Wine merchants and collectors are awaiting the first releases to the market from producers in Bordeaux to learn the cost of buying the unusual—and many say shockingly outstanding—2022 vintage.
The weather last year in France’s famed wine region was searing hot and extremely dry. Italy-based Saturnalia, which uses artificial intelligence and satellite data to assess wine regions, found average temperatures in Bordeaux rose above the average of the previous 10 years 83 times during the growing season, and that rainfall was 7% less than normal.
Saturnalia predicted the wines would have issues in both “quality and quantity.”
In quantity, that’s certainly true, with total production off 15% compared to the 10-year average, although it’s up from last year, according to “Bordeaux 2022—A double-edged sword,” a report from Liv-ex, a London-based global marketplace for fine wine.
In terms of quality, the scores rolling in so far are impressively high. The Wine Advocate, founded by Robert Parker, gave three wines its top score of 99-100—Château Canon, Les Carmes Haut-Brion, and Montrose.
The wine critic Janis Robinson had expected the vintage’s tough conditions to produce wines that “taste soupy and as broiled as the surfers in Arcachon, Bordeaux-by-the-Atlantic were last summer.” Instead, many of the wines showed “amazing freshness,” Robinson wrote after returning from tasting wines in Bordeaux during en primeur, or futures week, when producers provide barrel samples for critics and merchants to taste.
Independent French critic Jean-Marc Quarin was similarly surprised, gushing about the wines in his en primeur report. “This vintage surpasses all known points of reference,” Quarin wrote. “There is no obvious logical or scientific explanation for this level of quality, and many winemakers have been humble enough to hold up their hands and admit that they are stumped.” In his view, “80% of the wines I have tasted are the best the estates have ever made.”
That said, the full picture of the vintage has yet to emerge as critic scores are still coming in. Many have also observed that the wines are not homogeneous, meaning, while some are excellent, others fall short. There is some question, too, of the vintage’s longevity considering how full of fruit and drinkable the wines are today.
“Will, in 10, 20 years time, all the wines be singing in the same way? Probably not,” says Justin Gibbs, Liv-ex’s deputy chairman. “Some will move more rapidly through their life and others might well last the 50 years of great Bordeaux. But what we do know is that we’ve got a vintage that everyone’s excited about.”
With such unexpectedly good wine emerging from a year of bad weather, producers will likely release the wines to market at prices at least 20% higher than last year, Gibbs says. That’s because the 2021 vintage wasn’t as good as 2022 appears to be, so it would be difficult to price it for less.
The problem with a significant price hike, is that the market for Bordeaux, generally, has been slow and “drifting,” he says. Activity has dried up in the last three months after several years of strong prices in the face of macroeconomic headwinds, including inflation and high interest rates.
“You have a market that’s basically feeling a bit tired and a bit risk averse, and yet you have this great vintage, in theory coming to it,” Gibbs says.
Collectors will begin to get an inkling of prices when Château Cheval Blanc releases its wines as early as Tuesday, followed by Château Leoville Barton, likely on May 11, and Château Beychevelle on May 14. These châteaux are “what you might call bellwether stocks that will give us an idea of how well this vintage is going to be received,” he says. But the complete story won’t be known until late June, when all the wines will have been released.
In the meantime, the negociants, who buy wine from the châteaux and sometimes produce it and sell it themselves, and the merchants, are excited, but they are also nervous, Gibbs says.
That’s because their collectors, who often buy year in and year out almost by habit, are now grappling with interest rates that are far higher than they’ve been for years, which is affecting their businesses and properties, and debt levels, he says.
These collectors may be thinking, “‘Quite frankly, I’ve got a lot of wine—it’s a great vintage, but it’s a very expensive vintage, relative to the recent past.
Do I need it, or can I afford to wait?’” Gibbs says. “We don’t know the answer to that yet.”
Traditionally, Bordeaux collectors preferred to buy wines en primeur, that is, two years before it’s bottled, because it’s less expensive. Buying wines that haven’t been bottled yet also enables collectors to request wines in magnums or other large formats.
But as Liv-ex details in its “Bordeaux 2022” report, several factors have been upending the dynamics of en primeur, and have made futures pricing less predictable. While a more diverse and ever-changing group of critics affects the market, the châteaux are also engaging in practices to maximize prices through the introduction of so-called recommended retail prices and by holding back supply from en primeur, Liv-ex said in the report.
While such strategies may favor the producers, they aren’t great for collectors, and could turn off younger buyers from entering the market. Those who have been collecting for 25 years or more are sitting on some great wines that they can sell for a profit, but collectors who began five years ago can buy the same bottles they purchased then at the same price today and not be out the added costs of insurance and storage, Gibbs says.
That dynamic creates a big question for collectors this en primeur season, Gibbs says. “Do you need this vintage now or can you afford to wait to see how it turns out in bottle?”
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