Top-end Bordeaux prices drop
Bordeaux first growths have slipped down the order in a new market ranking, reflecting weaker prices for their wines. Châteaux Margaux, Lafite Rothschild, Haut-Brion and Mouton Rothschild dropped out of the top 10 in the latest Liv-ex Power 100 report, published in January, which is based on average prices for estates’ wines between 1 September 2018 and 31 August 2019.
Château Latour held on to its 10th position from the previous ranking, published a year earlier. It was the only one of the five first growth estates not to see a slight decline in average prices during the evaluation period.
Armand Rousseau rose from seventh place to first in the 2019 ranking, with fellow Burgundy producers Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Domaine Leroy in second and third places. Champagne houses Krug and Louis Roederer were fourth and fifth, up from 30th and 20th places respectively in the previous report.
Top-end Bordeaux wines struggled for price momentum in 2019, with political and economic uncertainty affecting the fine wine market more broadly. Liv-ex co-founder Justin Gibbs said: ‘The first growths continue to dominate the market in terms of liquidity – value and volume traded – but in 2019 their price performance let them down and this contributed to their drift in the [Liv-Ex] rankings.’
Some analysts separated younger and older vintages of top Bordeaux when considering price performance.
Miles Davis, of the Wine Owners trading platform, said in an outlook report for 2020: ‘I maintain my view that younger Bordeaux is fully priced, especially blockbuster vintages such as 2005, 2009 and 2010, where supply is still plentiful and prices are high.’ But he said there were ‘amazing opportunities’ in 2020 to buy ‘some fantastic older vintages, particularly 1989, 1990 and 1996, [which] are more available on the market than for some time’.