Under oak

Buying wine before it’s bottled has recently lost its attraction after the risks began to outweigh the promise. Harry Eyres looks at the en primeur market and finds that there might be light at the bottom of the barrel

THE massed ranks of the British wine trade and a handful of journalists descended on Bordeaux for a few days in early April to taste barrel samples of the 2015 vintage. It had been heavily hyped (not an unusual phenomenon) and does indeed look like a very promising vintage, the best since 2009 and 2010, but enthusiasm for the en primeur market—offering for sale, supposedly at a discount, wines that are still in barrel, before bottling and shipping—has rarely been more muted among both trade and press.

The pre-eminent American wine expert Robert Parker has even declared, in The Drinks Business magazine, that the en primeur market is ‘largely dead’. Chadwick Delaney of Justerini and Brooks (020–7493 6174; www.justerinis. com) is more sanguine: ‘The Bordelais can use this vintage to bring people back to Bordeaux—if they price it right. There needs to be a reason to buy en primeur for drinking, not speculation. The style of the vintage is very sexy and customers will love it.’

En primeur has always carried both a tempting promise and a number of risks. The promise, especially in the early days, was that, if you were clever, you could drink excellent claret for free. Buy two cases of, say, Château La Rêve Dorée (I’ve made up the name) en primeur, wait for the value to appreciate, as it inevitably would (or so you were told), then sell one off and the profit would cover the cost of the other one.