Bordeaux Today

Scores, Futures, Fortunes: How Bordeaux Became a Financial Asset (1982–2010)

From Parker's 1982 call to the Lafite bubble — how en primeur, the 100-point scale and Asian demand turned Bordeaux wine into a global financial asset.

In the spring of 1983, a lawyer from Maryland tasted the young 1982 vintage from the barrel and told his newsletter subscribers, against the caution of better-established critics, that it was superb. Within thirty years of that call, a bottle of Bordeaux had become something no medieval burgess or Chartrons merchant would have recognized: a globally traded financial asset, quoted on a London exchange, scored on a 100-point scale, and chased by buyers from Baltimore to Hong Kong. This is the story of how that happened — and of the hangover that followed.

Wine sold before it exists

The instrument at the centre of the story is old. Bordeaux merchants had bought wine "unfinished" — committing money before the wine was bottled, in exchange for access and price — for centuries; advancing funds against a harvest was part of how the négociants of the Chartrons built their houses. But the modern en primeur system, in which each spring's new vintage is sold while still in barrel, took shape after the Second World War. Bordeaux emerged from the conflict bruised and undercapitalized; many estates needed cash long before their wine was ready to ship. Selling the vintage in barrel solved both sides' problem at once: the châteaux got their money up to two years early, and the négociants locked in volume at a discount and kept control of distribution. Through the 1950s and 1960s, as château-bottling spread, the arrangement hardened from a loose habit into a recognizable system with a calendar of its own.

For most of that period it remained a trade affair. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did private buyers begin to participate in earnest, buying "futures" on wine they would not see for two years — a stage, as one history of the system puts it, rather than a mere financing tool. What the stage lacked was a star critic. It got one.

1978: a lawyer in Baltimore

In 1978 Robert M. Parker Jr., then a lawyer in Baltimore, launched a direct-mail newsletter called The Baltimore-Washington Wine Advocate — six hundred charter subscribers paid for the second issue. Its gimmick, borrowed from American schooling, was to grade wines on a scale running from 50 to 100 points. Where the established wine press wrote in prose, hedged and allusive, Parker issued a number. The consumer-advocate framing was explicit: no advertising, wines bought and tasted independently, a score anyone could act on.

1982: the vintage that made the judge

The 1982 Bordeaux vintage was hot, ripe and opulent — and it split the critics. Parker, tasting from barrel, called it superb and said so emphatically; much of the established wine press hesitated, and some said the opposite. The San Francisco critic Robert Finigan, then among the most influential voices in America, judged the wines too ripe and too low in acid to age. The verdict of the cellar went to Parker: 1982 proved to be one of the great post-war vintages, and the 1980s produced nothing to rival it until 1989 and 1990. Subscriptions to his newsletter soared, and in March 1984 Parker resigned his position as a lawyer to write about wine full-time.

The timing mattered as much as the call. The 1982 campaign was the moment en primeur and consumer wine criticism fused: American buyers, reading Parker, bought 1982 futures heavily, and those who did were handsomely rewarded as prices climbed. From then on, the spring ritual of barrel tastings had a script — the wines were made, the critics scored, the prices followed.

What 100 points does to a price — and to a wine

The numbers involved stopped being trivial almost immediately. One Bordeaux merchant reckoned the difference between a Parker score of 85 and 95 for a single wine at six to seven million euros; a 100-point score could multiply a wine's price fourfold. Econometric work later confirmed what the trade already knew: Parker's scores alone explained roughly a third of the variance in release prices for Médoc classed growths and Saint-Émilion grands crus. For an industry whose hierarchy had been fixed since the 1855 classification, this was a revolution: a single taster's palate could now do in an afternoon what brokers' ledgers had once taken decades to establish.

Critics of the system gave the phenomenon a name: Parkerization — the charge that, because riper, darker, more extracted and more heavily oaked wines tended to earn high scores, producers worldwide were converging on that style to court them. Jonathan Nossiter's documentary Mondovino, selected in competition at Cannes in 2004 — one of only four documentaries ever nominated for the Palme d'Or — built its argument around the axis between Parker and the ubiquitous consulting oenologist Michel Rolland, casting both as agents of a globalized, homogenized taste. Parker rejected the charge, arguing that global winemaking standards had risen, not narrowed, on his watch. The dispute is, at bottom, the old Bordeaux argument about whether wine expresses a place or a market — the same question that runs through the terroir debate — transposed into the age of the score.

The garagistes: fortunes from a shed

Nothing illustrated the new physics of scores and scarcity better than the garagistes. Their precursor was Le Pin, a one-hectare plot in Pomerol that Jacques Thienpont bought from the Laubie family in March 1979 for one million francs — a property whose winery was little more than a shed. Its first vintage under the new name was 1979; production from the (slightly enlarged, now 2.7-hectare) vineyard has never exceeded a few hundred cases, making it rarer than Pétrus, whose prices it came to rival and at times exceed. Perfect 100-point Parker scores — for the 1982, and later the 2009 and 2010 — turned obscurity into cult.

The lesson was not lost on Jean-Luc Thunevin, a former bank employee in Saint-Émilion, who in 1991 made the first vintage of Valandraud in the workshop beside his house: roughly 100 cases from tiny yields, hand-worked and raised in new oak. The French critic Michel Bettane sneeringly dubbed such wines vins de garage — wines you could make in a garage — and the insult became a banner. "By talking about me, they made me exist," Thunevin later said. From 1994 imitators multiplied across the Right Bank, and for a decade micro-cuvées with no château, no park and no history commanded prices that embarrassed the classified growths. The moment faded — by the late 2000s even prominent garagistes were cutting back the new oak and picking earlier — but it had proved the point definitively: in the new Bordeaux, reputation could be created in a single barrel cellar, in a single decade, with a single palate's blessing.

Hong Kong, Lafite and the number eight

The final ingredient arrived from Asia. In 2007 Hong Kong halved its 80% wine import duty, and in early 2008 abolished it outright — a stroke of fiscal policy that made the city the auction and trading hub of Asian fine wine almost overnight. Mainland Chinese demand poured through it, and it concentrated, with extraordinary intensity, on one name: Lafite. The most famous illustration came in October 2010, when Château Lafite Rothschild announced that bottles of its 2008 vintage would carry the Chinese character for eight — a number connoting prosperity — engraved on the glass. The wine's market price rose about 20% almost overnight.

The infrastructure to measure all this already existed. In 2000, two London stockbrokers, James Miles and Justin Gibbs, had founded Liv-ex — the London International Vintners Exchange — with ten founding member firms: a stock exchange for fine wine, with indices, bid-offer spreads and market reports. Bordeaux now had a ticker.

2009–2011: the escalation

The convergence of a great vintage, Asian money and investment demand produced the most extravagant price escalation in Bordeaux history. The 2009s were released in 2010 at prices up, for the top wines, roughly 71% on the 2008s; Lafite 2009 came out at €550 a bottle ex-négociant. The 2010 campaign went further still: the first growths released at an average of €736 a bottle ex-Bordeaux, against €404 for the 2005s and €141 for the 2000s a decade earlier. The Liv-ex 100 index peaked in June 2011 — and then the market turned. By late 2012 the index had lost some 29% from its peak, Chinese demand for Lafite had cooled as abruptly as it had ignited, and buyers of the two most expensive campaigns ever mounted were underwater. Even the sellers conceded the overreach: the managing director of Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite) admitted that the 2010 campaign had "come across as arrogance, in terms of both timing and prices, for many châteaux".

The reckoning

The clearest verdict came from inside the system. In a letter to the Bordeaux trade dated April 2012, Frédéric Engerer, president of Château Latour, announced that from the 2012 vintage the first growth would leave en primeur altogether and release its wines only when it judged them ready to drink — the most significant defection from Bordeaux commercial convention in living memory. His argument cut at the system's premise: wines that need fifteen or twenty years in bottle should not be priced on eighteen-month-old barrel samples.

The numbers backed the skeptics. A Liv-ex analysis in 2014 found that, on average, en primeur buyers had lost money on every vintage since 2008 except the 2012, with buyers of the 2010s down 17%; in campaign after campaign through the 2010s, wines could be bought more cheaply as physical bottles, years after release, than they had cost as futures. Merchants cut their commitments; collectors, burned repeatedly, stepped back; the trade press began asking annually whether en primeur had a future at all — a crisis of confidence in the very mechanism that had globalized Bordeaux.

The system survived, as Bordeaux's commercial machinery usually does. But the era that ran from Parker's 1982 call to the Lafite bubble had changed what a great Bordeaux is. For eight centuries the region had sold wine — brilliantly, ruthlessly, to whoever ruled the sea lanes. After 1982 it learned to sell something else as well: a number, a position, an asset. The gravel of the Médoc had become collateral.