More bleak news for fine wine

The latest Cellar Watch Market Report brings more miserable news for the fine wine world as Liv-ex’s indices continued to slide in April following a torrid en primeur campaign.

All of Liv-ex’s major indices, the Fine Wine 50 tracking the first growths, the Fine Wine 100 tracking the leading labels on the secondary market, the Bordeaux 500, the Fine Wine 1000 covering the leading labels in fine wine and the Investables index were down both month-on-month and the year-to-date – although all are up over five years.

Over April all of the indices fell by around 1% (1.2% in the case of the Bordeaux 500), while over the year-to-date declines range from the 3.7% dip in the Fine Wine 1000 to the 11.8% decline seen by the Fine Wine 50.

The news is unsurprising considering that the Fine Wine 100 has been falling for an incredible 13 straight months.

April was dominated by the 2013 en primeurs but, as reported by the drinks business, interest was next to nothing among buyers – a situation many merchants seemed resigned to.

The report showed that the 2012 campaign, although another failure, at least managed to make up 16% of monthly trade by value, the 2013s scraped just 3.3% and turnover in April fell 23% on March’s total.

Meanwhile, Robert Parker’s latest in-bottle scores for the 2011s has caused a minor boost in trade which was expected.

Pavie (the cheapest available vintage) on 95+ points and Ducru-Beaucaillou on 92+ accounting for 45% of 2011 trade by value.

Elsewhere it was a rare piece of bad news for Burgundy which apparently fell to a near three year low in monthly trades of just 2.7% (overall Bordeaux continued to dominate with 82.8% of trades in April).

Champagne and the Rhône apparently made gains from this as did Spain, Vega Sicilia’s Unico 2004 boosting that country’s presence to 1.4%.

The big winner when monthly rises was added up though was Italy. With the Burgundy 150 sub-index falling 1.8% in the Fine Wine 1000, the Italian 100 managed a rise 1.3%.

The Super Tuscans were some of the leading fine wines at the end of last year.