Bordeaux

Bordeaux is about 110,000 hectares of vines (CIVB), the great majority producing inexpensive wine. The collectible tier is a few hundred châteaux and perhaps 3% of volume, sold each spring as futures ('en primeur') through négociants, then traded for decades. Because release prices are published and the wines are made in large quantities, Bordeaux has the longest and most liquid price history of any wine.

How the economics work

Three structures define Bordeaux's economics. Classification: the 1855 ranking of the Médoc and Sauternes, Saint-Émilion's periodically revised classification, and Pomerol's absence of one, fix reputations and therefore the price a château can ask. The Place de Bordeaux: châteaux sell to négociants (through courtiers) who sell on to importers; the château captures the release price and the négociant the margin, and the whole system runs on the spring en primeur campaign, when the previous year's wine is offered before bottling. Scale: a first growth makes 150,000–300,000 bottles of its grand vin in a normal year, which is why Bordeaux dominates auction volume even where Burgundy dominates price per bottle.

Land

SAFER publishes vineyard prices by appellation each year. The spread inside Bordeaux is enormous: generic Bordeaux AOC vineyard has traded at roughly €10,000–15,000 a hectare, while the best Pauillac and Pomerol land is reported in the low millions per hectare — a ratio of more than a hundred to one within a single region. Land almost never changes hands at the top; the reported figures are inferred from the few transactions that do.

The collectible market

Bordeaux's share of the fine-wine secondary market fell from over 90% of Liv-ex-traded value in 2010 to well under half by the 2020s as Burgundy, Champagne, Italy and California grew — a shift widely reported by the trade press and visible in auction catalogues. The 2009 and 2010 vintages, released at record prices into Chinese demand, marked the peak of the 'Bordeaux bubble'; prices of those vintages fell for several years afterwards, the clearest drawdown in the modern record. Release prices since 2019 have generally been set below the trading level of older vintages in an attempt to revive en primeur, with mixed success — the 2023 and 2024 campaigns were widely described by merchants as the weakest in a generation.

Costs

A classified growth's production cost is dominated by labour and by the imputed cost of land rather than by grapes (it grows its own). Vineyard labour in the Médoc is intensive — hand harvesting, green harvesting, leaf-pulling — and the cost per hectare is reported in the tens of thousands of euros at the top estates. New French oak, 100% at the first growths, adds several euros a bottle. The result is a winery cost per bottle for a first growth that Corkonomics models in the tens of euros against a release price in the hundreds.