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Tag Archives: Bordeaux

Bordeaux Renaissance

March 28 2015 posted by Karl Curran
Due diligence is paramount if you are selling something as complicated as higher end French and Italian wines. The customers are passionate and have a thirst for knowledge. This is my point of view for the 2014 Bordeaux vintage and the current state of the market. Bordeaux wine is more than just wine, it’s a financial barometer, not in the same way as oil, gold, or real estate, however it moves in tandem with these asset classes. It can and does outperform them on yield. Recent seismic moves such as the collapse in the price of oil and volatility in global currency markets reflect instability. It seems there is a flight to quality, US assets are in high demand and naturally enough this had led to a strong dollar which is tremendously good news for Bordeaux. What happened to Bordeaux after 2010 is a grey area. It’s sadly a...

Bordeaux Market Shifts

April 12 2014 posted by Karl Curran
Bordeaux is like no other in the wine market. Every year around the last days of March and first few days of April, the wine press and buyers emerge excited to taste the new vintage. The custom has been to buy the wines en primeur (straight out of the barrel) for over three hundred years now. The wines are then delivered to buyers roughly three years after payment. The 64 million dollar question is how does the buyer know what he’s getting? That’s where tasters like Robert Parker come in. Parker has become a household name. There are others too such as Jancis Robinson and James Suckling. These tasters hold strong opinions, and it’s very true in the wine business that the pen is mightier than the sword. As a producer, if you’ve been given a medium score, it can result in huge financial losses. The grading system is...