Bordeaux 2001 Futures

Up, up, and gone

by Marc Dornan, dornan@tastings.com

	Le Dôme: Boutique 2001 Cabernet Franc success

The 2001 Bordeaux futures campaign, like the Spruce Goose, got about 2 feet in the air before it landed with a splash, never to raise again. The 2001 vintage will be a waste of time for speculators, as most of the Médoc growths will be cheaper or the same price when they hit the shelves in two years' time.

Many retailers are offering a good selection of 2001 futures, and for those that want to drink their purchase, and not sell it for a profit, there are still good red wines to be had for under $25 a bottle, sometimes much less. A decent bottle of claret is always going to cost about $20 a bottle, so a case exist for buying some 2001 futures if you are a bargain hunter. One thing that I have noticed in cross-referencing the 2001 offerings from the major wine retailer in the country is that there is very little discrepancy in futures pricing from one retailer to the next for the same wine.

Top 10 Values: Bordeaux 2001 Futures Offering
Senejac (France) 2001 Haut-Médoc. $13.(85-89 points)
Bernadotte (France) 2001 Cru Bourgeois, Haut-Médoc. $14. (85-89 points)
Haut-Bages Liberal (France) 2001 Pauillac. $17. (85-89)
Nairac (France) 2001 Barsac. $18. (88-92)
Cantelauze (France) 2001 Pomerol. $18. (85-89)
Lagrange (France) 2001 St. Julien. $21. (85-89 points)
Bellefont-Belcier (France) 2001 St. Emilion. $21. (88-92)
Rayne-Vigneau (France) 2001 Sauternes. $30.(88-92)
Suduiraut (France) 2001 Sauternes. $38. (88-92)
Rieussec (France) 2001 Sauternes. $43. (88-92)

See all Bordeaux 2001 Futures Prices as of June 2002.

The 2001 Campaign
It was all rather predictable. It has little to do with the quality of the wines, which is decent at best, but rather more to do with the economic context and the recent history of pricing. With the 2000 campaign, the Bordeaux fine wine industry out did itself, with the help of U.S. retailers and importers, and has sucked all the Bordeaux bound dollars they are going to get for the next few years from moneyed wine investors. This time, they could never have cut the price far enough to stimulate demand.

Indeed, I saw something quite rare in the wine world the other week. Some mid-level classified growth proprietors were actually hitting the road in the U.S. and pouring their wines in wine stores and meeting with journalists. Unremarkable, you might think, but classified growth proprietors aren't known for having much connection with the end consumer. Typically, they isolate themselves behind the middlemen of the Bordeaux wine trade, the négociants.

They were frank about how worried everyone is in Bordeaux about the response to the 2001 futures offering. Clearly they were doing their bit to drum up interest in their wares in Chicago. However, they still did not think that there was any alternative to the négociant system that seems to have put them in this predicament. This strikes me as curiously myopic.

That system has rather perilously evolved around the palate of one man, Robert Parker, for whom the négociants organize a special tasting, where as many 200 barely six month old wines may be tasted in a day. The proprietors wait for his results to hit the street and they set their prices to the négociants in accordance with a "Parker index." Then, the wines are dribbled out to the world markets by the middlemen négociants to keep supply and demand at the most favorable ratio to extract a maximum price. This is lucrative when Robert Parker is enthused about the vintage, and a spectacular flop when he blows a raspberry, as he did in 2001.

If anyone really doubted how influential Robert Parker's ratings were, then his reassessment of the 2000 vintage proved beyond doubt that his scores are the only ones to set pricing. According to a friend at a large Chicago retailer, when The Wine Advocate Bordeaux 2000 Part II issue hit the streets, "all hell broke loose." A few wines that Parker elevated into the magical 90 plus realm, after scoring them lower in his first take on the 2000 vintage, saw their prices double overnight.

At least the aviation world learnt from Howard Hughes. No one has ever tried to fly a seaplane as big as a football field again. That's where the similarities with the Spruce Goose and the Bordeaux futures campaign end (it was a stretch anyway)—we will see another 2001-style futures flop.

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