En Primeur: Buying Bordeaux Before It Is Bottled

There is a moment each spring, a few months after the harvest, when the wine world turns its attention to Bordeaux. The great châteaux open their cellars to critics and merchants, who taste the newest vintage while it is still raw and unfinished, resting in barrel two years before it will be bottled. On the strength of those early tastings, the wine is offered for sale. This is en primeur, the centuries old system of selling Bordeaux as a future, and it remains one of the more curious rituals in fine wine.

The logic is straightforward. By committing to a wine early, while it is still in barrel, a buyer hopes to secure it at the lowest price it will ever carry, before it is bottled, released, and, if the vintage is admired, chased upward by the market. For the greatest and scarcest wines, en primeur may also be the surest way to obtain them at all, since demand can far outstrip the supply that ever reaches the open market. The buyer pays now and takes delivery roughly two years later, once the wine is bottled and shipped.

The appeal, then, is a combination of price and access, and in a strong vintage the rewards can be considerable, with wines rising well above their opening price by the time they arrive. The tradition is woven into the fabric of Bordeaux, the mechanism by which the region's finest estates, whose story our guide to the five First Growths tells, sell much of their production.

Yet en primeur is not the guaranteed bargain it is sometimes made out to be. Prices are set by the châteaux themselves, and in some years they have opened so high that little upside remains, leaving early buyers no better off, or worse, than those who simply wait. The buyer commits capital years before receiving anything and must trust that the wine, still evolving in barrel, will fulfill its early promise. And the system depends utterly on trust in the merchant handling the purchase, since the money changes hands long before the wine does. En primeur rewards judgment and caution, not blind enthusiasm.

For the collector, buying en primeur is a skill worth learning but approaching with care, ideal in a great and fairly priced vintage and best avoided in a weak or overpriced one. It sits alongside the merchant and the auction house as one of the three principal ways to buy fine wine, each explored in our guide to starting a fine wine collection. For guidance on buying en primeur, contact us.