I just got an e mail offering me Arnoux Lachaux RSV for $950. Good producer, but not a Mugnier, DRC, Leroy etc. Nor was the wine close to 100 points; Burghound 93-96 ditto Vinous.
For me Burgundy prices have been out of control for some time, and I have been inundated with overpriced offers for the last few months. This one struck me as particularly ludicrous. Anybody buying current releases of Grand Cru Burgundy?
No. As much as I’m probably too old to be buying 2015, but still, even if I was 30 I wouldn’t be a buyer.
Not me. Not at my age and certainly not at those prices.
+1. Ludicrous. But someone is buying and it won’t take many someones.
From the title of the post I presumed we were talking per case (6 or 12). For a bottle, that is utterly ludicrous. Someone’s putting their money in the wrong pension fund…
I’m not buying that, but, to be fair, from the couple of times I’ve had the Arnoux RSV it’s been right up there. Better than the 2 times I’ve had Mugnier Musigny 
! I think that ~$1k mark for a “great” (but not “best”) GC is the new normal. Just look at the offers for Rousseau Chambertin etc. Unlike bdx, the volumes here are so small that I can see prices continue to rise. Heck, I’ve seen Fourrier and Rousseau CSJ “offered” at that sort of price.
Makes buying at auction look like a relative bargain. I wonder if this kind of demand will eventually ruin or help Burgundy?
I’m not. I’ve been joking for the past few years that I struggle to more to afford Grand Cru Burgundy now than I did when I was a recent college graduate who swore that some day he would buy Richebourg and Romanee St. Vivant for his table for an occasional special occasion.
I used to think the limited supply would tame demand. Nope.
Also, at $950 front line, you can still “close out” the wine somewhere very selectively and make plenty of money selling at the eventual discount. This has been the case for at least one prominent Piedmont producer for years.
I wonder when the insanity will hit the truly awesome Volnay and Pommard 1ers you can get for $60-150. Hopefully never.
Dennis and Ryan - I think the “insanity” will spread, but of course become more diffuse in spreading. Ultimately, it’s probably good for the region because if certain blue chips can command these ludicrous prices it should spur on the quality-laggards to improve things - both “cashing in” but also providing consumers with more better choices. I would also expect it to provide influx of capital over time, with the ability to then invest in better facilities and more meticulous vineyard work. Of course, atm, the majority of gouging is in the wholesale and retail tiers, which seems to me an anomaly that will get worked through over the next few years. In the meantime, some of us consumers can feel quite vindicated and smart spending “only” $100 - $200 for top Pommard and Volnay !
I have been buying Arnoux for a few years now, but not this cru, and certainly not at this price.
It’s unlikely that many on this board are spending $1k on bottles like this, but there clearly are many in the world who will pay top dollar and beyond for any bottle that says Burgundy/Grand Cru/Great Vintage. And Arnoux is on the rise in terms of reputation and quality.
Still, I’m buying a few bottles of Grand Cru red Burg on release, but less and less every year. I will enjoy what I have in my cellar until it’s all gone though!
Same here, and Alan I think you have hit precisely on the reality that is going to affect the Burgundy market for some time.
What I am observing at a retail level is that the wines are going to fewer retailers and then getting snapped up by 1 or 2 people taking everything. I was offered 2013 Roumier Bonnes Mares at $875 per. I passed, and so did most of my friends. The wine never went on the shelf, but waited quietly in the back until someone came along and took all that remained after a few faithful made their purchases. Public perception and access has not changed, but behind the scenes loyalty is crumbling badly.
Grivot is another one. I spotted 12 bottles of the 2014 Richebourg recently- which is an unheard of allocation for a single retailer of such a wine these days (it comes in 1 bottle cases now). It is a retailer that does a lot of business with the very wealthy, and the wine will eventually sell at full asking price to 1-2 people, versus the past when people clamored for it and a lucky handful of people got a couple of bottles. Meantime, the premier crus for 2014 are drastically reduced, but still well above where 2011-2013 was getting closed out after the market rejected them at insane prices.
What is frustrating, but inevitable, is knowing a lot of the buying audience is not buying the wines out of a primary desire to drink them- and certainly not based on past personal experience. They are buying what they are supposed to have.
I am also seeing some instances where retailers are taking extra markups on the cherries (basically anything grand cru, plus everything made by certain Domaines) to offset the need to put anything less than “blue chip” on sale at some point.
This works for now, but it relies on a problematic system of fewer retailers, a handful of people buying anything that can be pointed to as a “top wine” in quantity, and the rest out there for sale at also very high prices- which may or may not get cut in half (or more) when and if someone does a closeout. That is not a viable long term marketplace.
Couple of points:
- Out of interest, I thought I would google “how many $1000 handbags are sold every year”. The results were fun and interesting to read. Illuminating reading I would recommend. I suggest that in five years’ time I should BUMP this thread and we can all look in awe at why didn’t you / we buy all the $1000 GC you / we could back when it was reasonable . There’s plenty of substitutes at much less $ if you’re not willing to buy that $875 version of Bonnes Mares (from an impartial, somewhat objective observer’s viewpoint)
- Allocations and loyalty are double edged. Sure, it’s great if you “got on the list” for Coche, Ramonet, DRC, Rousseau etc in the 80s (or even just the last 10 years) and have remained “loyal”. It’s easy to now feel entitled - I might even check with my provider whether the Rousseau allocation can be passed to my kids in my will - but remember there are timing-challenged millions out there who for no fault of their own (in some cases) never had or now have the opportunity to get onto those allocations. The market has a simple solution for this.
A Leonardo painting sold recently for half a BILLION dollars. Compared to that this is chicken feed. Majority of the WB don’t move in those elite circles where price does not matter.
I think it’s hard to compare Leonardo, Van Gogh paintings etc, and Grand Cru Burgundy.You are comparing the best of the best, and there will be no more produced with the Arnoux, an also ran, and way way down the totem pole of also rans if I am honest.
I have tasted some recent vintages, 2012 and 2009, and while it is a good wine, there are plenty of other wines both within Vosne and outside that I prefer for a fraction of the price. Even lesser terrors in the hands of a great winemaker are for me far more interesting wines. I would prefer a bottle of Cecile Tremblay Chapelle 2012 to the Arnoux RSV 2012, and Hudelot is making better RSV at a lesser price.
Let me say now, that an 2015 RSV by Arnoux will never be the kind of wine that any collector must have, nor does it have the cachet to be a fashion accessory, the quality to be a “Work of Art”, or the desirability at the price to be in any rational wine lover’s cellar. This not a hatchet job at Arnoux, although I have to say the cost here of RSV and as Alan points out, the Suchots is ridiculous.
But this is more a general throwing up of my hands at the greed of producer and/or merchant. If you want to kill the market, overprice your product, and see how quickly you sell out. The Bordelais discovered this to their cost; pricing high and selling to the Chinese. They are still trying to recover some of the lost good will in the US.
I’ve raised my eyebrows in amazement many times at wine price increases (first at the 2000 Bordeaux prices) but I’ve yet to see a noticeable consistent drop.
I picture people who tell their personal buyer something like “Buy me a bunch of wine, good stuff, first growth Bordeaux, grand cru Burgundy, but don’t spend too much - no more than 20 or 30 million”
$950 for a case? Maybe
If I had WAY more money than I currently do, or ever will, then bottles priced in this pricing band might come into play for me; but I don’t, and won’t, so they don’t and won’t.
And I don’t think the comparisons to goods that aren’t of the One Time Use type are fair; a bottle of wine gets used once, and then it’s gone, thereby making a $950 bottle of wine that you drink more expensive, in a sense, than a $950 painting hung in your living room.
Bordeaux pricing has drawn back a bit from the recent lunacy, but it’s still bad, and it’s going up again, but maybe Burgundy will push things too far, too; really, that’s the only way to figure out what the market will bear.
See, this is why income and wealth inequality are bad for us. You get too many people who literally don’t care about price tags. Combine that with low Burgundy production and ordinary consumers are screwed. RSV total production is like 2500 cases a year. There are 1600 billionaires in the world. Each one orders a case a year of the best grand crus just to show off to guests in their curated wine cellars in their vacation homes, that’s almost two-thirds of total RSV production that just vanishes from the market.
This won’t get fixed by “the market” because there’s no way to increase the production of top level Burgundy. Monopoly producers in a market like this don’t want to cut prices – if you have a substantial fraction of customers who are price insensitive then you earn more by keeping prices high and losing ordinary price-sensitive consumers so you can get the most from the price-insensitive people. Better to sell half your production at triple the price than all your production at a third the price.