Against a background of rallying markets and a nascent En Primeur campaign the biggest news in Bordeaux at the moment isn’t in fact in Bordeaux at all, but from Baltimore, Maryland, home of TV’s “The Wire”, Super Bowl winning Baltimore Ravens and the wine world’s own Robert Parker Jr.
Yesterday Robert Parker Jr. and the Wine Advocate magazine announced that as of 1st of May this year he will be passing on all coverage of Bordeaux to Neal Martin. This is news the wine world has seen coming for some time; Parker, now 68 started handing over more coverage to Neal Martin last year with the reviews for EP2014, but yesterday’s announcement really does mark the end of an era.
Parker has been the preeminent voice in reviewing Bordeaux for more than 30 years and has, we estimate, reviewed comfortably more than 40,000 Bordeaux wines (the bottle reviews for 2009, his highest ever scoring vintage, amounted to 574 individual wines). Of these 40,000+ wines there are currently 94 Bordeaux wines with a 100 point score.
It will be fascinating to see how the market reacts to the prospect of no new wines receiving the gilt edged 100 point score from the master himself, certainly we think it will be good news for those already holding these monumental wines!
At present its difficult to isolate the impact of this news from the progress in the market generally, but it IS abundantly clear that the market is more positive than it has been for some time, with values moving up across the board. Vin-X’s view is that this news certainly shouldn’t be bad for the ongoing recovery and should help values, particularly for those wines with high scores.
