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Grand Bordeaux prices itself out of my market

Sorry for the heart-rending beginning, but when I started buying first-growth Bordeaux 30 years ago this month, Mouton 1970 was £80 a case and so-called "super seconds" such as Cos or Pichon-Lalande were around £45. It was possible in Paris to buy the greatest Bordeaux from the 1928 vintage for as little as £15 a bottle. I remember getting hold of a 1961 Ducru for £8 and wasting it on a snotty Frenchwoman who knew nothing about great wine. She wasn’t especially adept at life in general - a few years later she was sectioned for attacking her husband with an axe.)

The 1982 vintage put an end to this idyll. Opening prices for first growths hit £300 and for super seconds just under £100. John Armit shocked people by suggesting he would open Petrus '82 at £450 a case—nearly double the '81, though now, of course, it seems ridiculously reasonable, given that the '82 vintage sells for upwards of £35,000.

The 2005 opening prices also set new records. Most were unable to get their hands on first growths for less than £4,000 a case, and super seconds upwards of £800 to £1600. The first growths have nearly doubled while the super seconds have not really gone anywhere—further evidence that at this level wine buyers are either millionaires or billionaires.

There was some interesting gossip from a meal this week at The Square, one of London's greatest restaurants. One of the leading wine brokers gave a tenth-anniversary dinner for top clients, and invited Pierre Lurton, manager of Cheval Blanc and Yquem, as the wine provider.

He mentioned as an aside that Cheval will never again release its wine for less than £3,000 a case en primeur, which means after locking up your money for two years plus paying duty and VAT, it will end up costing you nearly £330 a bottle if you ever think of drinking it. I should add that Cheval Blanc is one of the two greatest St Emilion in Bordeaux, along with Ausone (which since 1995 has become nearly twice the price of Cheval because of a brilliant new wine maker plus its tiny size of less than 2000 cases to Cheval’s 8000). Cheval has always been astounding from birth, which means many drinkers drank their '47s and 49s well before the Suez crisis, when in fact they are still celestial today if well stored.

Does this mean that punters should scour the existing backlists and snap up relative bargains such as the '95, 2001, 2002 and 2004 vintages which are all around £2,000 a case or less? Well, a bit of background might help first.

Cheval and Yquem are no longer independent agents; they are owned by Bernard Arnault and LVMH, his luxury company. Arnault took over Cheval in the 1998 vintage and immediately held back supplies, though since it was such a great Right-Bank vintage, prices were bound to have gone up regardless. Later he acquired Yquem, the most profound white wine in existence. Lurton tried to rack up the opening price for the 2005 vintage (something around £3,500 a case) which didn't find acceptance in the market so he was savvy enough to immediately discount it the following day, despite its being a near perfect vintage.

This time however, the wine trade is mixed about his desire to never open Cheval at less than £3,000. While some of the larger brokers say this is just greed, others concede that the 2005 vintage racked up the prices to a new high, and, if subsequent vintages have not been as great or quite as expensive, a threshold has been crossed once and for all. I tend towards the latter view, so it may indeed be wise, for those who still have the taste for grand wine, to search out Chevals still well below the new benchmark.