Yesterday’s trading activity
Bordeaux remained core to trading on Tuesday and into Wednesday, accounting for 32% of trade value. Chateau Montrose 2eme Cru Classe Saint-Estephe 2003 traded at Market Price while Chateau Haut-Brion Premier Cru Classe Pessac-Leognan 2011 traded 5.5% below.
From Champagne, Bollinger Special Cuvee NV, Cristal 2014, Salon 2012 and Armand de Brignac, Ace of Spades Brut Gold NV all saw action. While in Burgundy, Domaine Louis Jadot Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru Clos Saint-Jacque 2008 traded at a new high of £1,247 per 12×75 case.
Finding value in Haut Brion
The Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 index, which tracks the price movements of the last ten physical vintages of the Firth Growths, is up 7.2% over the past year.
Among its sub-indices, Château Margaux was the biggest riser, up 10.5%. It was followed by Haut Brion and Château Lafite Rothschild, which were up 9.9% and 9.1% respectively.
Although Margaux has seen the best price performance, Haut Brion offers the lowest entry point for those wanting to invest in a First Growth.
It has the highest average score across the ten most recent physical vintages (95.9-points), but the lowest average Market Price of £4,840 per 12×75 case.
As the table below shows, this gives Haut Brion the lowest POP* score, Liv-ex’s loose measure of value – where the lowest POP indicates the greatest value for money.
The following table shows the individual wines with the lowest POP scores. Of the ten wines, seven are Haut Brion vintages.
Interestingly the wine in the top spot is the same as when we last examined POP scores back in 2016. With a POP of 245.3, the 2012 vintage of Haut Brion appears to offer the best relative value.
With live offers at £1,975 per 6×75 (£3,950 per 12×75) the 2012 is also available at a 26.4% discount to the similarly-scored 2016 vintage, which last traded at £2,682 per 6×75 case (£5,364 per 12×75).
Opportunities to trade First Growths
There are currently close to 400 LIVE bids and offers on all vintages of Haut Brion, among over 2,000 bids and offers across all First Growths on your exchange.
*A wine’s POP score is its price-over-points ratio, our loose measure of value. It is calculated by dividing the price of a nine-litre case of wine by a shortened 20-point score (scores from The Wine Advocate). We have calculated this 20-point score by simply subtracting 80 from the official rating (for barrel-score spreads we use the mid-point of the score), on the basis that any wine under 80 points is unlikely to attract a secondary market. In theory, the lower the POP score the better value a wine is.
Liv-ex analysis is drawn from the world’s most comprehensive database of fine wine prices. The data reflects the real time activity of Liv-ex’s 600 merchant members from across the globe. Together they represent the largest pool of liquidity in the world – currently £100m of bids and offers across 16,000 wines. Independent data, direct from the market.
