En Primeur 2014 update
After a long weekend – French bank holiday on Friday, British bank holiday on Monday – the campaign has roared into life again today.
There have been releases from Cos, Talbot and most importantly La Mission Haut-Brion and Haut- Brion, and we can now beginning to see a semblance of a pattern developing in the thinking behind the prices. The pattern? Inconsistency! In simple terms, Cos looks expensive, Talbot and Haut-Brion well priced, and La Mission Haut-Brion verges on excellent value.
Cos d’Estournel is currently the fourth most expensive vintage on the market, and there seems little to recommend it at this price. Yes, Cos ’14 was an excellent wine, showing brilliantly at the tastings, but why would you pay this price when you can invest in the excellent ’06 for less? It might end up representing good value in years to come, but it isn’t a risk worth taking now…
Talbot is one of our favourite ‘mid-priced’ Bordeaux, and you can find really good examples from the turn of the century that drink marvellously now. Whether this vintage will age well remains to be seen, but it is well priced at about £300 a case. Not a wine to be considered investible, for the simple reason that fixed costs of storage etc. will remove virtually any upside, even if it performs very well.
So, on to Haut-Brion and its neighbour/soul mate, La Mission Haut-Brion.
Starting with La Mission (my personal wine of the vintage, for what it is worth), the release price is around the £1400 mark. Its consistently high score (95+ from most critics) makes it the best Mission of the last 15 years after the stellar ’05, ’09 and ‘10s, but its price is well short of the £3500 – £4000 bracket that these sit in. Even relatively weak vintages of La Mission tend to be £1200 a dozen, so this wine really does appear to be right in the sweet spot for investors. I expect this wine to sit top, or at least very near the top, of the list of our recommendations.
Haut-Brion is also very attractively priced at £2300, and is at the same level as Mouton (but is probably the better wine). A lot of Haut-Brions (’04, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’11, ’12) sit between £2500 and £2750 per dozen so this price for what could well be a superior wine is attractive without being so lip-smackingly exciting that we rush headlong into buying it. I think it is likely to fare well, and be one to add, but without knowing at what price Margaux and Lafite will come to market, we can’t be sure…