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Barolo tops £1m at Justerini & Brooks
Pent-up demand for the highly-rated 2010 vintage has given fine wine merchant Justerini & Brooks its best year ever for Barolo.
The London merchant’s release offer last March brought in over £1 million, with a further £1 million sold of older vintages in the following months. As a result its sales from Piedmont have now edged ahead of the Rhône and lie fourth behind Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne.
Justerini’s began building its Barolo portfolio in the early 1990s and now lists 16 top estates including Vietti and Roberto Voerzio. With rave review from Robert Parker in 1997 sales began to take off and have grown steadily since with a 50% spike for the 2007 wines over the previous benchmark vintage, 2004. “It’s been a slow burn, but has started to gather a bit more momentum because there were fewer Burgundy vintages around and the fact the Bordeaux market is in the doldrums,” said buying director Giles Burke-Gaffney.
This week the firm is offering its 2011 Barolo release, after that statutory two years in wood and one in bottle. “It’s totally different to 2010, but still really attractive and I think the wines will age really well,” said Burke-Gaffeny. Ex-cellar prices are the same as last year, but thanks to a weak Euro there’s a slight discount for buying in Sterling.
“The US remains a very big market while Germany which was massive, shrank rapidly in the late 1990s when Barolo suddenly seemed to become quite expensive by the late 1990s” he continued. “But today most producers haven’t actually moved their prices for 6 or 7 years, which its pretty good value especially for the slightly under the radar producers like Marco Marengo.”