The start of the autumn tasting season for the London wine trade is marked nowadays by a tasting called Beyond Bordeaux organised by one of the most respected Bordeaux négociants, CVBG, run by Mathieu Chadronnier (pictured above).
Not a single bottle of bordeaux wine is poured. Instead in Glaziers’ Hall this year 79 wines were on show, poured by representatives of their 42 producers who had flown in from Australia, California, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Germany and Austria.
Just three of the wines were French: two champagnes, one each from Thiénot and Lanson, plus Château d’Aussières in the modest Corbières appellation, which owed its presence in this august, or at least expensive, company to the fact that the estate is owned by the Rothschilds of Château Lafite.
This provides a clue to the history of what has become the Bordeaux négociants’ perennial September attempt to sell non-Bordeaux wines through their marketplace, collectively known as La Place de Bordeaux. The first non-bordeaux to be offered on La Place was the late Baroness Philippine de Rothschild’s Chilean Almaviva in 1998. Six years later, she started to sell her Napa Valley joint venture Opus One on the Place. The Tuscan Merlot Masseto followed in 2009 and, as the négociants’ income from selling bordeaux en primeur every spring started to decline, investing in non-bordeaux to sell a few months later seemed like an increasingly good idea to them.
Today they offer a host of wines with ambitious price tags to the world’s wine trade, several each day according to a prearranged timetable. The Rothschild Corbières is ostensibly the most humble, Clos Apalta’s third wine Prélude from Chile the least expensive. There was a time when my inbox seemed to be flooded by producers boasting their wines were to be offered on the Place de Bordeaux – I remember being particularly surprised by such a message from Craggy Range in New Zealand – although recently some other négociants have trimmed their portfolio slightly.
When I asked Chadronnier how he selects which wines to offer, he wrote, ‘we select our Beyond Bordeaux projects based on the wine itself, its story, and the people behind it – as it always comes down to a meaningful encounter’. He also reported that nowadays Beyond Bordeaux sales represent about 20% of CBVG’s turnover, bordeaux en primeur 35% (which must be a much lower proportion than it once was) and bordeaux back vintages 45%.
I remember meeting Cyril Chappellet in 2023 just after he had decided to offer his Napa Valley Cabernets on the Place and was still wondering whether it was a good idea. Because of the marked downturn in demand for fine wine from consumers in the US, he told me he is now pleased with his decision, particularly with the newfound exposure for Chappellet wines, rarely exported in the past, in Europe and Asia. CVBG, for instance, hold Beyond Bordeaux tastings similar to the London one in Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. The producers themselves still have to work at selling, however, turning up at these tastings and pouring their wines.
So what proportion of this great rump of wine, most of it very young and designed for cellaring, an exercise today’s wine drinkers seem less and less interested in, actually sells through?
Although a few merchants from continental Europe had been invited, the vast majority of the 140 attendees at CVBG’s Beyond Bordeaux tasting in London were members of the UK wine trade. They were clearly happy, in between gossiping, to have a chance to taste a wide range of wines, many very expensive, that are not commonly seen in the UK market. But that fact alone suggests that few purchases are made on the basis of these Beyond Bordeaux tastings in London.
I asked two of the leading UK fine-wine traders for their view of the exercise. Owner of Farr Vintners Stephen Browett has been lukewarm to downright cold on the Bordeaux wine trade ever since they stared imposing higher and higher en primeur prices in an obviously apathetic market.
‘Last year’, he reported by email, ‘Bordeaux represented 45% of our sales by value and 52% by volume. I’m pretty sure that this was the first time ever that Bordeaux was under 50%. [Bordeaux] en primeur last year was £2.4 million out of our turnover of £56 million (1,750 dozen) but this year it was only £900,000 (500 dozen) – a far cry from the 2009 vintage when we did £62 million primeur turnover (31,000 dozen).
‘As for Beyond Bordeaux there are far too many “foreign” wines offered by the Place and producers who ditched long-standing importers in each country have made a big mistake by just chasing the money with no control over where their wines are sold. The Bordelais are now really struggling to sell most of these wines.’
You might expect Farr’s rival London-based fine-wine trader Bordeaux Index, whose very name suggests an allegiance to Bordeaux, to be rather more enthusiastic – but you’d be wrong. Matthew O’Connell of Bordeaux Index reports that sales of bordeaux en primeur wines and those in the Beyond Bordeaux collection represent less than 5% and 1% of their turnover respectively. Unlike Farr, they have an online Live Trade platform for trading wine with and between their customers, just as Berry Bros & Rudd have done with their BBX – which presumably helps to explain just how relatively unimportant selling very young wines has become for them.
‘Just as for Bordeaux EP,’ he continued in an email, ‘price has emerged in recent Beyond Bordeaux campaigns as a further headwind, with the price ambitions of many producers becoming meaningfully detached from secondary market realities.’
The handsome booklet accompanying the CVBG tasting contained no prices. The new releases’ prices are apparently issued only on the morning each wine is offered to merchants, who then add their margin. But an analysis of current average retail prices of the previous vintage according to the price-comparison site Wine-Searcher.com suggests that the California wines, which represented the biggest group, 23 of the 79 wines presented in London, are the most expensive. The majority of these California offerings were West Coast ripostes to red bordeaux, with the 2021 vintage of the trio of 2022s from Verité in Sonoma already retailing for well over £300 a bottle, and the most expensive wine in the whole tasting being Dalla Valle’s Maya 2022, whose previous vintage sells for almost £460 a bottle currently – even more than Australia’s prime investment wine Penfolds Grange 2021 that was also included in the tasting.
I can understand the Bordeaux négociants’ pressing need to make up the shortfall now that bordeaux en primeur sales are flagging so obviously, but I do feel sorry for distributors all over the world who worked hard to establish a market for the wines of producers who have decided to turn their back on them and get into bed with the Bordeaux Place.
The wines I recommend below are the least expensive ones in this year’s Beyond Bordeaux collection that I scored highly. The prices given are current average retail prices for the previous vintage. It is to be hoped that these younger wines are less expensive and will appreciate in value to reward those who buy them – something that has not necessarily been the case with some recent Bordeaux wines offered en primeur.
Best-value from Beyond Bordeaux 2025
With principal grape variety/ies and the approximate average international retail price of the previous vintage according to Wine-Searcher.com.
Reds
Clos Apalta, Prélude 2023 Apalta, Chile 14.5%
Carmenère, Cabernet Sauvignon £18
Château d’Aussières 2021 Corbières, Languedoc 13%
Syrah, Mourvèdre, Grenache Noir £25
Almaviva, Epu 2023 Puento Alto, Chile 15.5%
Cabernet Sauvignon £39
Telmo Rodriguez, Matallana 2022 Ribera del Duero, Spain 14.5%
Tempranillo £50
Zuccardi, Finca Canal Uco 2022 Paraje Altamira, Mendoza, Argentina 12%
Malbec £59
Cheval des Andes 2022 Mendoza, Argentina 14%
Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec £64
Bibi Graetz, Testamatta 2023 IGT Toscana, Italy 14%
Sangiovese £65
Chappellet, Signature 2022 Napa Valley, California 14.8%
Cabernet Sauvignon £69
Nicolas Catena, Zapata 2021 Mendoza, Argentina 13.5%
Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec £75
Montes, Muse 2021 Puento Alto, Chile 14.5%
Cabernet Sauvignon £80
Whites
Jim Barry, The Florita Cellar Release 2015 Clare Valley, Australia 12.3%
Riesling £49
Dr Loosen, Wehlener Sonnenuhr Grosses Gewächs 2019 Mosel, Germany 12.5%
Riesling £67
See our tasting notes database for reviews, suggested drinking dates and scores on the vintage being offered, and in some cases other vintages, too. For international stockists, see Wine-Searcher.com.
Back to basics
| How is fine wine sold? |
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Bordeaux, the region that sells the greatest volume of investment-grade wine in the world, has a very particular system for selling it. Since the 1970s the latest vintage from the 61 classed growths and their equivalents (see the Back to basics section at the end of The Mouton Man) has been offered en primeur to négociants (merchants) in the city of Bordeaux via courtiers (brokers), long before the wine is bottled but after cask samples have been sampled by media and the trade. There is a timetable of these early-morning offers throughout the early summer. The négociants then offer these young wines to their network of clients around the world and those clients – typically a fine-wine specialist merchant such as Farr Vintners or Bordeaux Index in London – then offer them to their customers. So this is a distribution system with many links in the chain, meaning several margins along the way.
In Burgundy and the Rhône, things are more straightforward. Foreign importers taste at each domaine, decide what to buy and then make a special offer of the latest vintage to their customers each year.
For most other fine wines, producers have a specific importer in each country – in the US sometimes state by state – with whom they work to build up a reputation, distribution and sales. |
