Well I’ve booked my plane ticket and car rental for Bordeaux’s busy primeurs week at the beginning of April. There has already been a fair degree of hype surrounding the quality of the 2015 vintage since harvest, with comparisons already being made with 2005, 2009 and 2010. But as with the last few years it will surely be price that is the major determinant of the success of Bordeaux 2015. With a very uncertain global economic outlook, the hope must be that prices won’t be much up on 2014 and surely offered at a substantial discount to the physically available 2005, 2009 and 2010 vintages? This probably won’t happen of course, partly because that hasn’t happened for almost a decade with the 2008 vintage being the last offered to customers at an attractive price en primeur.

Big personal investments [some made by me] in 2009 and 2010 have proved financially crippling for buyers of Bordeaux. Much of that wine bought en-primeur in 2010 or 2011 can now be bought as physical stock in a great many cases at much less [60% less in the case of Château Lafite-Rothschild] than it was first offered five or six years ago. Regardless of the quality of 2015, which I look forward to reporting upon in detail in these pages, it will certainly be yet another case of caveat emptor….only buy these up-coming wines as futures if they are offered at a significant discounts to any physically available comparable back vintages.

My advice to the major châteaux on the eve of this 2015 campaign is forget about undermining your over-priced offerings in 2011, 2012, 2013 and even [yes admit it] 2014, and simply price 2015 ‘to go’ please. For consumers reading this blog, if the châteaux don’t get prices right this year, go back and look at their 2009s and 2010s. They can be picked up for a song compared to their original prices and they are sitting in bottle already.

Lafite ’09 – now 60% less than it was in 2010