Red Obsession Page #3

which is not yet bottled, not yet ready,

means you are selling

a piece of excitement,

of anticipation, of magic,

and there must be some

hype and hope around this.

So, clearly, it's part of the deal

and that's why Bordeaux is

so famous around the world

because Bordeaux is very good

at creating that excitement.

With the 2009 vintage,

the hype matched the

quality of the wines.

This time around, we've

got an awful lot of hype.

I wonder whether their

wines will actually deliver,

and the proof, of course,

will be in the pudding.

But behind all the excitement

about whether the 2010

will be another 'vintage of the century'

is the commercial reality

that En Primeur is

all about... business.

In the past 10 years,

prices of the top Bordeaux wines

have risen by more than 1,000%.

As the price of these

wines continues to escalate,

the inevitable has happened -

they've become too valuable to drink.

15 years ago, when

I started the company,

I said that at some point in

the future, within 25 years,

half of all the top wines bought

will be bought for investment,

and people laughed at me.

Now, you go and look at

all the traditional

kind of wine companies

and they've all got investment teams.

What are you paying on those?

Close to four grand.

Close to four grand?

Are you having a laugh?

En Primeur is a calculated investment.

You're buying, essentially, the wine

because you think you're

getting it cheaper now

and you're taking a credit risk

and a price risk on the future

but, essentially, an En Primeur purchase

is an investment purchase,

and once you understand that

then you start treating

it slightly differently.

Didn't he say he's got a few million

he's gotta sell today or tomorrow?

He's got a couple million.

It's coming on to the market.

Because those guys have got

a deadline on that stuff,

so he's got 3 million to 5 million,

he's got to sell it.

Wine has outperformed the stock

markets, all the major markets -

the Dow Jones, the FTSE, gold -

all these markets, since 1982.

We were looking for some Margaux,

vintages from the '90s,

those sort of lesser vintages,

as the market might call them.

You want nine and a half?

That's interesting, OK.

That gives me 100

profit for my sale price.

I mean, what do I

need...? Yeah, exactly...

People will buy,

and they'll spend half a

million or a million pounds,

and buy, you know, 25 cases of Lafite

and 25 cases of Latour,

and four or five years

time, they sell it.

They've never seen the wine.

They don't even know what

the bottle looks like.

Here we've got X

number of thousand cases.

Average value of each bottle

would be approximately

400 or 500 euros a bottle,

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