On Apr 24, 2:30*pm, Mark Lipton > wrote:
> I just saw some estimated prices for the much ballyhooed '09 Bdx wines.
> *It's been a few years since I last paid much attention to new releases
> of Bdx, but my first reaction was one of shock. *First growth pricing
> was consistently at $1000-2000 per bottle and many former (relative)
> bargains such as Montrose and Pichon-Lalande are going for $300-350 a
> bottle. *Granted, there were a few standouts such as Gruaud-Larose and
> Leoville-Barton that still had reasonable pricing, but they were the
> rare exception. *It was not that long ago that most of these wines were
> retailing for 1/4-1/5 of their current prices.
>
> Some of this is the result of RMP's hype:
> <http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/wine-investors-raise-a-...>
>
> but that only explains a fraction of the overall effect. *So, has it
> been demand from China that's fueled this rise? *Growing demand and
> limited supply?
I recently received a spring catalog from Brown Derby that gave prices
for several recent vintages of higher end Bordeaux wines. It seems
elevated prices are here to stay. Yes increased demand from China and
several other nations in Asia no doubt has something to do with high
prices. In general rich persons in Asia are much more likely to be
willing to pay very high prices for rare food and drink than are many
Americans, for example. For example, if you are the CEO of a major
Bank in Asia, you would not want to serve an important guest or client
anything other than the "best", whatever that is. This attitude likely
was responsible for Lafite being priced well above other first
growths, and even average vintages of Lafite brought a very high
price. Many Asian Lafite drinkers have moved on to other "best" wines,
such as DRC Romanee-Conti and La Tache, and the prices of these wines
have increased an extreme amount recently. Such wines were already
very expensive because of very low production and huge demand.

Even in the US, demand for fine wines has greatly increase from when I
was young. Then a Martini lunch was much more common than a fine wine
lunch. You might have a cheap Chianti in an Italian restaurant. Of
course there were some fine restaurants, often French, then that had
large cellars of fine aged wines, but these mainly were in a few large
cities.