Jancis Robinson’s Weekend FT column ‘What’s the Point of Beyond Bordeaux’ contained a pretty shocking statistic.

In the article a leading UK merchant revealed that they sold £62 million of Bordeaux wine ‘en primeur’ in 2009, but just £900k this year. That’s a drop of -98.5% in just a decade and a half!

The merchant named is not alone in experiencing this decline.

We need to bin the fiction that the collapse in Bordeaux en primeur sales is due solely to ‘vintage variation’ or ‘healthy market cycles’. It is time to accept that there has been a fundamental and permanent shift in the way fine wine is purchased and collected today.

What is it that has changed since 2009/10? The standard (and wrong) answer is: ‘the châteaux just got too greedy with pricing’. Pricing does have a role to play in this story, but it is not the most important factor.

Today’s fine wine collector has two important things that he/she lacked in 2009/10:

• Full transparency on prices and scores for ALL fine wines (across ALL vintages for EVERY producer); and

• The ability to purchase ANY vintage instantly in one place (on the emerging ‘super platforms’ like Cru World Wine).

Two decades ago the secondary market for fine wine was almost non- existent. I remember my own experiences in the 1990s and early 2000s - when figuring out which vintage to buy meant hours on Wine Advocate followed by a horror show of multiple accounts with multiple merchants, resulting in wines stored all over the place, with no visibility or fungibility between them.

Thankfully, those days are gone.

Today’s advanced platforms show ‘price vs. score’ analysis for virtually every fine wine at a glance, with major critics’ scores assimilated. Collectors can see instantly, for any given producer, which vintage is most attractive based on current price and score. Acquiring attractive back vintage is also far easier than it used to be. Our platform has over 80,000 offers of live inventory, with multiple vintages and formats for all the major producers. And if a collector doesn’t like the offered price, they can bid the price they want.

These developments represent a fundamental change in the power relationship between collectors and producers. Collectors no longer have to accept an annual ‘take it or leave it’ offer from a Bordeaux estate. They now use analytical tools and the new secondary market liquidity to purchase whichever vintage they want.

This is a welcome and empowering development, but it is one that too many producers are struggling to come to terms with. All en primeur offers are today immediately (and easily) scrutinised to determine if they offer genuine value or not. If they don’t, the best-case scenario is that the collector will purchase an older vintage. The days when collectors would gratefully and passively accept an ‘allocation’ are over.

The opportunity for producers to become active participants in the newly developing secondary market is an open invitation, and an exciting one. It is an opportunity that some are now exploring. But this trickle needs to become a flood, because the market tail is becoming the dog. Whereas before collectors bought mostly en primeur, with the occasional foray into the back vintage market, today the position is reversed.

This doesn’t mean that fine wine brand loyalty is weakening. Our stats show that collectors are still very loyal to their favourite producers, but today they can (and do) pick and choose what to buy from across the back vintage range, often eschewing en primeur altogether if there are back vintages offered at better prices.

Producers need to embrace the change in collector behaviour and adapt their distribution accordingly. There are many things they can do, from releasing more aged inventory direct into the secondary market, to buying up back vintage inventory where they feel it is under-valued. And platforms like ours, backed by warehousing in Bordeaux, now make this easy and cost effective. Cru World Wine currently has over €25 million in live bids, the majority for Bordeaux wine. But this potential liquidity is not reaching the châteaux due to the inefficiencies in the current market.

Bordeaux en primeur hit rock bottom in 2025. It is time for the whole industry to embrace a different, and brighter, future.