On Apr 24, 8:29*pm, cwdjrxyz > wrote:
> On Apr 24, 2:30*pm, Mark Lipton > wrote:
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> > 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.
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> > Some of this is the result of RMP's hype:
> > <http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/wine-investors-raise-a-....>
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> > 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?
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> 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.
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> 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.

And this is contributing to the high rate of counterfeit high end
French wines in China and elsewhere in Asia.