5 Things to Know About the Future of La Place de Bordeaux

What Lies Ahead for la Place de Bordeaux?

Four months, seven episodes and dozens of interviews with experts from around the world later — and now, the Inside La Place de Bordeaux limited series podcast has come to an end.

In the seventh and final episode, hosts Pauline Vicard and Felicity Carter looked back at what they had discovered about Bordeaux’s unique and historic system — and tried to forecast its future.

Here are five of their insights:

1. The institution of En Primeur still works — for the top end

Each year like clockwork, the wine press questions the viability of En Primeur, the barrel tastings that take place in Bordeaux each April. 

For many, the idea of buying wine two years before it’s released no longer makes sense. The whole idea was to secure wines at the cheapest possible price. But now, the barrel prices are very high and the wines are unlikely to appreciate very much on the secondary market.

In this case, why not just buy older vintages?

But Bordeaux remained highly responsive to the market and in 2024, chateaux lowered their prices. Suddenly, there was a real reason to buy once again.

“We already knew that the prices would have to be much lower, and on average they were,” said Mathieu Chadronnier, president of Bordeaux négociant CVBG.

So the system is still working — but for fewer properties. Max Lalondrelle, the Managing Director of Fine Wine at Berry Bros. & Rudd told Areni, “Eighty percent of our turnover is coming from about 30 properties out of 160”.

Lalondrelle said the market has been narrowing for years, with the top of the pyramid taking more of the attention and money. “Where we were offering 200 properties before, we went down to 180, then we’re probably down to 160 now. There’s a very good chance that the way things are going, En Primeur will be focusing only on 50 to 100 properties.”

He added, “the price difference between the top and the bottom is more today than it was 20 or 30 years ago”.

In other words, Bordeaux is becoming more polarised.

Wine tasting during En Primeur 2024, Picture by Pierre Planchenault, courtesy of the UGCB

2. Climate change is having an impact

Another issue is that a combination of changing weather and ever better viticulture means the wines are getting better and better.

“Until the recent past, the fortunes of En Primeur were following the fortunes of vintages,” said Chadronnier. In those days, great vintages created great excitement.

“My first campaign was in 2001. Then 2003 was exciting; 2005 was exciting.” So was 2009 and 2010. And then came the brilliant wines of 2015,2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022. “I think one of the big reasons why this campaign did not fare as we were hoping it would is because we had an unprecedented succession of great vintages.”

In other words, En Primeur no longer makes sense if most vintages are great ones. Why buy two years in advance, if it’s almost certain that great wines will always be available? The sense of urgency has been lost.

Not only that, but the end of cheap money has made merchants more cautious about buying big quantities of stock.

All these factors, plus the reality that the system now only works for top producers, mean En Primeur will have to change, though how it will evolve is not yet clear.

But it won’t disappear — it’s too important for Bordeaux.

“There’s a three week window where everybody is focused on your wines, and everyone is talking about them,” said Elin McCoy, wine critic for Bloomberg. “You have the spotlight on you and your wines for a significant period of time, so that’s all to the good for you.”

The proof of its worth is shown by how many other regions have tried to copy En Primeur, with new vintage tastings of their own.

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3.Bordeaux’s great strength remains its ability to make fine wine at scale

While wine is an agricultural and cultural product, it’s also a fashion business. Today, Bordeaux is not as fashionable as it once was, particularly with younger consumers.

Jane Anson, noted wine writer and critic, says Bordeaux has seen it all before.

“Bordeaux has been counted out so many times, and it always manages to find a way through,” she says. “You look at 19th century writings about Bordeaux and what are people saying? They’re saying the top wines are too high, the prices are ridiculous and nobody’s going to want to buy them. And that turns out not to be the case, again and again.”

There are other very great fine wine regions, such as Burgundy and Napa, but they produce their top wines in tiny, tiny quantities, of 1,000 to 5,000 bottles per winery.

Bordeaux, however, can produce many cases of fine wine at a time — 1,000 to 5,000 cases or more per château. It has, as Anson says, the unique ability to make fine wine at scale.

“There’s still the potential for the fine wine market to make money from Bordeaux,” she says. “I am still confident that it will find a way through.”

4. La Place will continue its international expansion

Masetto, the Italian Super Tuscan, joined La Place in 2009. Since then, there has been an ever-growing number of wines from all over the world being sold by Bordeaux’s negociants.

La Place offers fine wine producers something remarkable: a depth and breadth of fine wine expertise, coupled with a fine-grained knowledge of the world’s fine wine markets and plenty of logistics expertise. La Place also offers prestige, making it highly attractive to many of the world’s fine wine producers.

The world of fine wine has also fundamentally changed in the last 25 years. “Fine wine” is now a distinct category, where fine wine producers from far-flung regions may have more in common with each other than they do with other producers from their own territories.

“We will see more wines from beyond Bordeaux come to La Place,” says Chadronnier. “That trend is not going anywhere because the fundamental rationale that fine wine is one single category that embraces regions and countries of origin remains. The fact that it addresses the same consumer remains. So I don’t see that going away.”

It’s no simple matter to list a wine on La Place. Negociants must be confident the wine will sell, which generally means they will only list the most sought-after wines.

Such wines generally have distribution networks in place that can be expensive and difficult to disrupt. And in the world of wine, disrupting long-standing relationships is a fraught thing to do.

Not only that, but plenty of “beyond Bordeaux” wines have found that La Place distribution has not been the golden ticket to success they hoped it would be.

But, overall, it’s probable that La Place will continue to expand its reach well beyond its base in Bordeaux.

Tasting during En Primeur 2024, photo Pierre Planchenault, courtesy of the UGCB

5. Bordeaux will both contract and expand

The world of wine is undergoing a structural change, which is also affecting Bordeaux.

“We have seen quite a bit of concentration of châteaux. Some of the more successful estates are expanding,” says Chadronnier. “What we will probably see is a serious contraction of the vineyard base of Bordeaux. It’s in play already.”

There are tragic stories behind these disappearing vineyards, he adds, because “those who are pulling out vineyards are doing it because they are in very dire, personal financial situations.”

But within a decade, he goes on, Bordeaux will be a much stronger region than it is today.

La Place’s role will remain integral to that success.

“La Place is the platform that best bridges the gap between producers and consumers on a global scale,” concludes Chadronnier.  “La Place is the hub where the world of fine wine meets and interacts. It helps the pollination of ideas, it enhances and accelerates the emerging of new trends.”

Chadronnier says that La Place “has a  collective duty to contribute to the rebound of Bordeaux so that it may remain the beacon it always was. In the end, fine wine is more than wine, it is a culture and a community. And Bordeaux has a special role in nurturing the cultural dimension of fine wine and in bringing the community together.”

His final words: “That’s probably a good way to summarise the future of La Place indeed: making the world of fine wines into one.”

Listen to the full episode: The Future of the Place de Bordeaux

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