The history of en primeur – a stop-start story
An intensive few spring weeks of tastings, ratings and drawn-out unveiling of prices for Bordeaux’s latest, still-in-barrel, vintage has become an integral part of the market. Our in-depth look at the evolution of Bordeaux ‘en primeur’ helps to shine a light on its continued relevance for the consumer today.
Many people associate the rise of Bordeaux en primeur with the legendary 1982 vintage. However, selling Bordeaux wine en primeur – while the new wines are still ageing in barrel, potentially many months prior to their bottling and release – boasts a storied history, dating all the way back to the 1740s.
By the early 20th century, it had become a significant event in Bordeaux, with frenzied autumnal ‘campaigns’ taking place among prestigious châteaux and Bordeaux négociants. However, it wasn’t until the 1950s that the practice began to evolve into its modern form.
Today, ‘EP’ as it’s known, remains an important way to buy Bordeaux wine ‘futures’, often as a form of investment.
For the producers, it’s a hedging tool that reduces price volatility and secures cashflow. How this all started helps to explain the forces that will continue to affect EP and its prices.
As The Wine Society’s long-serving buyer, now retired, Sebastian Payne MW tells me, this history has ‘all to do with money, of course, or lack of it’.
1950s & 1960s: Boom times begin in America
The pieces of the ‘wine futures’ puzzle began to fall into place after World War II. Both France and Britain walked a slow path to economic recovery. In the US, by contrast, people revelled in the ‘jet set’ era which saw Manhattanites sipping Petrus Pomerol at trendy restaurants such as Le Pavillon.
Its owner bought well-priced EP claret from Robert Haas (pictured below), who worked at the Park Avenue wine store M Lehmann (and would go on to co-found Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles, in 1989).
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In 1954, Haas took his first buying trip to France. Due to the lean economic times, wines from the 1952 vintage remained available in barrel. Haas had an epiphany: sell the ’52s to his select customers in advance. He chose well.
Early in 1955, châteaux Cheval Blanc, Lafite Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion alongside Beychevelle, Calon Ségur, Cos d’Estournel and Gruaud-Larose appeared in a beautifully printed offering in the US: ‘An opportunity to buy fine château-bottled Bordeaux wines “en tonneau” before they are bottled, at savings of up to 20 dollars a case.’
He offered 11,400 bottles of wine for sale, with a one-case minimum. Château Margaux cost $38 per case of 12 bottles [equivalent to about $436 today, according to amortization.org], Cos d’Estournel a bargain at $19.50.
Selling wine ‘futures’ to the public was unprecedented. There existed, at that point, no hint of buying wine as an investment; nor was this done in the spring following vintage, as it is today.
It didn’t work as a hedging tool for the châteaux; rather, it moved moribund wine at fair prices to the consumer. This was a first.
What economists think of en primeur
Allan Sichel, head of the major family négociant-producer and second-term president of Bordeaux’s regional body CIVB, told me that Bordeaux ‘is an open market subjected to normal laws of supply and demand’.
Do economists agree? Journal of Wine Economics editor Karl Storchmann answered a few questions.
‘The fact that one can buy wine futures’ makes en primeur (EP) interesting. The father of wine economics, Professor Orley Ashenfelter of Princeton University, ‘analysed whether EP prices are set too high compared to market prices upon the wine’s release’, because investing in wines at EP ‘would only be sensible if market prices are higher than future prices’.
Ashenfelter’s results showed that ‘most EP prices are too high – especially in inferior vintages’.
Subsequent economic research has largely focused on investment, the impact of weather and climate on prices, and the role played by wine critics.
Storchmann says: ‘I would characterise the Bordeaux cru classé wine market as monopolistically competitive – each château has a monopoly over its own brand.’
And although ‘some competition exists, the EP system helps to mitigate competition’. For Storchmann, when EP prices from different châteaux move in unison, ‘the system exhibits some elements of a cartel’.
Into the ‘60s: Early progress
Robert’s son Danny Haas, wine buyer for importer Vineyard Brands, which his father set up in 1971, tells me: ‘I am sure that my father continued to offer wine in advance to his customers. He was buying Petrus from 1953 and buying half the crop of Lafite in 1961.’
The Lafite ended up in their basement. ‘I remember playing down there with the walls floor to ceiling stacked with 1961 Lafite. He said they bought it for $60 a case.’
Prices were indeed rising. Allan Sichel says: ‘In 1956, a furious customer complained to my grandfather [about high prices], saying there was no longer any prospect of earning a living selling Bordeaux.’ The customer was wrong.
By June 1965, M Lehmann’s competitor Sherry Wine & Spirits had published an ‘Advance Offering of 1964 Wines’, mailed to ‘a selected few of our clientele’. ‘Avoid the inevitable high prices that will prevail a year or two hence.’
Sherry listed 59 wines for purchase en primeur. In 1955, M Lehmann had offered Château Lafite for $39 per case (pictured, below); by 1965, Sherry had the price at $93.50.
This approach came very close to how today’s EP operates. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Robert Haas (who died in 2018) joined the growing coterie of people communicating about wine, including Sam Aaron (of Sherry Wine & Spirits and later Sherry-Lehmann), The New York Times journalist Jane Nickerson and one of Aaron’s employees, James Beard.
‘The Wine Establishment in New York includes men who sell wine, men who write about wine, and men who talk about wine,’ said New York magazine in 1972.
As Stephen Browett, chairman of UK merchant Farr Vintners, told me, ‘increased consumer interest’ bolstered EP’s growth.
1970s: Going global
Bordeaux remained a buyer’s market through most of the 1950s and 1960s, but public enthusiasm for Bordeaux wines expanded. Wine consumption grew, prices rose. Then, 1970 happened.
‘Today, le Bordelais enjoys a period of prosperity.’ So wrote, in 1973, Bordeaux economic geography grad student Philippe Roudié, who could hardly contain his excitement.
The UK wine journalist Edmund Penning-Rowsell recalled that ‘the Bordeaux wine trade’ was ‘desperate for a good, plentiful year’ after 1969.
Their prayers were answered. Although today few remember its importance, the 1970 vintage offered record yields and excellent growing conditions.
After decades of experience, Penning-Rowsell (who died in 2002) opined: ‘I have never seen healthier, rounder grapes without a hint of rot.’
Based on sales over two years, Roudié wrote in the Bulletin de l’Association de Géographes Français that economic conditions in Bordeaux were as opulent as 1945 claret.
He summarised: ‘Starting in 1970, there resulted a sudden and spectacular rise in the prices of various Bordeaux wines en primeur, which propelled the wine region’ into a state of heightened emotion.
Penning-Rowsell called it a ‘bourse [trading floor] atmosphere’. No one knew that the 1973-1975 economic recession was looming on the horizon.
Indeed, to celebrate, in 1971, Bordeaux held its first international wine festival in 62 years, involving ‘day-long wine tasting in the vineyards and in the cellars of the great wine merchants’, reported The New York Times.
In many ways, this event presaged the festive en primeur campaigns of the 1980s and ’90s. Penning-Rowsell referred to this moment as ‘the Bordeaux boom’.
Simon Loftus – former chairman of UK brewer and wine merchant Adnams and awarded author – calls it, more precisely, a ‘speculative boom’.
This short-lived prosperity structurally transformed Bordeaux wine commerce and particularly how the public could purchase. One Swiss wine buyer recalls: ‘From around 1970, this EP system was transferred to wine merchants’ outside Bordeaux.
The new vintages were much cheaper than the older ones,’ he says, and these far-flung wine merchants, including Haas and Aaron in the US, began offering EP wines ‘to their gastronomic and especially private customers, with steadily growing interest’.
This change also stemmed from easier international shipping of wines that were increasingly estate-bottled. This was the new age of jets and container ships.
EP sales advanced in elite New York. In 1971, a new exclusive jet set wine club debuted: the Automation House Wine Society.
The directorial team included Haas, Michael Aaron (son of Sherry-Lehmann co-founder Jack Aaron) and well-known wine writer Alexis Bespaloff.
Financially, as Payne says, the high yield and quality of the 1970 vintage put ‘the boot on the other foot’. The Bordeaux châteaux ‘were at last’ making money.
They could set prices and sell directly abroad. In his book The Wines of Bordeaux (6th edition, Penguin 1990), Penning-Rowsell recalled ‘the mad, speculative fever’.
Many châteaux, he said, had even begun to insist on people placing orders without first having had the chance to taste samples.
False start in the ‘70s
The full impact of this change would only be felt a decade later. In the interim, a series of bad harvests through the 1970s and the global oil crisis intervened. A crash was looming.
Bordeaux négociants managed to persuade many in the UK ‘to buy the wretched overpriced 1972 vintage’, says Payne, ‘and we were all hit by rampant inflation’.
Referring to Bordeaux, Serena Sutcliffe – who became a Master of Wine in 1976 before going on to head Sotheby’s international wine department – recalls that the 1970s ‘were awful, crisis after crisis dans le monde, and also chez them!’
As Penning-Rowsell summarised, once the markedly inferior 1972 wines ‘became seriously tasteable in the spring of 1973, the bubble burst’. Bordeaux became overstocked; supply overtook demand.
Michael Broadbent MW, the celebrated head of Christie’s wine department (who died in 2020), had to explain poor auction results to The New York Times: ‘Prices are floundering,’ he said in May 1975.
‘The speculative fever is gone because people know that if they don’t bid this year they probably will be able to bid on the same wine next year.’ It seemed as though there was the potential for EP to die alongside the speculation. But not quite.
‘Because of the oil crisis,’ Payne says, the négociants in Bordeaux ‘were no longer able to hold stock’ until they sold it. While some wineries finally felt rich, everyone in the trade ‘wanted to sell before they paid’.
One solution was the newfangled en primeur. That is: the consumer bought from the merchants two to three years in advance. Fortunately, the 1975 vintage was, as Penning-Rowsell put it, ‘fine in quality, small in quantity’. EP would henceforth not go away, but continued to advance in fits and starts.
Colin Anderson MW, who was buying director of Grants of St James’s at the time, adds that EP wines ‘started to be a thing’ in 1976. Specialist merchant Loftus (Adnams) and The Wine Society started to offer EP sales to the UK public that year.
Loftus summarises the 1970s: ‘Oil price shock, collapse of boom, ruin of many négociants, shedloads of unsaleable wine. Fingers burnt. Mediocre 1973, poor ’74, difficult but exciting ’75. Decent but unexciting ’76, dreadful ’77, decent ’78 and fair ’79.’
1982: The pivotal vintage
Then, all of the pieces finally fell firmly into place; en primeur never looked back. Penning-Rowsell wrote in The Wines of Bordeaux: ‘The 1982 claret vintage was sung home before ever the grapes reached the fermenting vats.’
Farr’s Browett agrees: ‘Bordeaux finally made a great vintage after a long run of mediocre years.’ Penning-Rowsell described the 1982s thus: ‘Exceptionally deep colour, with seductively rich bouquets and unusually sweet easy-to-taste flavour.’
If that sounds familiar, it’s because a soon-to-be-famous US wine critic loved the wines and told his readers so. Browett says that 1982 ‘very much links to the rise of Robert Parker’.
Economist Karl Storchmann observes that the issue became how ‘the uninformed consumer’ can ‘predict what the market price will be’. This heightened the importance of ‘selected critics’, Parker among them. ‘Regular consumers rely on their assessment’ in the form of easily comprehensible scores.
Loftus remembers ‘his marking system had a dramatic influence’ on EP’s evolution, ‘particularly for American buyers. If Parker gave a wine 98 points, it automatically went on their shopping lists.’
Sarah Kemp, who as Decanter’s former publisher is intimately familiar with Bordeaux and its dynamics, refers to ‘the 100-point system hyping the market’. Hence the character of the 1982s mattered: deep colour, rich bouquet, soft tannins and more accessible to novice drinkers.
Loftus tells me: ‘The influence of Parker encouraged a change in how people evaluated fine Bordeaux.’ He argues that qualities such as elegance, complexity, clear terroir expression and modest alcohol levels gave way to ‘strong, rich, full-flavoured wines’.
Kemp believes that ‘the idea of laying [wines] down’ was ‘becoming lost’. Pretty quickly, ‘producers responded by shaping wines for that market’, in part based on enhanced technology in the vineyard and the winery.
In the UK, The Wine Society’s Payne recalls: ‘En primeur took off for us with the 1982 vintage, which we bought and sold in abundance.’ Critics contributed to the price enthusiasm.
Post-1982: Overdoing it?
As en primeur became well established after 1982, Loftus remembers that ‘competition between châteaux to achieve higher prices than their neighbours became intense’. In addition, the participation of the ‘super-second’ growths (top-performing estates in the ranking immediately below the five first growths in the 1855 Médoc classification) ‘added fuel to this fire’.
Loftus says that ‘there were very few restraining influences’ on prices, and that among the few keeping prices reasonable were ‘notably Peter Sichel at Château Palmer [third growth], Anthony Barton of Léoville Barton [second] and Langoa Barton [third]’.
Sutcliffe remarks: ‘It started to change a lot from the 1990s, but especially 25 years ago.’ She refers to EP becoming, around the turn of the millennium, ‘something of a circus, with huge tastings grouped in the different regions, big négociant tastings, press dinners etc. Then there was a flood of Asians, often first-time visitors.’
En primeur has continued to evolve in the 2020s. Kemp concludes: ‘Six thousand people descending to taste a new vintage is good news for fine wine, wherever it is from.’
But, she adds: ‘A new generation of wine lovers can buy from Italy, the US, Burgundy – so the pricing needs to be realistic. Unless the pricing changes, I feel Bordeaux en primeur will be a problem.’
Payne believes en primeur remains significant. ‘The vagaries of exchange rates and world economies mean that sometimes prices have gone down, but they nearly always catch up when the wine is nearer [full] maturity.’
Echoing Kemp, Browett tells me: ‘With some EP wines being sold at higher prices than mature vintages, the Bordelais risk customers giving up buying EP.’ Today, ‘for Farr Vintners, EP sales are only a small part of our turnover’. History, as always, will be watching.
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