French Wine Investment

“In water one sees one’s own face, but in wine one beholds the heart of another.

               -French Proverb

1042102_72304878

French Wine Investment

Located in the Southwest of France, Bordeaux is the largest and most influential wine region. With a combination of fertile soil and temperate climate, it produces more of the world’s finest wine than any other wine producing nation.

The substantial increase in fine wine prices in 2010 can partly be attributed to China’s growing taste for the top Bordeaux. Lafite is well established with Chinese government officials and it is rumoured that if you need to seal a deal, then you should serve this wine!

Although the supply of any vintage of wines such as the acclaimed Château Lafite Rothschild is diminishing, the younger vintages are improving. The 2009 vintage is currently being labelled by many critics as the best since 1961.

Crowns 3 also purchases wine En Primeur, which means buying while a vintage, is still in a barrel, offering a client the opportunity to invest in a particular wine at a reasonable price before it is bottled. En primeur is purchased a year to 18 months before the official bottling and release of a vintage. The advantage of buying en primeur is that the price will be lower than that on the future market. The other advantages include securing stocks of wines that would be otherwise difficult to obtain and offering an opportunity to obtain scarce wines from a highly desirable vintage. Some of these wines may not even be available commercially later in their lives, or else will command much higher prices. It is interesting to note that in the long term, no investment grade wine has ever seen its value remain below the en primeur price.

Crowns 3 takes the speculation out of buying and selling the finest Bordeaux & Burgundy wines. The combination of our expertise, established partnerships with suppliers and reference to Robert Parker’s fine wine scoring system places us at the forefront of our trade.