The Château La Croix Guillotin of Puisseguin-Saint-Émilion of Bordeaux

Colin Hay, a professor of political economy with a special interest in the Place de Bordeaux, considers the different ways of approaching en primeur purchasing, ahead of this year’s 2021 campaign. Buying en primeur wines is a rather strange and, arguably, arcane system of buying and selling in which the consumer purchases the wine typically in the early summer following the vintage even though it will not be bottled and delivered for a further 12-18 months. It is, in effect, a futures mark ...

Lafite Rothschild 2021 was released at €470 per bottle ex-Bordeaux this morning (7 June) and was being offered en primeur by UK merchants at the equivalent of £5,808 per 12-bottle case in bond, said Liv-ex, a global marketplace for the trade. Decanter’s Georgie Hindle rated Lafite 2021 at 97 points, a strong performance in one of the more challenging Bordeaux vintages of recent years. ‘Surely a contender for wine of the vintage, certainly on the Left Bank. Vibrant and explosive,’ Hindle wrote. L ...

My book The Complete Bordeaux, which has been revised every five years, is soon to be published in its fourth edition. This may seem like excessive haste, given the scope of the book, but it is astonishing how rapidly changes can take place in the region. Burgundy, in contrast, is relatively stable, since most properties are family-owned and tend to stay that way. But not so in Bordeaux, where there are ample opportunities for newcomers to acquire established properties, as they have been doing ...