Well, Idk about Keller bc I don’t drink Riesling but I do follow MG inventory and it’s sold out after offers. If you want to argue people are artificially manipulating their online inventory you can make that argument but I doubt it’s true.
The VR price is not going to come back to earth. Now that they have carved out the Colombiere there is still a limited amount of VR. It should cost less, but I sorely doubt it will. Losing the tariffs should help, but could get masked by a 2019 vintage price hike.
Michel,
When there is only a few hundreds or thousand bottles for a given wine for the whole world, most merchants will be very lucky if they only get one or a few cases to sell… so inventory costs nothing
… and if, as they do with MG prices, they put an asking price equal to 3 to 4 times the price they pay to MG, the reward can pay for many decades of storage costs at today’s interest rates… so not a problem
So, I am not surprised merchant play this game, margin is equal to thousand times inventory costs.
It is worth noting that a few producers in Burgundy have now decided to join forces and cut the trade and to create an internet site where they will sell their bottles directly to customers (not yet operational but very soon).
Of course, I doubt they can do this in the US or the Far East given trade rules (protectionism) but the project has kicked off in France. The good news will be decent prices, the bad news is there is a risk some wines will sell out very rapidly… but they may introduce some control (limited allocations, customer details…).
Some other producers (some of which I get direct allocation) do manage the proportion they"allocate" to different types of business sectors (restaurants, direct customers, shops, big merchants…).
Good evening Antoine,
To clarify- the intent of my analogy was to explain why the secondary market price of a wine like DRC Echezeaux is more than double (sometimes far more than double) the price of any other Echezeaux in the marketplace. It is not just a matter of the rarity factor you cite- which applies to all top burgundies- but also of brand name.
Historically, while the increase in demand for the higher end wines of a given producer in a bull market have also driven up the prices of the less heralded bottlings, in the current environment the effect of brand name is more readily visible with producers like DRC, Roumier (Chambolle AC at $250+), Leroy (Savigny Narbontons over $1,000) etc. than it has been in the past. Roumier Musigny started getting really expensive with the 2002 vintage. By 2005, the Bonnes-Mares was really getting up there. But it is only recently that the Chambolle AC has taken a percentage price increase from a decade ago that is comparable to what has happened with the rarest wines.
This is what I was pointing out and it has created a pattern that resembles that with many luxury goods- one in which there is a certain price you pay just to own anything from a given brand. It is the same reason that in the current marketplace the 2001 and prior mixed case assortments from DRC sell with a far smaller difference in price between lesser and greater vintages than has been the case historically.
I am curious to see how this plays out in the long term. With worldwide interest in wines that were once distributed in a fairly limited number of countries, I think at the top levels very high burgundy prices are here to stay. What I am curious to see is what happens with the “lower end” wines of top producers, “lesser” vintages and very good to great but not A+ blue chip Domaines in the next 10 years.
1 Like
This is amazing news. Makes good sense- but like you say, probably not great news for the US except for the collectors who are already buying direct. I would be grateful if you would post more on this as any plans become public. That would be a real game-changer indeed.
I doubt much will change. Even if a few people get the wine cheaply, many of them will just flip the wine and the price most people will pay will be about what it is now. I have found some hard to get Burgundies at much cheaper prices in Burgundy, but even there, at wine stores, they generally only allow you to buy a limited # of bottles and even then often only if you buy something else. As Michael said, the issue is more people want the wine than there are bottles of wine. Happens with Screaming Eagle, happens with le Pin, happens with top Barolo, happens with small production Burgundies.
For example, last time I was in Burgundy, I needed Champagne for a dinner I was attending and I went to a store where I convinced them to “let” me buy one bottle of MG Vosne Romanee (at a pretty good price but still above what they sell it for at the winery) for every bottle of Champagne I bought.
Fast fwd a couple years and those prices don’t look so bad.
1 Like
Any of these look alright?
I tried a 2018 Feusselottes for the first time 2 weeks ago and thought it was really good. Not pictured: the Vosne Romanee at 245 Euro. Curious if there’s anything worth going out of the way for.
I just can’t stomach the prices, but if forced I would go with the Chambolle.
Better than average.
Based on a quick look at Wine Searcher, that seems to be the best deal. I definitely don’t need a bottle of it but the price doesn’t suck (compared to what it goes for usually)
The price doesn’t suck now. It wasn’t so long ago that the prices were 50%-60% less. That’s what I can’t stomach.