New highs for Petrus

The weaker pound continues to be a boon for fine wine as eight vintages of Petrus hit new trade records on Liv-ex this month.

After Angelus and Talbot saw several of their back vintages scale new heights in July, in August it has been the turn of high-flying Petrus.

The Right Bank estate has been powering on strongly in the secondary and auction markets for quite some time now. Since the fine wine market began to rally towards the end of last year, the Petrus index – tracking the 10 latest physical vintages – is up 12.7% since November 2015, outperforming its parent Right Bank 50 index which is up 8.6% over the same period.

Somewhat unsurprisingly it has been the ‘cheaper’ Petrus vintages that have showed the strongest gains in August, the 2011 vintage increasing by 8% from June to trade at £15,562 per dozen.

Using its price-over-points (POP) ratio, where a wine’s price is divided by a 20-point score to create a “loose” measure of value, Liv-ex has pointed out a few other Petrus vintages which might be of interest to buyers.

The 2008 for example with a Robert Parker score of 97 and a price of £18,000 per case, actually has the best (ie lowest) POP score of all Petrus vintages since 1999.

The 100-point 2009 and 2010 vintages arguably offer “relative value”. The 2010 has the fifth lowest POP score between 1999-2012 and at £25,500 a case is available at a 31% discount to the 97+ rated 2005, it is also still below its July 2011 peak of £26,204.