UNDER THE SURFACE | En Primeur – Is Burgundy going the same way as Bordeaux?
Burgundy's 2024 vintage has had a lukewarm reception, yet for the most part, prices remain high. In a stuttering fine wine market, should producers in the Côte d'Or be heeding the lessons of their counterparts 500km southwest, asks Guy Woodward
Here in London, the second week of January is now firmly established as Burgundy En Primeur week, with professional wine buyers and amateur wine lovers alike dashing from one merchant’s tasting to another. This year, as samples of the 2024 vintage were swirled, and notes swapped, there was the usual deluge of online commentary on vintage conditions (wet and arduous), together with the wines’ quality (whites excellent, reds mixed) and their overall quantity (sparse).
The more furtive chatter centred around arguably the most important element of all – price. The recent market for top-end Burgundy has been, to say the least, volatile. Unprecedented price rises over the second half of the 2010s took the top wines stratospheric, before the bubble was pricked early in the 2020s. Remind you of anywhere?
Some merchants were willing to acknowledge the elephant in the room. ‘There is a cautionary tale 500km to the southwest,’ warned Guy Seddon, head of fine wine buying at Corney & Barrow, in the merchant’s vintage report. ‘Bordeaux has seen its customer base dwindle over the past decade, through an approach to En Primeur pricing that has largely removed the incentive to buy upfront.’ Notwithstanding the much smaller quantities produced in Burgundy, Seddon maintains that the same principle applies. ‘Drinkers still love Burgundy, but they won't buy it at any price,’ he said. ‘Nobody wants to feel that they are overpaying.’
'Drinkers still love Burgundy,
Guy Seddon,
but they won't buy it at any price. Nobody wants to feel that
they are overpaying
CORNEY & BARROW
In such a climate, Seddon cautioned that customers would find price rises for the 2024 vintage ‘hard to swallow’ – even if domaines’ volumes had been hit. ‘The value of comparable previous vintages should inform new release prices,’ he argued. ‘As we saw with 2021, using lower yields as justification for higher prices doesn’t wash.’ He was, he added, all too aware of the squeeze on margins for producers and merchants as a result. ‘But bottles stuck in the supply chain are no use to anyone. They are made to be uncorked. Much as we feel for our friends in Burgundy, in the current market, a short crop is perhaps not entirely unwelcome.’
Catherine Jaën MW, his counterpart at fellow merchant Lay & Wheeler, agrees: ‘For a few years now, an imbalance has been building in Burgundy,’ she said. ‘Release prices have been high, leaving in their wake a growing pile of expensive recent vintages not yet ready to drink [and] struggling to compete with a softened secondary market where mature vintages are, when attractively priced, snapped up quickly. The sharp shortages in 2024 may be the correction the market needs.’
Even some critics – who normally concern themselves only with the wines, rather than the market – weighed in. Matthew Hayes, Burgundy correspondent for jancisrobinson.com, commented: ‘In such demanding economic times, there is a fair argument to regard the tiny harvest of 2024 as a blessing. It is not a vintage for the ages, and as such, surely better that it is more quickly sold through.’
Producers, it seems, are less convinced. Paul Epistalié, director and winemaker at Simonnet-Febvre, and president of the Union des Grands Crus de Chablis, was at pains to point out that, thanks to devastating frost and hail earlier in the season, yields in Burgundy’s northernmost outpost sat somewhere between a third and a half of the norm. ‘2022 and 2023 were recovering after the low-yielding 2021, so 2024 represents the worst possible timing from a market perspective,’ he told 67 Pall Mall. As a result, ‘Prices this year are dictated by quantity not quality.’ While it was prolonged wet weather that impacted yields in the Côte d’Or, Eléonore Latour, vice president at Louis Latour – one of Burgundy’s largest producers (and parent company of Simonnet-Febvre) – said the same rules apply. ‘We always say we need three good vintages in a row – quantity-wise – to be able to lower prices,’ she told us. ‘We had 2022, 2023 and then bam – 2024 hits.’ There is no escaping the fact, she added, that scarcity is a major contributing factor when it comes to setting prices – particularly for negociants, who rely on bought-in grapes. ‘When there is a lack of grapes, the prices go up, and the grapes go to whoever can afford them.’
Matthew Starr, CEO of online trading platform WineBourse, has little sympathy, however: ‘Lower yields do not justify higher prices,’ he argues.‘The reason yields are lower is because of the poor growing season, and thus 2024 is, by definition, a sub-par vintage.’ He puts the vintage at a similar quality level to 2013 and 2017, and urges buyers to be ‘very cautious’ of merchants ‘pushing consumers to accept higher prices based solely on scarcity’, which he describes as ‘utter nonsense’. ‘Wine is not a commodity like wheat, where supply and demand impact price,’ Starr says. ‘No-one HAS to buy a particular vintage. Fine wine has longevity – and you can look at the vintage curve to judge value and find better, cheaper examples from older vintages.’
Latour counters that most of the industry is mindful of such concern, and of the economic climate: ‘I'm not going to talk for everyone, but I think most producers are listening. At Latour, prices haven’t gone up in 2024 – we are remaining stable for the most part, or even going down for some wines. We don’t want Burgundy to become this unreachable region where no one can afford the wines.’
It’s a sentiment often heard from producers, with Thibault Liger-Belair, founder of the eponymous Nuits-St-Georges domaine, and Laurent Delaunay, head of négociant Edouard Delaunay, both on record as expressing their hope that prices on the secondary market would come down. The much in-demand grower Benjamin Leroux called the recent market ‘crazy’, adding that ‘just getting back to normal would be great’. In the longer term, however, it is the price of grapes that has to come down to have a major impact. ‘And sadly, it's not the case yet,’ he said. ‘There are signs, but the small crop in 2024 is bad timing.’
Adam Bruntlett, Burgundy buyer for Berry Bros & Rudd, had some sympathy, conceding that the small crop made it difficult for small producers – ‘and 2025 is not particularly large, either’. The stronger euro hasn't helped either, meaning BBR had had to cut its margin to remain competitive. ‘Everyone says prices are too high,’ he said, ‘And I’ve no doubt [the producers] are all price-conscious. But they're not also that keen on going down.’
Ultimately, though, most UK merchants seem satisfied. ‘Prices have largely been held, which, given it’s a smaller vintage, is welcome,’ said Matt Tipping, CEO of Jeroboams. Martin Tickle, the merchant’s fine wine buyer, added further context: ‘Domaines are acutely aware that their wines must be opened and enjoyed, not locked away as investible curiosities,’ he said. ‘Volumes are too small to expect reductions, but there is a clear sentiment that stability is a virtue – an affirmation that Burgundy still belongs at the table.’
Catherine Jaën MW of Lay & Wheeler also heralded growers for not raising prices, recognising, she said, ‘the need for calm in the market’. David Roberts MW at Goedhuis Waddesdon claimed that ‘All our domaines are aware of and sensitive to current market conditions,’ and that, ‘barring the odd exception, they have restrained from a farmer’s temptation to compensate small yields by increasing prices.’ He added, however, that ‘The pressure of demand over supply on Burgundy’s greatest wines shows no sign of abating, and even went so far as to say: ‘The En Primeur system may have its critics, but the fact is that if you like Burgundy, [2024] is the time to buy.’
That may be pushing it, says Starr, who is certainly one of those critics. ‘We’re starting to see Bordeaux En Primeur habits play out in Burgundy, elevating prices irrespective of the quality of the vintage,’ he warned. ‘But En Primeur is not buying wine, it’s a futures market for speculating on the price of wine. And such practices have resulted, with alarming frequency, in consumers buying wines at inflated prices, when they could pick them up years later much cheaper.’ His words were backed up by Nick Pegna, global head of wine and spirits at auction house Sotheby's, who told Club Oenologique magazine that confidence in the secondary market had been ‘undermined by recent Bordeaux primeur prices and overly ambitious price increases in Burgundy.’
A dispassionate view came from Matthew Hayes at jancisrobinson.com, who wrote that, while the generosity of 2022 and 2023 had optimists hoping that prices would start to soften, Mother Nature was having none of it. ‘The tiny harvest and sheer costs of production in 2024 mean price reductions remain almost impossible.’ Hayes noted that, as he put it, ‘Everyone is feeling the pinch’ – even at grand cru level, where consumers are ‘turning up their noses at wines that just a couple of years ago were flying out of cellars at €350–€450’. Times are tough across the board, he added, ‘and if you don’t have the pedigree (for which read ‘long-term investment-gain potential’), especially so’.
Veteran critic Michael Schuster MW, meanwhile, expressed surprise that, given the quality, the prices of the reds hadn’t come down. ‘Sure, they’re transparent and pure but they’re also a bit thin in places, and there’s no denying it’s a “lesser” vintage on the whole. It’s tough for growers, but the market is the market and I suspect it’ll be a tough sell given that there’s older stuff out there at lower prices.’
So how is the market? As this newsletter went to press, most 2024 en primeur offers had been open for no more than a week. That was enough time, however, for Bruntlett at Berry Bros to declare the campaign ‘tricky’. ‘It’s definitely tougher [than usual],’ he told us. ‘There's depressed demand, as there is for all wines at the moment. From that point of view, having a small vintage isn't the worst thing.’
Bruntlett reported demand outstripping supply for certain wines, particularly in the Côte de Nuits, where production was particularly meagre. He also noted novelty as an attractive element of offers – be it new suppliers, one-off cuvées or village-level wines bolstered by premier cru grapes unavailable in sufficient quantity to make a dedicated wine (of which there were several in 2024).
George Wilmoth at Justerini & Brooks expects the vintage to perform similarly to 2021 [another small yielding vintage]. ‘We’re confident we’ll sell the vast majority of what we have,’ he said. ‘The whites will fly and I don’t see them dropping further [in price]. 2015, ‘16, ’18 and ‘19 whites are all drinking well now, and there’s not much 14 left, so there’s only ‘22 and ‘23 with any volume on the market.’ The reds, by comparison, ‘are more varied and there’s lots [of older vintages] around’.
So is the Côte d’Or’s star on the wane? ‘2014-2022 was a phenomenal run for Burgundy,’ says Wilmoth. ‘People were almost buying blind and still asking for more. Now, merchants are being held to account and customers are very selective – but not just when it comes to Burgundy and not just when it comes to wine.’
‘I think we're at a plateau now, in terms of where producers can go with prices,’ added Bruntlett. Wilmoth agrees. ‘The desire is there, but consumers are more cautious, looking for value, quality-conscious. There’s also more choice in fine wine than ever before. South Africa, Spain, Loire, California… they all offer great value for money and the quality is sky high if you know where to look.’ Now that's the sign of a good merchant – they always have something to sell…
For an accompanying piece charting the critics' reception to Burgundy 2024, see here
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