En Primeur is dead! Long live En Primeur!?

May 2025, Pauillac, Bordeaux

(21°C with blue skies and a lovely light breeze)

It has been almost 3 years now since our last Bordeaux ‘En Primeur’ purchase and along with my rather over simplified commentary at the time: ”Never say never” as I did back in 2023 over the 2022 Bordeaux campaign. The phrase went ”I will never buy En Primeur ever again.” It is not what the  EP market was designed for, and is still not whcih is why it does not work anymore.  A while back, decades ago infact, the whole point of the EP market was to keep a healthy relationship between the London Wine Trade and Bordeaux, it was a mutual way of Bordeaux doing an annual handshake to the London Fine Wine Trade as we where known then, for supporting a system designed by us and to support them. Giving them our money for two years to cover the costs of buying and housing their current vintage, until the next vintage came along. You simply received your allocation, on all the Cru Classes, then you either confirmed or not and then you paid the two tranches when the bill came through and then collected the wine two years later. It was worth tying up funds in those days, it was not complicated and infact I could almost say it was a lot of fun. Everyone was making a healthy 10% and we would even hop down to Bordeaux for a couple of days before the market began just to taste the raw stuff. All hunky dory and then of course the City lads, the grey market and the Asians all got involved along with their calculators & loads of cash, and so the greedy little Frenchies started to fill there buckets with the filthy lucre and have since used all that extraordinary profit made over the last 20+ years to build a kind of wine Disney land with silly looking modern cellars along with silly new looking properties. Oh la la! Has the wine drastically improved? No! It’s still the benchmark red wine producing region of the world and I would not want to swop a good bottle of Claret for anything else. But the prices! come on……

Alas this year, 2025, and for some strange reason (forgive my irony here, but the international fine wine market has collapsed, 2023-2025, as you may or may not be aware of) the Bordelais have decide to cut prices on some of their Chateaux bottled wines by up to 30%, even in the 1er Grand Cru Classe territory. Still, I reckon that it is not nearly enough to kickstart a true En Primeur market, and here we are, moi!, eating some apple crumble, as I have just purchased some of the 2024 Ch.Lafite-Rothschild (delivery? circa spring 2027). Why? It’s a dam good/great wine and the price is under 300euros a bottle. There is no Lafite in the world at this price and I will not be buying anything else this year. Mouton has just been released today. I will be buying some in 2027, not this week. A word in the ear of the Frenchies. ”Stop being so dam stingy. If you are serious about re-inventing a sustainable En P Market you need to reduce the release prices, all of them, by at least 50% and I am not kidding.”

2024 Ch.Lafite-Rothschild, Pauillac, Bordeaux
96% Cabernet Sauvignon; 3% Merlot; 1% Petit Verdot
A final yield of 32 hl/ha and representing just a third of the total production.

The first ever Lafite vintage certified organic (times have changed eh!) and tasted at Duhart-Milon with Saskia de Rothschild. Quite plump (the wine that is) and plush for the vintage (2024 that is!.) 

This Lafite is very spherical in it’s shape in the mouth, with gloriously refined cashmere tannins encircling the fresh, bright, crisp and crunchy dark berries and the black cherries. Just à point! it forms the dense and compact core around which the wine is structured vertically. Horizontally, the wine is again highly structured by a very well-defined central spine around which the graphite seems to gather with the tannins in this dimension stretching out the fruit over the palate. Very classical, very pure and precise, very focussed and always tender, soft and gently seductive. Almost opulent, but never quite, the austerity of the vintage reining it back and rendering this a little more ethereal and also a little more intellectual in the process. I cannot wait to open a bottle when it arrives in 2027. En Primeur is dead! Long live En Primeur!!

To refresh the olde palate, and very much needed, on returning to the office last week we had a fun and highly informative tasting of a new Champagne for me. Maison Champagne Roger Coulon based in Vrigny. The Coulon family own 11 hectares spread across 1er Cru villages Chouilly, Geux, Vrigny and Coulommes-la-Montagne. All are made with a minimum dosage of 3g/l. Without banging on here endlessly about all of the Champagne we tasted. The one bottle that was highly original and stood out for me was the Heri Hodie NV (or in the local dialect ‘Hairy Hoodie’). A Non Vintage fizz made from 100% Meunier. Monsieur Coulon takes the juice for this wine from his ‘réserve perpetuelle’ that he started over 25 years ago. It was disgorged July 2022. There’s a little wild element to this wine, a dryad spirit and lots of it! It’s an outrageous act of lusty fruit, crab apple and quince to begin with and then tucked into the folds of shimmering cherry-sweet acidity you can taste the peaches, the cranberries, blueberries. A crackle of sweet pastry. Satin texture. Succulent finish. Delicious! If you do manage to find some to try, good luck and just don’t over chill it.

 ”Wine improves with age, the older I get the better I like it!” .. W.P.H.