Decanter World Wine AwardsBordeaux 2011: Chateau Lafite Rothschild releases at €420 per bottle
- Monday 16 April 2012
Chateau Lafite Rothschild 2011: First major name to release
The wine will be €420 ex-negociant, and merchants will wait to announce their price until they are sure of their allocations. The ex-chateau price is €350.
Merchants are still digesting the news but one or two have commented in pleased terms.
An email from Farr Vintners read, ‘Welcome news on the pricing and let's hope that other chateaux follow this lead and allow us to sell at a lower price than we sell physical vintages.’
Both they and Berry Bros also said they were pleased there was no ‘tie-in’ with the Rothschild-owned Sauternes Chateau Rieussec, which last year merchants were obliged to buy along with their Lafite allocation.
There is now a good deal of uncertainty about how the rest of the blue-chip properties will react to this price.
‘I doubt very much that Mouton, Haut-Brion, Margaux and Cheval Blanc will be able to sell at €350,’ Simon Staples at BBR told Decanter.com.
His prediction – with the proviso that this was a very early state of the campaign – was that Lafite’s sister property Mouton-Rothschild, for one, would release a very small tranche at €350 and then price the following tranches according to market reaction.
Lafite’s announcement will also unleash a wave of speculation as to how this year’s most-lauded wines, such as the third-growth Chateau Palmer, Ducru-Beaucaillou, Montrose or Calon-Segur.
Palmer was given five stars and 18.5 points by Steven Spurrier for Decanter, the others 18 points, or four stars.
See all Decanter's Bordeaux 2011 en primeur ratings
Have your say!
Gary Evans
May 17 20:09
I have been approached by a wine investment company offering me the 2009 Chateu Lafitte Rothschild at £6400.00 per case.
Is this a good deal ?
Hope you can help.
James Swann
April 20 11:56
One challenge with en primeur is that chateaux do not interact directly with clients, rather this is done entirely through the negociants, it is hard to tell what people are willing to pay.
Important benchmarks for en primeur pricing are wholesale prices for physical vintages at Bordeaux, with wholesale and retail prices in London. However, London’s position as a hub means these do not necessarily indicate the threshold for the British public, but rather the prevalent price ceiling for top Bordeaux that is in turn a product of a new and more global demand.
We might, then, expect a certain disparity between what Bordeaux’s most sought-after chateau can command and the price-positioning of the campaign overall. On another note, en primeur is famously opaque, if one was a courtier on a 2% commission off the release price, at which end of the scale might a chateaux be advised to price itself?
Panos
April 17 11:28
Adam, thanks for the news. Since you mentioned the chateau, you and I both know how good Calon Segur is... I hope the price will be "right", as that is one wine I may purchase in magnum formats.
Vincenzo Tagliavia
April 17 10:32
This is intelligent marketing but what about the customers who have already lost 40-50% of their capital with 2009s and 2010s?
How these customers will recoup these losses is still unclear...
However, Lafite is well aware the whole market has turned cold whereby China, with revised growth (down to 8.1%) and a broadening interest on anything else but Lafite does not seem to be supporting prices in the short term.
All in all, this is a campaign that may be interesting at the lower end of the market whereby we expect a period of under-performance at the higher end/Blue Chips across a number of physical and non-physical vintages. Probably this is not what people want to hear...