet La Cabotte and Le Montrachet are, regardless of who owns them or what they’re called, among the most remarkable vineyard parcels in the world.

I think the new name and the luxury positioning will be, to the wine itself, entirely irrelevant — which is the answer to the central question. The wine is not “new.” It is wine from parcels that have been producing extraordinary Chardonnay for centuries, under new ownership with significant resources and a serious winemaking intention. Whether that represents meaningful improvement over what came before will be settled, over the next decade, in the glass rather than in the press release.

I think the price premium over the Bouchard-labelled wines from the same parcels will be substantial and will reflect brand value rather than wine quality. This is unfortunate in a way that matters symbolically and structurally even if it does not affect the wine in the bottle. The broader pattern it represents — the luxury-ification of Burgundy’s most prestigious appellations — has implications for the region’s identity and market structure that should concern people who care about what Burgundy is and what it is for.

And if someone puts a glass of Vignoble des Cabottes Le Montrachet in front of me from a good vintage in about ten years’ time, having given it the cellaring it will require to begin showing what it actually is, I will drink it. With attention, and with pleasure, and possibly with some irritation at the circumstances of its existence, which is the standard condition in which the serious wine drinker encounters the contemporary Burgundy market.

The irritation and the pleasure are not mutually exclusive. This is something the luxury machine has, unfortunately, understood rather well.

The wine does not know what it costs, what it’s called, or who owns the hillside it came from. It knows only what the year was and what the ground is made of. It knows this completely and expresses it honestly, with a precision that no label redesign can affect in either direction.

This is either a source of enormous comfort or a source of crushing futility, depending on whether you are a wine drinker or a brand manager.

The author holds no position in Artémis Domaines, Bouchard Père & Fils, or any other entity connected to this story. She does hold a small position in a 2017 Bouchard Chevalier-Montrachet La Cabotte, purchased at what she now understands to have been a historically advantageous price point, and which will be opened only when the question of what it actually tastes like becomes more interesting to her than the question of what it’s currently worth. This may take some time.

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There is a particular species of human being — and the wine world produces them with the reliable fecundity of a Vosne-Romanée premier cru in a good vintage — who is absolutely certain they are right and also, on the evidence available, actually right, and who finds the gap between these two conditions and the world’s failure to sufficiently acknowledge them to be a source of inexhaustible creative energy.

Laurent Ponsot is this person.

This is not a criticism. Given what he’s right about, it is arguably the most useful thing a person could be. But reading FBI: Fausses Bouteilles Investigation — his account of the years he spent dogging the fake wine trade with the obsessive persistence of a man who takes it rather personally when his family name is applied to bottles of wine that his family never produced — is the experience of the company of someone who is simultaneously your most valuable witness, your most exasperating dinner companion, and the only person in the room with the actual receipts.

The book, co-authored with Thibault Raisse and Manuel Desbois, is an odd and valuable thing. It is part memoir, part investigation, part manifesto, and part — one suspects — a very long letter to everyone who told Ponsot over the years to calm down, let the authorities handle it, stop making scenes at auction previews, and perhaps focus on making wine rather than conducting amateur investigations into international fraud networks. To those people, the book is a reply. The reply is, in essence: non.

The Backstory, Briefly, for the Three People Who Don’t Know It

The basics: Domaine Ponsot is one of Burgundy’s great estates, based in Morey-Saint-Denis, with holdings in some of the Côte de Nuits’ most revered lieux-dits. Laurent Ponsot, representing the third generation of the family at the domaine, has a reputation for being — and this is meant entirely as a compliment — difficile, which in Burgundian viticulture is not a character flaw but a professional qualification. He is particular. He is exacting. He does not do things the easy way because the easy way is not always the right way, and Laurent Ponsot would rather do the right thing badly than the wrong thing well.

In 2008, he was alerted to an upcoming auction at Acker Merrall & Condit in New York that included, among a great many impressive-looking bottles, several cases of Clos Saint-Denis from Domaine Ponsot bearing vintages that predated the domaine’s actual production of wine from that vineyard. The domaine did not begin making Clos Saint-Denis until 1982. The auction included bottles supposedly from the 1940s and 1950s.

This is, in the vocabulary of wine fraud, what experts call a mistake. Not a small one.

Ponsot did not write a strongly worded letter. He did not engage a lawyer and wait. He bought a plane ticket, flew to New York, and inserted himself — with the quiet, implacable authority of a man who has been making wine in the same village for three decades and has therefore encountered every variety of human obstruction — into the situation directly. The auction was stopped, at least in relation to the Ponsot lots. The fraud that underpinned those bottles eventually became the Kurniawan prosecution. And Laurent Ponsot became, in the process, the closest thing the wine world has to a protagonist who actually does something rather than simply observing the catastrophe and writing a column about it.

The book is, in one sense, the extended account of everything that happened before and after that moment, and what it reveals about the systems — or rather the absence of systems — that made it possible.

The Real Argument: An Industry That Doesn’t Want to Know

The book’s central argument — and it is an argument, sustained across the whole of the text with the dedication of a man making a case in court — is that the fake wine problem is not primarily a problem of clever criminals. It is a problem of deliberate institutional incuriosity.

Ponsot is specific about this, and the specificity is the book’s most valuable quality. He is not making a vague claim that the wine trade is corrupt — a charge that can be acknowledged, deplored, and filed away without producing change. He is making the considerably more actionable claim that specific institutions, with specific incentives, have made specific choices not to implement specific safeguards that would materially reduce the circulation of fake wine, because those safeguards would be inconvenient for business.

The auction houses come in for sustained and detailed attention. The argument, stripped of its (quite excellent) supporting texture, is that an auction house’s business depends on volume and velocity, that authentication is costly and slow, that the person certifying wine’s authenticity is often the same person or institution profiting from its sale, and that these conditions together produce something that looks very much like a system designed to not catch fakes rather than one that occasionally fails to do so. The distinction between incompetence and design is one that Ponsot makes carefully, and it makes the book considerably more uncomfortable than the standard wine fraud narrative, which prefers to locate the problem in individual bad actors who can be prosecuted and then forgotten.

The wine trade, Ponsot argues, is not a collection of honest people who were occasionally deceived by a talented fraudster. It is a structure that created and maintained conditions in which fraud of Kurniawan’s scale and duration was not only possible but effectively guaranteed — and that has, since the prosecution and conviction, made the minimum adjustments compatible with continued operation rather than the structural reforms that would actually address the problem.

This is not a comfortable book for anyone who participates in the fine wine market at a serious level. It is not meant to be.

The Sections on Authentication: Indispensable and Impenetrable in Equal Measure

The book contains long passages on the technical methods of detecting fake wine — the examination of labels under UV light, the analysis of cork composition and age, the forensic examination of fill levels and capsule types and the specific visual signatures of genuine old Burgundy bottles — and these passages are, taken together, the most practically useful thing in the literature on wine fraud.

They are also, at certain junctures, written at a level of technical specificity that requires either prior knowledge of the subject or a willingness to re-read sentences until they yield their meaning. This is not a complaint, exactly — the alternative is a superficial account that gives readers the impression of understanding without the substance — but it is worth noting that FBI is not a book that can be read while doing something else. It rewards attention. It requires it.

The most interesting material in these sections concerns the systemic failure of provenance documentation in the fine wine trade — the almost complete absence, until relatively recently and still in most cases, of any chain of custody documentation that would allow a serious buyer to trace a bottle from producer to current owner without gaps that a moderately imaginative fraud could populate with invented history. Ponsot makes the point — and it is, when you sit with it, rather remarkable — that the wine world long operated on a system of provenance verification that essentially relied on the good faith of the previous owner, which is to say it did not operate on a system of provenance verification at all.

What the Book Gets Wrong, or Rather: What It Doesn’t Say

No review that aspires to seriousness can avoid the sections of a book that are absent, and FBI has notable silences.

The book is thorough on the mechanics of fraud and the failures of institutional oversight. It is less thorough — understandably, perhaps, given who wrote it — on the sociology of the collector class that made the fraud possible. The demand side of the Kurniawan equation: the collectors who needed a Rudy, who wanted the trophies, who perhaps sensed that the provenance was not quite right and decided that their desire for the experience outweighed their need to resolve the question. The fraud required not just a supplier but a market that was, in some structural sense, open to it.

Ponsot’s perspective is that of the producer — someone who creates wine with care, who attaches their name to it with full moral seriousness, who experiences the fraudulent use of that name as a violation of something more important than commerce. This is a legitimate and important perspective, and it produces much of the book’s moral clarity. But it also means that certain uncomfortable questions about the collector mentality — the way that trophy collecting creates incentives to believe rather than to verify — are not fully excavated.

This is perhaps asking too much of a single book. But for a text that is otherwise admirably willing to make powerful people uncomfortable, the relative gentleness toward the buyer community is worth noting.

The Question the Book Keeps Asking

FBI is, at its best, a book about accountability — specifically about an industry’s resistance to being held accountable for conditions it creates and profits from and periodically claims to be shocked by. Ponsot returns to this theme from multiple angles throughout the text, and the cumulative effect is not unlike being presented with the same piece of evidence in ten different forms until the reluctant conclusion becomes unavoidable: the wine world knows what it is doing and has chosen to continue doing it.

The chapter dealing with the aftermath of the Kurniawan conviction — the window of genuine reform, briefly open, and the ways in which the institutional players found means to satisfy the demand for visible action without implementing the structural changes that would make a material difference — is the most important in the book. Not the most exciting. The most important. It describes, with the precision of a man who has been watching this very carefully for a very long time, exactly how an industry manages a scandal: demonstrate concern, make procedural adjustments, wait for attention to move elsewhere, resume.

The fake wine problem, Ponsot argues, is not a Rudy Kurniawan problem. Rudy Kurniawan is, depending on your sources, somewhere in Asia doing whatever it is that the wine world’s most talented fraudster does after seven years of federal imprisonment. The fake wine problem is a structural problem, and it will produce its next Kurniawan — perhaps already has — because the conditions that created the first one have not been dismantled. Only named.

The Verdict

FBI: Fausses Bouteilles Investigation is not a perfect book. It is too long in certain technical passages, not long enough in certain sociological ones. It is also, fairly regularly, the work of a man who enjoys being right and is not above reminding you how long he has been right for, which is a quality that one respects in retrospect more than one enjoys in the moment.

Laurent Ponsot flew to New York to stop an auction. He spent years investigating fraud that governments and regulatory bodies and auction houses were willing to manage rather than resolve. He named names and described systems and made the case that the problem is ongoing and structural and that the comfortable narrative of the singular bad actor is a story the industry tells itself to avoid a less comfortable story about itself.

He is, in all of this, almost certainly right.

Which means that the most useful thing the wine world could do, on receiving this book, is read it carefully, take its structural arguments seriously, and implement the reforms it recommends.

Which means that the wine world will praise it, feature it at a dinner or two, and wait for something else to come along.

In the meantime, somewhere, someone is opening a bottle of Clos de la Roche 1964 that was bottled in California by a man with a kitchen full of old corks, and finding it magnificent, and thinking: the terroir really does show.

The bottle doesn’t care. And neither, increasingly, does anyone with the power to do something about it.

Label Drinker recommends this book to everyone in the fine wine trade, particularly those who are certain it doesn’t apply to them. It applies especially to them.

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Here we go again.

Every spring, like some elaborate financial hazing ritual designed by people who genuinely enjoy watching others suffer, the Bordeaux machine cranks itself into gear and invites the world’s wine trade to Bordeaux for what is formally called the en primeur campaign and what is more accurately described as a sustained exercise in collective delusion involving barrel samples, inflated rhetoric, and the systematic suspension of critical faculties that would embarrass a first-year economics student.

You taste the wine out of barrel — which is to say, you taste an approximation of the wine, assembled specifically for the purpose of tasting by people who know exactly what they’re doing and are not, let us be clear, showing you anything they don’t want you to see. You make notes. You assign scores or adjectives. You write something about “exceptional potential” and “the finest expression in a generation,” because that is what you write every single year regardless of what actually happened in the vineyard, because the alternative is acknowledging that you’ve flown to Bordeaux in April and the wine is, in several instances, not actually that good.

And then you go home. And the châteaux release their prices. And everyone looks at the prices and says “that seems quite a lot, doesn’t it” and then buys it anyway, because the alternative is not buying it, and not buying it means admitting that the entire en primeur proposition — buying wine you cannot access for three years at a price that requires faith rather than evidence, from an appellation that has been variously described as “back” approximately seventeen times in the last two decades — is a peculiar way to spend money that could otherwise be doing something useful.

The 2025 Vintage: What We’re Dealing With

The 2025 growing season in Bordeaux was, by most accounts emerging from the tastings, the kind of vintage that the trade describes as “challenging but ultimately rewarding” — which is the wine world’s equivalent of saying someone has “a great personality.” It means something went wrong. The question is always what, and how much.

The Gironde in 2025 had a growing season marked by the now-familiar pattern of climatic volatility that has become the defining feature of Bordeaux vintages in this decade: a dry, warm start, a period of significant rainfall pressure that kept vignerons awake at night and agronomists reaching for their fungicide protocols, followed by a recovery in late summer that saved estates with both the resources to manage their vineyards through the difficult middle and the luck to avoid hail at the wrong moment.

The result — as is increasingly the case in variable Bordeaux vintages — is a tale of two châteaux, and the chasm between the top estates and everyone else is, frankly, not shrinking.

The Right Bank fared interestingly. Pomerol, as it does with a particular smugness, found the clay soils helpful during drier periods and produced, from its best parcels, wines of genuine concentration and aromatic complexity. Saint-Émilion is, as always, a patchwork of the sublime and the completely pointless, and the classification may or may not be a useful guide depending on your feelings about processes that generate considerable legal correspondence.

On the Left Bank, the Médoc performed variably by commune, with Pauillac and Saint-Julien producing the most consistent results at the top level — which is not surprising, because these are the appellations whose top estates can afford to do essentially whatever is required regardless of cost, including sorting tables staffed by more people than some villages, and micro-vinification regimens that would make a Burgundian weep with envy and then ask what it all costs.

Margaux was, as it occasionally is in irregular vintages, the most interesting story — the commune’s diversity of soils and exposures meaning some estates genuinely excelled while others produced wines that will be described as “elegant” in press releases and “thin” in private conversation.

Saint-Estèphe, blessed with the Left Bank’s most resilient soils in difficult conditions, produced what may be the vintage’s most quietly reliable wines at the second and third growth level. Remember this when we get to the buying section.

Graves and Pessac-Léognan produced whites that are drawing serious attention — the quality of white Bordeaux in this decade has been frankly staggering and remains one of the category’s most consistently underpriced pleasures, a situation the market is slowly and irritatingly correcting.

The Prices: A Theatre of the Absurd in Several Acts

Let us talk about the prices, because the prices are, as always, the thing.

The First Growths released at figures that caused the customary intake of breath among people who have been watching First Growth releases for long enough to know that the intake of breath no longer translates into a refusal to buy. The prices were, depending on your frame of reference, either “significantly elevated relative to the vintage’s objective quality” or “consistent with the current market positioning of assets of this category,” and both of these sentences mean the same thing, which is that they cost an extraordinary amount of money.

What the 2025 campaign has once again demonstrated is that en primeur pricing at the top level has almost entirely decoupled from vintage quality as a variable. The châteaux are no longer pricing the wine. They are pricing the brand, the allocation relationship, and the not unreasonable observation that someone, somewhere, will pay this. In a vintage unanimously acknowledged as the greatest since the previous greatest vintage, the prices were high. In 2025, which is a very good rather than historically exceptional vintage by most honest assessments, the prices are high. The variable has been removed from the equation. This is, from a pure business perspective, impressive. From a consumer perspective, it is the sort of thing that should prompt a long and uncomfortable conversation with oneself about what exactly one is participating in.

The second and third growths tell a more nuanced story, as they often do when you’re paying attention to the parts of Bordeaux that haven’t yet completed the transition from “wine” to “financial instrument.” Here there is still — just about, clinging on by its fingernails — a relationship between quality and price that makes the exercise feel like commerce rather than theatre.

What to Buy

Right. Practical matters.

The Saint-Estèphe Seconds and Beyond — Cos d’Estournel had an excellent vintage here and the price, while not inexpensive, remains within the range of defensible luxury rather than financial commitment requiring spousal sign-off. Montrose, Calon-Ségur, and the reliable mid-tier of the commune represent the best value-to-quality argument in the entire Médoc in 2025. The wines are structured, ageworthy, and made without the kind of performative excess that occasionally afflicts estates further south. Buy these.

Right Bank at the Second Level — The gap between the trophy names and the serious but less-discussed estates on the Right Bank in 2025 represents a genuine opportunity that will close the moment anyone with a large following writes about it (hello). Estates in Saint-Émilion’s Grand Cru Classé tier that aren’t receiving the full critical spotlight are producing wines of real quality at prices that still respond to negotiation. Your merchant will know which ones. Ask them. Actually ask them, rather than Googling the answer and pretending you worked it out yourself.

White Bordeaux and Pessac-Léognan — The whites from Domaine de Chevalier, Smith Haut Lafitte, and Haut-Brion Blanc (if you have the allocation, which you probably don’t, but manifesting is free) in 2025 are drinking extremely well in barrel and represent, particularly in the case of the second and third tier Pessac estates, some of the most ageworthy and intellectually interesting whites being made anywhere in France right now. They are also, relative to white Burgundy of equivalent ambition, astonishingly priced. The market knows this and is adjusting. Buy before it finishes adjusting.

Pomerol, Off-Piste — Not Pétrus, obviously. You know this. But the constellation of smaller Pomerol estates — the ones without waiting lists and PR departments and allocations traded in hushed tones like state secrets — produced wines in 2025 that reward the kind of attentive buying that en primeur, at its theoretical best, is supposed to enable. Vieux Château Certan and L’Église-Clinet, if you have access at anything approaching release price, remain two of the most compelling purchases in the entire campaign.

What Not to Buy

First Growth Anything, Unless You Have a Specific and Non-Financial Reason — The First Growths in 2025 are magnificent. I will not pretend otherwise. They are also priced at levels that mean your cost of capital over the holding period, combined with storage, insurance, and the opportunity cost of the funds, produces a financial argument for ownership that requires assumptions about future pricing that grow more heroic the longer you examine them. If you are buying Lafite or Mouton or Margaux in 2025 because you love the wines and intend to drink them in twenty years with people you love, fine. If you are buying them as an investment, please speak to a financial advisor rather than a wine merchant, because a wine merchant’s interests and your interests are not, in this particular transaction, perfectly aligned.

Anything From a Château With a New Owner and a Suspiciously Ambitious Release Price — You know the type. The estate that was quietly respected and modestly priced until approximately three years ago, when it was acquired by someone whose primary expertise is not viticulture, underwent a “comprehensive renovation of winemaking philosophy,” and emerged with a new label, a new consultant, and a release price that triangulates aggressively toward the ceiling of its appellation rather than its own track record. This vintage will have several of these. They will receive scores that justify the price. The wines may even be good. The question is whether “good” at “trophy price” from an estate still establishing credibility is the right allocation of your en primeur budget, and I would suggest it usually isn’t.

Generic Saint-Émilion and Generic Médoc at Anything Above Cellar-Door Pricing — The bottom of the Bordeaux pyramid in 2025, as in most years, represents a proposition that deserves no more than approximately fifteen seconds of your consideration. There is no appellation fatigue quite as acute as the recognition that you have paid en primeur prices for something that will be outsold in two years by a supermarket own-label at a third of the cost. The entry-level of Bordeaux is a fine thing purchased off a shelf. It is not a fine thing purchased on futures.

The Wine That Every Newsletter Is Calling the “Discovery of the Vintage” — There is, in every en primeur campaign, an estate that gets anointed as the discovery — the overlooked gem, the under-the-radar producer that the smart buyers are supposedly snapping up before the market catches on. By the time this designation appears in a newsletter — including this one — the market has already caught on. The price reflects it. The allocation is gone. What you are being offered is the opportunity to pay discovery-stage excitement prices for a wine that has already been discovered, which is a subtly different transaction than it appears.

The Honest Conclusion Nobody Wants

Here is the thing about Bordeaux en primeur in 2025 that I will tell you plainly, at the risk of undermining the preceding two thousand words of conditional enthusiasm.

The system is, structurally, worse value than it has ever been for the vast majority of purchasers at the vast majority of price points. The legitimate reasons to buy en primeur — securing an allocation you cannot get any other way, paying less than you would on the secondary market, accessing wines at a stage where the price hasn’t yet been inflated by critical consensus — apply to an increasingly narrow slice of the total campaign. For the First Growths, you are not buying ahead of the market; you are the market. For the generic appellations, you are not securing anything that couldn’t be bought more cheaply elsewhere. The sweet spot — genuine quality at prices that reward patience and early commitment — exists, but it requires either an excellent independent merchant relationship or the willingness to do serious research rather than following the scores.

What makes me keep going back — and I will keep going back, let’s not pretend otherwise — is that within the noise and the pricing theatre and the annual ritual humiliation of the négociant system, there are still wines being made in Bordeaux that are, genuinely and without qualification, among the most extraordinary things produced anywhere on earth. The best estates in the best vintages produce wines that justify the patience, the storage costs, and the occasional financial masochism of the en primeur commitment.

Will 2025 be a vintage that will be discussed in the same reverential tones as 2022 or 2019 or 2016? It is a very good vintage with a meaningful quality hierarchy and several compelling buying opportunities for people willing to look beyond the obvious names at the top of the pyramid.

Buy the right wines. Ignore the scores. Talk to your merchant. And for the love of God, open something from 2015 tonight instead of staring at another release price like it’s going to tell you something it hasn’t already told you.

It won’t.

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Well. Here we are again.

I had every intention of keeping this up, of course. Late last year I promised myself — and the apparently sixty-seven of you who remained subscribed through what I can only describe as an act of extraordinary loyalty or perhaps a simple failure to manage your inbox — that I would write more regularly. That I would share my thoughts on the vintage, the market, the estates worth watching, the estates worth abandoning entirely, and the general civilisational decline as expressed through the medium of wine.

And then I didn’t. For five years.

In my defence, I was very busy drinking, moved onto two jobs since and with a four year old child.

But here we are in the somewhat bewildering year of 2026, post COVID wine bubble, and the wine world has continued to spin on its axis in my absence without so much as a telegram asking for guidance. It has made several questionable decisions. I have thoughts. You are, I’m afraid, going to hear them.

On Returning to Substack

Let us briefly address the elephant in the room, which is that returning to Substack after a hiatus of several years requires one to adopt a posture of faux-humility that I find genuinely exhausting to perform but shall attempt nonetheless.

I have missed you all terribly. (I haven’t, particularly. I’ve been in Beaune.)

What I have missed is the act of writing about wine for an audience sophisticated enough to appreciate the distinction between someone who collects wine and someone who merely buys it and stacks it in a temperature-controlled cupboard they paid a great deal of money for and call a “wine fridge.” These are not the same person, though the wine fridge person does sometimes — through sheer accidental accumulation — become the former.

Substack, for all its flaws (and there are several, including but not limited to the fact that it has made every moderately opinionated person in possession of a Burgundy allocation believe themselves to be a wine writer), remains the most appropriate venue for the kind of long-form, deeply considered, occasionally insufferable commentary that wine genuinely deserves. The rest of the internet is posting forty-second videos of people opening bottles in outdoor kitchens whilst saying “oh my God” in a manner that suggests they have never tasted anything before and are experiencing flavour for the first time. I won’t participate in that. I simply won’t.

So. We are here. Let’s get on with it.

Collecting Wine in 2026: A Situation Report

The first thing to understand about collecting wine in 2026 is that it has never been simultaneously easier and more dispiriting to do so.

Easier, because the secondary market has matured considerably, provenance tracking has improved, and the sheer volume of information available to any reasonably attentive buyer is staggering. Dispiriting, because everyone else has access to exactly the same information, which means that the little pockets of comparative value that once existed — the estates you discovered before the Wine Spectator did, the appellations your merchant tipped you off about before they appeared in a trending newsletter — are now surfaced, priced, and Instagrammed within approximately forty-eight hours of anyone noticing them.

The allocation system, which was already a baroque and occasionally farcical arrangement of loyalty points, relationship-building, and carefully managed humiliation, has become something approaching performance art. To receive an allocation from a serious Burgundy producer in 2026, one must demonstrate commitment measured in years rather than purchases, accept without complaint that you will receive two bottles of something you very much want and six bottles of something you didn’t ask for, and express gratitude that would embarrass a saint. And then you pay for it upfront. And then you wait eighteen months. And then it arrives slightly damaged in a box that has clearly been on a boat.

It is, all things considered, quite an extraordinary hobby.

The truly serious collectors — and I use “serious” in the way that wine people use it, which is to say financially committed to a degree that ought to require therapy — have largely retreated from the grand cru circus and are doing one of three things. They are going deeper into single-parcel expressions from appellations that haven’t yet attracted lifestyle magazine coverage. They are pivoting to Italy with an aggression that would have seemed eccentric five years ago and now seems merely prudent. Or they are doing what a small, rather enviable cohort has always done, which is buying directly from producers they know personally, paying fair prices, and refusing to tell anyone about it.

That last group is, by some margin, the most pleasant company at dinner.

What you should be doing in 2026, if you are collecting rather than merely accumulating, is this: resist the pull of the obvious. The Burgundy grand crus that anchor every serious cellar are still wonderful, still worth having, and still priced in a way that should cause reasonable people to lie awake at night. They are not, however, where the interest is. The interest is elsewhere, and we will get to that shortly.

On Bordeaux: it remains magnificent, occasionally transcendent, and comprehensively unfashionable among anyone under fifty who wants to seem interesting at a dinner party. This is, of course, splendid news for those of us who have been quietly buying back-vintage Pomerol at prices that suggest the market has collectively decided the Right Bank is somehow embarrassing. It isn’t. It’s extraordinary. Do continue ignoring it. Thank you.

On natural wine: I have nothing new to say about natural wine that I have not already said, repeatedly, at some cost to my social relationships. Some of it is very good. Much of it tastes like someone poured a glass of fermented intention and priced it according to the producer’s feelings about industrial agriculture. The conversation has matured slightly, which is welcome, and the more doctrinaire end of the natural wine community has quietened down to a degree that makes it possible to discuss the subject at dinner without someone removing their glasses meaningfully and beginning a sentence with “but what does ‘natural’ even mean.”

The State of the Wine Business: Candid Observations

The wine trade is, and I say this with genuine fondness for the many people in it who are thoughtful and principled and working very hard, in an extraordinary state of creative anxiety.

On-trade volumes in Europe have still not fully recovered to pre-pandemic baselines in several key markets, which would be more alarming if the off-trade hadn’t absorbed much of that consumption in ways that have actually been rather interesting for the serious end of the category. People are drinking at home with slightly more deliberateness than they were, and a not-insignificant proportion of them have graduated from buying recognisable labels to buying with actual curiosity. This is encouraging.

Less encouraging is the structural position of the traditional merchant. The fine wine merchant — the kind with a basement, a catalogue, and a relationship model built around knowing your cellar better than you do — is having a difficult time. Not a terminal time, I should say, because reports of its death are considerably premature. But a difficult one. The platforms have commoditised price discovery completely, which means the merchant’s margin on straightforward secondary market transactions has compressed to a point where the model requires recalibration. The good ones have recalibrated: they are selling expertise, provenance confidence, and the kind of curation that an algorithm simply cannot replicate. The less good ones are in varying degrees of trouble.

The auction houses continue to operate with a magnificently unbothered confidence that I genuinely admire. There is something almost philosophical about the equanimity with which the major houses approach every market condition — bullish or bearish, glut or shortage — with essentially identical processes and buyer’s premiums. One could learn something from this. I choose instead to find it mildly exasperating.

The conversation about wine and health has grown louder in ways that the industry has handled with variable degrees of grace. The evidence on the relative risks of alcohol consumption is more nuanced than both the alarmist and the dismissive camps would have you believe, but the cultural headwinds are real and the drinks industry’s response — which has largely involved either aggressive denial or an anxious pivot to low-alcohol alternatives that taste of neither here nor there — has not always been its finest hour. The answer, which several thoughtful producers and communicators have articulated and which I broadly endorse, is that wine drunk with intention, in context, in moderate quantities, with food and conversation and the slightest degree of historical awareness, is a fundamentally different cultural object from alcohol consumed purely as a delivery mechanism. This is not a medical claim. It is a civilisational one. I stand by it absolutely whilst acknowledging that it is the sort of thing one can more comfortably assert from the position of someone with an excellent cellar.

The most significant development in the business that doesn’t get discussed quite enough is the increasing concentration of vineyard ownership in the hands of financial investors and luxury conglomerates. This is not uniformly bad — some of these owners have been conscientious stewards and have invested in vineyards and teams in ways that smaller family operations simply couldn’t sustain. But it does create a particular kind of homogenisation risk that anyone paying attention should monitor carefully. The most interesting wines in the world come from people who are slightly mad with commitment, not from people managing a portfolio allocation. This has always been true. It will continue to be true. But the conditions that allow slightly mad committed people to own significant parcels of land in premier appellations are becoming structurally more difficult to maintain, and that is a genuine concern.

In Conclusion, Or Something Like It

I am aware that this newsletter has covered considerable ground with what some of you might characterise as insufficient specificity and what I would characterise as appropriate restraint in a public forum. More specifics are coming: a deeper look at particular estates, a vintage update on what’s drinking well from the cellar right now, and a piece on the Rhône that I have been promising myself for approximately eighteen months.

For now, I will simply say that wine remains the most absorbing, most endlessly complicated, most reliably disappointing-and-then-transcendent subject in the world of comestibles, and that writing about it — even for sixty-seven of you, some of whom I suspect subscribed accidentally — remains one of the genuinely worthwhile uses of one’s time.

The rest of it I’ll figure out as we go.

Open something good tonight. You’ve earned it, probably.

If you found this valuable, do consider forwarding it to someone whose wine education you’ve been meaning to take in hand. Paid subscriptions support the cellar, the notebook, and the occasional train journey to Burgundy that I categorise, with some justification, as research.

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The 2018 Burgundies as I have tried it through other domaines, had tasted extremely varied and distinctive producer from producer. Those who managed the heat well, whether through vineyard work or winemaking, produced open and balanced wines. Those who didn’t, had unbalanced and overly alcoholic juice that tasted wholly un-Burgundian. Tremblay has not only succeeded but exceeded expectations, in creating mind-blowingly open, sumptuous and beautiful wines that give you everything you want from each terroir and more. The Beauxmont was the beaux-est mont ever I have tasted in a long time (caveat: too little references from Leroy, I am open for invitation 💁‍♀️) and the Rouge du Dessus (located above Echezeaux) was simply the belle of the ball. Even the Echezeaux, which is traditionally a grand cru I don’t care too much for especially young, showed well.

It seems a bit late to the game to be #TeamCecile but for what it’s worth, it is better late than never and from a deeper understanding and appreciation for her work.

Tasting Notes

Tremblay Bourgogne Cote D’Or 2018: Open and pure nose of succulent cherries with a touch of barnyard. The texture is fantastic here—impossibly silky and velvety smooth.

Tremblay Chambolle Musigny Les Cabottes 2018: Similar notes of succulent ripe cherries, but again with much finesse, purity and silkiness. Just glides on the tongue and a sheer joy to drink.

Tremblay Vosne Romanee VV 2018: This is a darker, inkier more serious wine than the first two, offering more complexity and a touch more rusticity. The palate is a mix of both ripe red and black fruit without feeling heavy or overripe. Fine structure, acidity and balance.

Tremblay Chambolle Musigny 1er Cru Les Feusselottes 2018: Sharper cherry notes comparatively speaking than the VR, but still open, ripe and succulent all the same. More strawberry on the palate whilst also intensely perfumed, lifted and complex.

Tremblay Vosne Romanee 1er Cru Rouges du Dessus 2018 💎: Out of the bunch, the most rustic nose so far but still has incredibly sense of purity and finesse on the palate. Brimming with complexity, the wine is relatively open now with its rush of floral and red fruit notes. However with time, I can see this giving excellent layers and depth.

Tremblay Vosne Romanee 1er Cru Les Beaux Monts 2018 💎: PRETTY. What I wrote down in all caps and underlined. With an overwhelming sense of flowers along with ripe strawberries, the nose and palate were very lifted, perfumed and refined. It seems a bit too precious to be “just” wine. I cannot wait to see how this will evolve.

Tremblay Echezeaux du Dessus Grand Cru 2018: Lovely ripe red fruit and bramble on the nose. Palate is showing lots of purity and complexity but much like the Rouge de Desssus, brimming with potential to offer lots of depth and layers with time, with hints of tobacco and cocoa looming in the mid to back palate.

Thanks La Souveraine for the invitation to try the wines, August 2021.

Weingut Keller is a German estate that needs little introduction by now. Their G-Max, often described as the “Montrachet” of Rieslings, are highly sought after by Asian collectors and fetch eye watering prices at auction. Other cuvees are sadly overlooked by most but they are most worthy of attention in their own right (especially the Kabinett Limestone, my personal fave!). I get it, German terroir is complicated and G-Max is a nice catchy name that encompasses the best of the best the estate has to offer. Nevertheless it is through trying all the cuvees that you understand the estate style and the skill in translating that terroir into beautiful elixirs. Their ability to craft wines that are simultaneously concentrated, pure, balanced and complex is near unparalleled in my opinion to top wineries and domaines everywhere, not just within Germany.

With Felix (son of Klaus Peter and Julia) joining the Keller team in 2018, we also tasted the latest release alongside the older vintages for comparison.

Tasting Notes

Keller Riesling Trocken 2020: dry trocken Riesling from a number of different parcels, mostly young vines. Lovely honey and flint notes with some stone fruit on the nose, great tensile precision on the palate. Very approachable now.

Keller Riesling Kabinett -Limestone- 2020 ❤️: Blend of Riesling vines planted on, you guessed it, limestone soils, in Hubacker (60%) and Kirchspiel (40%). More citrus and floral notes on the nose compared to the Riesling trocken, with more concentration and sweeter nectarine notes in the mouth. Gourmand and crazy addictive, I can drink a whole bottle by myself easy.

Keller Westhofener Kirchspiel Riesling GG 2011: From Kirchspiel, a cooler east-facing site. 2011 was a cold vintage. Floral and flinty on nose and palate, with a more luscious mouth feel. Refreshing.

Keller Westhofener Kirchspiel Riesling GG 2019: 2019 was a warmer vintage in Germany but overall great vintage for the region. The 2019s tasted more concentrated and powerful, but still completely balanced and fresh. Relatively closed off but I think will age most impeccably.

Keller Dalsheimer Hubacker Riesling GG 2011: From 4ha of vines that have been in family holdings since 1789 and on average 40 year old vines. Ripens later than Keller’s other GGs. The 2011 tasted “sunny”, bright and round, but not excessively rich or ripe. Intoxicating blend of honey, stone fruit and citrus.

Keller Dalsheimer Hubacker Riesling GG 2019: Slightly closed and less expressive but still brimming with potential. It is refreshing and zesty with great verve and energy. A real keeper.

Keller Westhofener Morstein Riesling GG 2011: Most important vineyard of the Rheinhessen region and the second most sought-after cuvee made by Keller. I can understand why, with this being the most concentrated and “complete” (if that makes any sense compared to the Kirchspiel and the Hubacker). Gorgeous blend of honey, stone fruit, red apple and white flowers but a deeply intense, structured, sharp mineral palate and an ultra long finish. I wrote, “like sucking on a rock” but a very yummy rock at that.

Keller Dalsheimer Burgel Spatburgunder GG 2012: From small 0.5ha of Pinot Noir in Burgel. Slightly rustic with a rose petal touch but great ripe red fruit on the nose. More pure strawberry, fresh forest floor (sous bois) and mushroom on the tongue. No rusticity on palate. Exceptionally silky and fine.

Keller Dalsheimer Burgel Spatburgunder GG 2018: The same rose touch but with more cherry (younger red fruit) that is crunchy and full of bramble. Fresh with a lot of personality. Qualitatively this wine is better made technique-wise than that of the 2012 but I can’t deny the 2012 is delicious to drink now while the 2018 is still too youthful at the moment.

Keller Dalsheimer Frauenberg Spatburgunder GG 2018: Pinot noir from 0.5ha of Frauenberg not far from Burgel. Similar notes of rose and cherry but with a slightly savoury bent. The palate is very similar to the nose but with great juiciness and succulence. I don’t doubt the ability of this wine to age exceptionally well—hope I can try another bottle in 5 years to witness its brilliant evolution.

Thank you La Souveraine for inviting me to taste the wines in Hong Kong, July 2021.

In recent years, boasting about how Robert Parker gave you 100pt is no longer much of a compliment, if anything it is met with derision, suggesting that the wines are overripe, inelegant and not in line with what’s in vogue today. Unfortunately Pingus is still thought of as a huge, big and bold Spanish wine that has in recent years completely changed in style and is well worth another look. All wineries change, adapt and evolve and I think what the wines from the past should not be used to judge the same estate more than 20 years later (in fact Burgundy domaines are the prime example of this, from one generation to another). At the same time, I would not say the new changes at Dominio de Pingus are simply chasing trends only. Fundamentally they are well made wines, with exceptional depth, elegance and profundity, following a slow but incremental evolution over the last 25 years, ranging from the humble PSI to the grand daddy Pingus itself.

For Peter, the 2020 vintage was one of “great balance”, although they had a record-breaking early harvest beginning 7th-8th September 2020.

Tasting Note

PSI 2020: Incredibly open and accessible right now. Lovely sweet spice, with lush red and black fruit. The palate is very similar, incredibly fresh but also perfumed, with fine silk tannins. Very substantive. Probably one of the best PSI I’ve had in recent years.

Flor de Pingus 2020: 20% new barrel. Not as open immediately but the nose is giving lots of roses, deeper and darker red and black fruits with slight hints of tea and tobacco. It is incredibly silky and open in the mouth, velvety and inviting with more notes of sweet spice, plum and violet. Tannins are more noticeable but wonderfully refined. Oak is almost imperceptible.

Pingus 2020: No new oak. Serious and stern nose of dark fruit, tobacco and dried herbs. The palate shows similar ethereal mix of dark fruit but with more violet and tea flavours. The wine is well structured but in a refined and noble sort of way, standing heads and shoulders above the other two. Incredibly defined long finish.

Thanks to Corney & Barrow Hong Kong for the tasting. Please contact me directly if you are interested in any.

We all know that pregnancy hormones changes the way you taste and smell but seems that most studies are rather inconclusive. From one study:

Generally, the majority of studies report either no change, or an increase in threshold/decrease in perceived taste intensity, particularly in the early stages of pregnancy, suggesting a possible decrease in taste acuity when pregnant. We further discuss several non-human studies of taste and pregnancy that may extend our understanding. Findings demonstrate that taste buds express receptors for many of the same hormones and circulating factors that vary with pregnancy. Circulating gonadal hormones or other contributions from the endocrine system, as well as physiological changes in weight and immune response could all bear some responsibility for such a modulation of taste during pregnancy. Given our growing understanding of taste, we propose that a change in taste function during pregnancy may not be solely driven by hormonal fluctuations of progesterone and estrogen, as many have suggested. 1

I can say anecdotally, my sense smell and taste have definitely heightened, most noticeably in the first trimester and then less sensitive as the months went by into the second trimester. Generally my senses seem to be still heightened but are more or less normalised as I approach the end of my second trimester into my third. Specifically with regards to wine, I find that tannins are more bitter, acidity more sharp and minerality heavier. Most of what I’ve tasted in the past few months are young wine/barrel samples, so do take that into account as well.

But with other vintages and somewhat older wines, I found it extremely difficult to place wines in a blind tasting held in June, when I was close to four months pregnant. Though it is not nearly as bad as those who suffered from COVID-19, having been someone who prided herself on her rather keen sense of taste and smell, the sudden change is quite disheartening and scary. So while I have attended far less wine dinner that I do typically, it’s also due to a complete lack of confidence in tasting that I have pushed off writing about wine.

Recently I went to a tasting of Savoie and Jura wines, with a nice line up of Francois Rousset Martin. First recommended to me by Jean-Yves Bizot at a wine dinner in January 2020 when I asked him who did he think was making the most exciting wines these days, this is a small domaine established in 2007, based in Nevy-sur-Seille (Jura) not far from Chateau Chalon. Most of the wines are made from old vine plots, hand harvested and made without fining or filtration. Minimal sulphite is added.

The wines: Aligoté "Aligato", 2019; Chardonnay, Terres Blanches 2018; Chardonnay, Sous-Voile Beaumont La Chaux, 2016; Mémée Marie 2018; Sous-Roche "Cuvee du Professeur", Savagnin 2018; los Bacchus "La Veine Bleue de Bacchus", Savagnin 2018; Puit-Saint-Pierre, Savagnin 2018 and Poulsard Les Vignasses, 2019.

I didn’t keep detailed tasting notes for each wine as I didn’t think I’ll share them but they made good enough of an impression that I still think about them one month later. Compared to the 2017s I’ve tasted last year, the 2018s are undoubtedly more powerful, with greater minerality, tension and precision for each of the cuvee. Again the wines continues proves that 2018 Jura weren’t affected by heat in the same way it did in Loire or Burgundy, retaining great acidity, structure and finesse. While they were reasonably approachable young, FRM 2018s will definitely improve with age, tempering the minerality and acidity in a way that will produce even more complexity and enjoyment than it does now.

Previously the most well regarded wines at the 2017 vintage dinner was the Memee Marie and the the Cuvee du Professeur. Both cuvees were still superb at the tasting one vintage later, however personally “La Veine Bleue de Bacchus” was most impressive, with its deeper concentration and complexity. I can’t wait to revisit these 5 and 10 years from now. The Poulsard was fine but somewhat overshadowed by the overwhelming performance of the Savagnin, who are definitely the star of the show (and might I add my favourite grape from Jura).

If you manage to get your hands on the cult wines, better square them away now for later.

Thank you to Hong Kong distributor La Souveraine for the opportunity to taste the wines.

From the outset, it is clear that the 2019 vintage at Domaine du Pelican is another positive evolution, after the delicious 2018 vintage, on the road to “Jura expression”. We can clearly see the increasing winemaking confidence from the team which is firmly in its 6th vintage now. This puts Domaine du Pelican with the best of the best in the region. 2019 vintage releases also introduces a sparkling wine, made of 100% Savagnin, the ‘Cuvee S’. It completes the already strong line-up of regional and single vineyard Chardonnay, Savagnin, Poulsard, Trousseau and Pinot Noir.

The 2019 Vintage

The vintage was early because of a mild and wet winter that led to an early budbreak in April. April and May proved to be very dry, with low temperatures between 3-4°C. Spring and summer continued to be dry, causing a loss of 20% in the vineyard to poor fruit setting (coulure). By mid-June to July, temperatures rose to 40°C.

Some producers in the south of Jura lost their entire production to sunburn. Domaine du Pelican was lucky in this regard and ended up harvesting in mid-September. Harvest was quick and lasted a total of around 2.5 weeks. For the first time, the team paused half a week before harvesting the Poulsard at the optimal maturity.

The resulting wines are concentrated but without the high alcohol levels and the typical sensation of warmth of some 2019 whites from other regions in France.

The Wines

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Poulsard 2019: Excellent ripeness and succulent red fruit on the nose, with slight touches of kirsch and herbal spices. It is very accessible now even so young, with gorgeous ripe strawberry and raspberry notes on the palate, completed with fantastic minerality and a long saline finish. One to drink well either on its own or with food.

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Pinot Noir Clos St Laurent 2019: This cuvée was formerly labelled Arbois Pinot Noir. It is now labelled with the name of its vineyard, which is located directly behind the winery. Compared to the Poulsard, the nose is less open but quite concentrated with hints of cherry, bramble and sweet spice. This is more concentrated and serious than the previous 2018 Pinot Noir. In the mouth, it has excellent punch with cherry, raspberry and strawberry notes with a clear aromatic and perfumed finish. This is no Burgundy pinot but the very distinct Jura pinot noir, something singular and unique!

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Trousseau Beranger 2019: This is a majestic, opulent and powerful wine from the get-go, with profound red and black fruit notes, lots of complexity and layers both on the nose and palate. It is a broad wine yet it retains elegance and silkiness. It has an appealing sous bois and mushroom lift on the mid palate and finish. One to try now but also forget in the cellar while it ages patiently.

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Trois Cepages 2019: Delicate and refined cherries and raspberries, peppered with deft touches of bramble, cedar and forest floor notes. It is a pure, lively and refreshing wine that is easily quaffable now young but also with enough structure and acidity to age effortlessly. A serious beauty with personality and inner depth and layers.

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Chardonnay 2019: This is a big departure for those who have tried their previous vintages of Chardonnay. It drinks as ultra-Jura now and less Burgundian than previous vintages. The nose is full of almond and nut notes, incredibly racy and full of tension in the mouth (‘nerveuse’ as the French would call it). Lovely touches of lime, pear, green apples and silex. There is no sense of heat on either the nose or palate – truly an astonishing testament to the level of viticulture and vinification.

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Chardonnay En Barbi 2019: There is a distinct difference between the single vineyard Chardonnay En Barbi and the classic cuvée. Here the nose has more salinity than nuttiness. The palate is equally saline and reminiscent of the alluvial soil, which was under the sea millions of years ago. It has this appealing touch of white flowers and a long mineral finish. A definite gourmand wine that needs time to really showcase its full potential.

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Savagnin Ouille 2019: Pronounced herbaceous notes that are accompanied by layers of lemon rind, green apple, sea salt and white flowers. There is also a strong underlining mineral backbone to the wine that carries it from beginning to finish. This is also quite more-ish, meaning you want to keep drinking more of it. In its youth now, it is more austere than past vintages in their youth, but will be incredibly powerful with time.

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Savagnin Grand Curoulet 2019: Crunchy green apple and pear notes with touches of elderflower and minerality. It is quite racy compared to the more opulent 2018 vintage. Long and tensile finish. It will require some time to open fully but will reward you for a long time to come. Definitely reminiscent of certain grand cru Chablis or Burgundy.

Domaine du Pelican Arbois Savagnin Maceration Pelliculaire 2019 :Bright, fresh, full of citrus and citrus rind notes. The fresh and fruit forward characters are matched nicely with touch of flint and chalk. This is Guillaume and Francois’ 2nd incursion in the orange wine/skin contact wine territory.

Domaine du Pelican Brut Cuvee S NV: ‘Cuvee S’ is made mostly from a 2018 base wine, spending 1 year in foudre. It is then blended with 10% of 2019 vintage for the second fermentation in bottle. Disgorgement takes place after 13 months in the cellar, without any dosage or any added yeast. It is dry and 100% Savagnin. It is vinous with aromas of fresh flowers and drinks well as an aperitif.

If you are interested in any and you live in Hong Kong, please let me know.

If you have to ask me how I first became acquainted with Icy Liu, I would say it was over Instagram first and then came conversations over Whatsapp. At the time, she was still based in Beaune and seemed to have the dream wine job (who wouldn’t want to live in Burgundy and dealing with the top domaines that Becky Wasserman represents?). I’ve always admired her drive, her boundless curiosity and intense passion in wine and I hope some of it rubs off on me. Here’s our conversation over her wine journey, her thoughts on the wine industry today and her amazing and informative podcast, “Ungrafted”.

Our conversation is lightly edited for clarity.

How did you get into wine? I know you first started in finance in NYC...

I got into wine through my love of food. I grew up in Taiwan so you will understand the fascination with food! After being miserable in finance I thought I should give wine a shot.

You are living the dream! How did you end up in Burgundy?

I worked in wine in NYC in the fields of retail, auctions, and distribution and was at a point in my wine career where I wasn't sure what I would do next. I thought it might be a good time to experience life in France and improve my French so I would be able to speak with vignerons in their native tongue. (I would also get to eat butter and croissants every day!) So I moved to Burgundy for my Wine MBA in 2018 and found a job with Becky Wasserman after my program was over.

What was it like to be a foreigner and living in a small place like Burgundy? What kind of difficulties did you come across and likewise, success?

For a town with 20k+ inhabitants Beaune is actually pretty diverse because so many foreigners move there for wine. There are also tons of great restaurants, which I wouldn’t be able to live without. I really enjoy making new friends and most people have been very nice and welcoming. It's never easy to deal with French bureaucracy but it's a good chance to learn to take things easy and not expect a 24-hour turnaround for everything!

What is it like to work with winemakers directly in Burgundy, vs your previous other wine jobs in NYC?

Being able to interact closely with growers is what I love most about wine actually. I have learned so much about vines, plants, and the ecosystem. The team at Becky Wasserman & Co was incredibly supportive in letting me work part time with Charles Lachaux and Tomoko Kuriyama in the vines in 2020. Though I had done harvests before, I had never worked in the vines and cellar during the rest of the year. The ability to experience a complete one-year cycle of this work, along with my Enology Diploma from the University of Burgundy, have really solidified my knowledge of viticulture and winemaking. This wouldn’t have been possible in NYC.

Who do you think is doing exciting things both in Burgundy and other parts of the world?

My definition of an exciting domaine makes not only great wines but also pushes the boundaries in the cellar and in the vines. Most importantly, the grower must have deep concerns for the environment and the people who work for them, which for me is true sustainability.

In Burgundy, Tomoko and Guillaume from Chanterêves. Tomoko is part of a group of female vigneronnes called “Mi-Filles Mi-Raisins” whose goal is to promote "discreet" Burgundy appellations. Because of Tomoko and Guillaume's superb farming and outstanding winemaking, their wines outperform wines that are ranked higher in the appellation system but taste subpar. They use low fat milk instead of sulfur to combat powdery mildew, alternative sprays through Eric Pitiot's program, and have elevated the canopy to increase shadow and combat climate change. They are thinking of making their own compost in the future. In the cellar, they have decreased sulfur use while still making beautiful, clean wines. I also love what my friend Catharina Sadde at Les Horées is doing. She is planting massal selections of chardonnay, pinot beurot, and pinot blanc from different nurseries and on various rootstocks to compare their quality and adaptation to climate change. Both Chanterêves and Les Horées made carbonic Aligotés in 2020 that I am very excited to try! The Bret Brothers make such great wines and have a deep concern for the environment. They have introduced a cuvee called "Zen" where the total added sulphur is less than 20 mg/L. The other wines are also low in sulphur (added before bottling): 20-30 reds and 40-50 whites. They have done tasting trials of vines using different biodynamic treatments so that they can better understand how viticulture translates into their wines. They use concrete eggs and carbonic maceration for their whites which is fun. They hedge their vines by hand (to avoid soil compaction), plough only under the rows and use whey to combat powdery mildew. To my knowledge, Charles Lachaux is the only grower in Burgundy to do 100% no till, which is exciting in terms of carbon sequestration and seeing what is possible for Burgundy given that the vines are planted to such high densities.

In the Loire (Layon, Savennières, Hill of Chaume, Quarts de Chaume), Emmanuel Ogereau and Vanessa Cherruau (Château de Plaisance) are planting hedges and trees every 30 meters to bring in bats to eat grape vine moths. Bats are able to eat 30% of their body weight of moths in one hour. Both Emmanuel and Vanessa both take a lot of pride in their teams and hiring women where possible. Paul recounted that when he first met Vanessa, she apologetically told him that her wine bottles were not heavy (wine bottles are the heaviest contributor to a winery's carbon footprint). I knew I would like Vanessa right away 😊

In Alsace, the Deiss’s pay attention to biodiversity with their philosophy of complanation (field blends), and after planting fruit trees, they have observed a decrease in the need for copper.

What other winemakers would you love to work with and go visit if we are able to travel right now?

I interviewed Mimi Casteel on tilling and Steve Matthiasson on water conservation. I would love to visit them and ask them a bajillion questions about viticulture and our planet.

What do you think are the most important issues in wine today?

Climate change and labour practices.

If you look at California, 6 of the top 20 largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred in 2020.  Wine country has been affected for 6 consecutive years, most severely in 2017 and 2020.  In Burgundy, harvesting in August is the new normal. There have been 7 vintages with August harvest dates since 2003.  I’m not sure how you can say climate change is not real. It's important for both makers, sellers, and drinkers of wine to think about what we can do about climate change, ranging from cultivation practices to sequester carbon and maintain soil health and the carbon footprint from the vines to the consumer.  What packaging are you using to wrap your bottles?  What type of shipping are you using to ship your bottles?  As wine lovers, we should be especially attuned to this because grapevines are an agricultural product that is so sensitive to any climatic shifts.

My friend Evan Watson works with a research and advocacy organization called La Isla Network which protects agricultural workers from the effects of heat stress. This is a huge issue in Central America’s sugarcane industry which has caused a fatal epidemic of heat-related kidney disease that has killed tens of thousands of young men.  The stats are astounding: in one community of 350 families, 100 of them are headed by widows since the men have all died from heat stress. The organization found this issue in the labour chain of Flor de Cana Rum and it also happens with other liquor companies.  There have also been heat related deaths in wine.  In May 2008, Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, was a 17 year old pregnant woman who worked an 8 hour shift in 100 degree heat. In October 2020, then Senator Kamala Harris introduced the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, which will protect all US farm and other workers from heat. 

There is not only heat to be concerned about, last year Italian natural wine producer Valentina Passalacqua and her father were accused of caporalato, which some NGO’s have labelled as modern day slavery.  As many natural wine enthusiasts have mentioned, it seems silly to care about how much sulphur is in the wine when the people harvesting the grapes are working under such poor conditions with no protection.

Ungrafted is a novel wine podcast that presents a comprehensive overview of wine featuring people from immensely diverse backgrounds, not just winemakers. What was the original goal in creating this podcast?

The goal for the podcast is to highlight the environmental and societal aspects of wine. Episodes are a deep dive into one specific topic so hopefully after 40 mins of listening, you will become more knowledgeable on a certain issue.

I know you have been very active in attending wine dinners and speaking as part of wine conference panels in Taiwan so far. Any plans while you're here and other projects that we should be aware of?

For Women in Wine Taiwan will be pairing Taiwanese night market food with wines made by female winemakers and with paperclipjenn we are doing a Zhongzi and Wine Workshop for Dragon Boat Festival where I will be pairing Taiwanese lu wei and zhongzi with a Lustau Palo Cortado Sherry and Vignoble du Rêveur’s Singulier Orange Wine.

Thanks Icy for your time and please listen to her podcast “Ungrafted” wherever you get your podcasts: https://www.ungraftedpodcast.com/.

Tasting Note

It’s hard to fathom that this is a newly released wine just from taste alone — the elegance, the readiness, the balance, the acidity and the tannins all are already perfect in place, showcasing ripe red fruit, soft touches of sweet spice and some leathery savouriness. This was a not easy vintage per se for the estate but again, you can’t really tell. Soldera is a wine that is able to be drunk young but I think adds different complexities and surprises every following year and decade that you drink it (if you can bear to open and part with any in the intervening years).

The wines are now available for Hong Kong. Please directly get in touch if you are interested in any.

Soldera 1994-2013 Wine Dinner

I understand its rather short to just leave it at that for this week’s newsletter and to compensate for the lack of release last week (pregnancy fatigue is real, y’all) I’ve included as well a repost of a Soldera dinner I had in March 2019.

To say that I came late to knowing Soldera is an understatement. I’ve heard of the name, uttered in passing but never sought it out until now. This dinner was supposed to have been attended by Monica Soldera, though with Gianfranco Soldera’s sudden passing, she understandably could not make it to Hong Kong.

I always admired someone who sticks to their own guns and you cannot a more emblematic winemaker than Gianfranco. A stickler to his own philosophy and a perfectionist’s zeal, he has elevated Brunello di Montalcino to new heights. He has persevered even after setbacks such as the vandalism scandal in 2012, where barrels storing vintages 2007-2012 were emptied, and his eventual break from the association in 2013. 2013 is the first vintage in which production levels are back to normal, however it does not mean that you should drag your feet into getting a case with Gianfranco’s passing. His attention to detail (such as the design of the cork and the bottle) and demands on himself are equally admirable.

The wines of the night were a line up of vintages 1994, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2013. Although quite used to drinking verticals of a singular, never before have I seen such dramatic changes across vintages before. It is clear there are decisive stylistic changes as oppose to the quality of the harvest or vintage, as he varied between uses in oak, time spent in oak etc. He is a meticulous and sensitive man, so it is to no surprise he was forever evolving. That said, sadly I cannot find enough information on the precise periods which he pursue a particular style, for how long and/or for what motivations. Nevertheless, the wines seem to speak for themselves.

To Gianfranco, I wish I could have gotten to know you better but am grateful to be an acquaintance (and a fan!) through your wines.

Tasting Note

Toscana Sangiovese IGT Case Basse di Gianfranco Soldera 2013: Despite 2013 being a ripe vintage in Tuscany, the elegance, finesse and readiness associated with Soldera is here. Pretty wafts of violet and plum opens readily and the tannin seamlessly coats the mouth. However it is easy to think that this is all the wine can offer — which to be fair tastes like great well rounded Burgundy. However its Tuscan rustic characters are reveal themselves after opening the wines for a while with the signature herbal sweetness and spice showing through. Definitely a wine that can be drunk young but also one to keep.

Brunello di Montalcino Riserva Case Basse Gianfranco Soldera 2004: This was hands down WOTN, by good measure. Why? It has the prettiness of 2013 crossed with the depth and personality of the 1994. It is a total babe of a wine that has more up her sleeve than the way she looks. Liquorice, tobacco and mint all on the first whiff however the palate takes you away with its rich plum-iness. One of the finest examples of Soldera you will ever find.

Brunello di Montalcino Riserva Case Basse Gianfranco Soldera 2001: Many that night enjoyed the 2001 over to the 2000 but personally thought they were quite similar. This was a big and powerful upon opening, which reminds me of a Bordeaux. Even with some minerality, it lacks the complexity of the 2013, 2004 and 1994.

Brunello di Montalcino Riserva Case Basse Gianfranco Soldera 2000: Ditto with the above, not at all a bad wine but nothing to write much on. Rustic, sweet and gigantic.

Brunello di Montalcino Riserva Case Basse Gianfranco Soldera 1994: Only managed to have a small taste but it was enough to make an impression. Beautiful yet intense bouquet of plum, spice and herbal notes. However the palate blows you away with its intensity and exceptional depth. The layers of dark plum, cherry, violet and a certain sweet elegance slowly unfolded in the mouth a good hand of cards. Beautiful and still with ageing potential.

I don’t know about you but I am quite sick of hearing about crypto, blockchain, NFTs and more. I am a bad at investing (don’t worry my father isn’t reading this, he will be appalled) most of my investing advice is taken from my Econ professor in college who said I should put most of it on S&P500 index funds. I put some leftover cash in wine and I store that shit far far away from me in Octavian (UK) so I won’t be tempted to drink it. Essentially unsexy, untrendy things. However you can’t avoid it when your sister works in a fintech blockchain start-up and is dating a guy who helps raise funds for start-ups, mostly in fintech. But it was precisely a conversation over the weekend regarding NFTs that got the ball rolling…

Blockchain

I think blockchain would be the easiest tech to apply in wine, as its been discussed for a few years already. The point is to put the wine into the system as soon as its been released by the winery, allowing for an immaculate supply chain from beginning to end. Nonetheless I haven’t actually seen anyone use this in practice though I think it would be fantastic to have blockchain-backed online brokerage, make it easier to trade wines back and forth.

There is a new platform called ‘Tattoo’ located in Singapore using blockchain tech but I have never heard anyone talk about it so far.

Crytocurrencies

I saw a couple days ago on Instagram that Acker is now accepting bitcoin, ethereum and other digital currencies. I guess as long as it is easy to exchange into fiat money, it shouldn’t be too much a problem except for volatility. However I am not sure how it will do in terms of compliance, as I believe it will enable bad behaviour such as money laundering. Acker is not public company so there’s no quarterly disclosures.

However paying for purchases in crypto is hardly innovative. I recently read a NYMag article saying how coins that can radically change how goods or services are distributed, schools such as Stanford can issue coins to raise money and in turn can allow only coin-holders to apply. Luxury brands such as Chanel, who may want to push the exclusivity of their brand to allow only those with coins to purchase their leather goods. We know that in wine, many domaines are trying to distribute and reach the end consumer themselves, although they are stuck currently distributing through clubs like Ficofi or trusted exclusive distributers who only sell to the end customer. It is quite easy to issue DRC/Leroy coins for a select set of clientele themselves and only allow those with the coins to buy/sell ex-domaine wine. This may be the kind of tech-supported distribution solution they’ve been looking for all these years.

NFTs (non-fungible tokens)

The latest rage is obviously NFT and its uses in the contemporary art and other collectibles such as avatars. This is essentially a digital ledger on blockchain that can trace and authenticate you as its owner. At first I didn’t think it was all that interesting, if people want to pay hundreds of thousands for ugly CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties, whatever man that’s your money. It’s great however if you’re a creative and for contemporary art, revolutionising how things will be bought, sold and distributed. I mean why does Gagosian need 18 different locations globally when it can all be hosted on one platform with NFTs? And how would a museum of NFT art look like in the future?

While I can understand why it would be great for art, the jump to wine took longer for me to get. Domaines can definitely issue NFTs and other collectibles: in fact Liger-Belair is I believe, one of the first to have done so out of Burgundy. They are issuing videos accompanying lots for the upcoming Acker auction. However what I think would be more forward thinking is if they release the wines simply as NFTs — since most people won’t be drinking expensive grand cru Burgundies anytime soon. I sense some reluctance of domaines actually adopting this, after all they still like to pretend that people don’t speculate and buy to drink only. But I can definitely see wine funds, big collectors and brokerages create such NFTs, allowing people to invest in say 10% of a bottle of Roumier Musigny. Instead of buying the whole thing, they trade this fraction of Roumier back and forth on the secondary market or splitting it up even further. Will this further drive up prices on the secondary market?

All I’ve said above are mostly speculative but crypto, block chain tech and NFTs are slowly making inroads into wine. I am personally not against change and will keep an open mind but I think we need to make sure changes will add to the experience, not detract from it. Also I am not an expert in crypto so I can be entirely off-base—what I know and understand is gleaned from what I read in articles available online.

What do you think? Should wine stay low tech or embrace all sorts of new tech, not just in the winery but also in the marketplace?

How long have you been studying, traveling to and drinking Burgundy wines? 

Well this sounds long but since I was 16 years old, so 24 years—ouch! It all started thanks to my wine teacher at culinary school. I was bad at school and went very early to some more professional studies and found some interest in training to be a chef. In the beginning, there were also some wine courses at the culinary school and so my interest developed gradually whilst I was training in some of the greatest restaurants in France. After realising how demanding it is to work in restaurants and being more and more passionate about wine and meeting with those who make the wine, I really decided that it would be my life. 

What has been the greatest changes you've seen in Burgundy over the last ten years? 

First, quality has improved so much thanks to the new generation taking over the family estates: they've been trained well, they travelled, they are open minded. That might sound weird but the producers now talk to each other in the same village. They learn together, exchange point of views and improve as a whole whilst in the past they were barely tasting each other wines—in the same village!

Second, pricing. Being fortunate enough to be having a business both in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, we have experienced a surge of demand for Burgundy wines that was unthinkable even 10 years ago. I remember being in Hong Kong in 2010 and struggling to promote Burgundy wines whilst everyone was thinking about Bordeaux.. All that increasing demand has inevitably driven prices up and up. 

Who is doing the most exciting thing in Burgundy today? Why? 

Lalou Bize Leroy has shown the path 30 years ago by being innovative, shifting to organic practices (after reading an interview with Nicolas Joly) whilst everyone was criticizing her. Now she is the Queen in Burgundy, who simply makes the best wines. That has led younger winemakers to study what she was doing and push forward to raise the quality of their wines. These days, Charles Lachaux is on the spotlight, not only because he is using many of Lalou's methods in the vineyard but also because he is re-inventing it and continues to push even further with different practices that no one in Burgundy dare to implement. A simple example is his choice, this past year, not to plough his soils thus leaving mother nature to grow in between rows of vineyards. That would seem normal for everyone to let mother nature do her work but the result is a drop in production which is massive. It's a financial challenge but the ultimate goal is quality. Some other winemakers are still under the shadow simply because they are not located in Vosne Romanee but they do the same sort of work; I am thinking of Jean Marc Vincent in Santenay, Bruno Lorenzon in Mercurey and Hubert Lamy in Saint Aubin who have been the first people to do high density. They are making wines that are equal to other top wines in Cotes de Nuits. Burgundy is not always expensive. Of course, Bizot, Cecile Tremblay, Dugat Py are amongst my really really exciting domaines but everyone heard about these already! 

What are the most serious challenges for the regions to come in both the short term future and the long term future? 

Short term and long term future serious challenges is climate change. We have seen it with the "Gel Noir" (Black frost) event last week (a sort of frost combined with snow), something that only happens once in a century. Summers are hotter and hotter and that's a threat because the alcohol increases too quickly and sometimes the phenolic maturity is not there. They end up harvesting wines at 15 degrees alcohol sometimes. The traditional way Burgundy wines were made no longer works: they have to train the vines higher to increase shadow on the grapes, they have to purchase lands in higher altitude to be able to have a cooler climate, there are tons of things they will have to implement in the coming years if they do not want to lose some part of their production. Some have already done it (those producers quoted above), some others wait for the new generation to take over and do this tremendous work. 

What is your opinion on the current Burgundy bubble and do you remain bullish in its future? 

Let's be reasonable. There are 1.5 billion Chinese people and a good part of it starts to have enough money to enjoy the pleasures of life. The demand for Burgundy wines is unstoppable and we see it everyday in our Beijing or Shanghai office. The Burgundy classification has not changed for nearly 100 years old, that means the production of quality Burgundy wines will not increase. Simple proof is the investments LVMH made in buying Clos des Lambrays: Bernard Arnault is known to have a long perspective for his investments (remember he purchased Yquem long time ago). And we did not talk about the Brazilians, etc... 

In fact I am fascinated to see people always thinking the bubble will stop, when you look at it 10 years ago the same question was here and last time I visited Domaine Leroy, Lalou Bize Leroy shown me a magazine from the Los Angeles times, in 1996 titled "Can any wine be worth 500USD a bottle?" with a photo of Lalou....

What are some potential impacts for drinkers, collectors and speculators? 

I would guess speculators are all trying to move to Burgundy. Proof is the Liv-Ex exchange is shifting from Bordeaux to Burgundy more and more. Their problem is scale, they can't buy 100 cases of DRC so we do not see much investment businesses focusing on this region too much. It is mainly private collectors who want to secure wines for their lifespan. 

They know the prices rise every year, so they buy literally all they can find and when they feel the price is too high, some other new wine lovers come in and grab their allocations and it goes on and on. They do not speculate on wine, they feel just happy that their value appreciates and that they can share bottles of it.

Drinkers complain Burgundy is expensive but I think it is because they do not trust their palate enough. Again, in Saint aubin, Marsannay, Fixin, Mercurey, Rully, Santenay for example, you can find amazing wines for less than 400 HKD a bottle. There are some terroirs there that can produce amazing wines if they are handled by the right vigneron.

What would your advice be for someone new to Burgundy and wants to start collecting?

First, to try to find friends who love wine so he could drink and learn with them. Combining it with a lot of reading to explore and make your own point of view, is important. 

Second, get close to a few wine merchants so you get introduced to nice wines and can also learn from them. 

Third, let's forget about saying "you should visit Burgundy" as it seems too far away for most people right now and it's getting too difficult!

Fourth, after a while, make sure you go into the direction that fits you well. Do you want to buy trophy wines and "collect" ? Or you simply want to enjoy drinking. That is two different paths...

Apart from Burgundy, what are other regions you think people should focus on and why? 

I would recommend going deep into the Jura because it provides excellent values for wines that are sometime at the quality of really good Burgundy wines. Their terroirs are of high quality and given climate change, the producers are now able to reach good maturities and make superb wines. Savoie is also a paradise at the moment, with really talented young growers who for sure will be key producers in the future. Alsace is also an area that is bubbly at the moment with many many young growers changing the way wines were made before. And outside France, Germany for sure, with Switzerland. 

An old fashioned question from wine interviews of yore: what would be your three desert island wines?

Yes, this question is definitely not matching with the label drinker attitude! It's just impossible!

Julien Froger is proprietor and director of La Souveraine. Visit their website here for more information.