against about 16,000 cases of Lafi te. The question we must
now explore is where they all went, and what has become
of them now? Quite frankly, any producer making thousands of cases is more
concerned with getting it off the balance sheet, than where it
goes, and the same goes for the négociants.
In the case of Le Pin the answer is likely to be that the 2010s
went in much the same direction as the 2009s and the 2008s
before them. These had long been collectors’ items, so
irrespective of the ill that was to befall the market by the
summer, it is unlikely that too much will have found their
way back into the market either then or when they became
physical in 2013. All this means that for most producers in Bordeaux there was
no control over where the wine went, which made the market
prey to the speculative element from Asia which we know had
become highly signifi cant by this time. And the consequence of
this is simply that if you get caught re-selling a bottle of DRC
it is ‘woe betide’ as regards getting an allocation next year, for
larger producers it is out of their control entirely.
This, in fact, is what happened to the price of Le Pin 2010
when they became physical, and subsequently: This brings us back to the 2010s. How long does it take for
speculators to offl oad excess supply? Unfortunately, the wine
market lacks statistical evidence to allow for an accurate
answer to that question, so it’s pretty much guesswork. This
is the price chart for Château Lafi te 2010:
What happened here is that Robert Parker upgraded from an
in barrel score of 96-98 to a perfect 100 when it went into
bottle, so you have the combination of tightly held supply and
a healthy upgrade. So what of a wine in greater supply with
a perfect score?
Here is La Mission Haut-Brion 2009:
Have all the loose holders been shaken out? Lafi te makes
between 15-20,000 cases per annum. That’s a lot by the
standards of Le Pin and even of La Mission Haut-Brion, but
in seven years you would think there would not be much left
‘in the wrong hands’. The price chart suggests that by 2016
much of this selling had been done, but by our algorithmic
measurements Lafi te 2010 has been good value for a while,
so there has clearly been an ‘after-effect’.
We await a catalyst to light the blue touch paper under wines
such as this, and maybe the reviews of this great vintage will
provide just such a spark.
Author is head of research at Amphora Portfolio Management.
After a career in the City running emerging markets businesses
for such investment banks as Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank
he now heads up the fi ne wine investment research proposition
with Amphora.
‘Mission’ is hardly produced in prodigious quantities, making
around 7,000 cases a year, but there is a huge difference
between 600 and 7,500 cases in terms of where it ‘ends up’.
Drink Asia
21
Source: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2020/02/fi ne-wine-
investment-lighting-the-spark/
March-April 2020