Tesco may be tempted by Bordeaux en primeur

Tesco is considering offering its customers Bordeaux en primeur next year. The wines, which customers pay for two years before their release in bottle, would be marketed through the supermarket’s Wine Club, starting from the 2007 campaign if they were felt to be suitable.

Not surprisingly, Tesco, the supermarket that promises its customers value for money, hasn’t jumped in with the much-criticised 2006 campaign. Following after the superior quality 2005 vintage, the 2006 is considered by many to be overpriced and has been predicted to fail in the US by Robert Parker.

Here in the UK, Jancis Robinson, in a Berry, Bros and Rudd podcast, said she hoped it wouldn’t be a success and said she’d told readers of her website, ‘Why buy at these ridiculous prices?’ Her view generally about en primeur is that, from the consumer’s point of view, it doesn’t work well and she questions why someone who’s relatively new to fine wine would buy into it.

This is likely to be the challenge facing Tesco - explaining the value of buying wines en primeur to the customer. However, Waitrose, which has been selling Bordeaux this way since 2003 in conjunction with Lay & Wheeler, hasn’t found this a problem. Maybe this is because buyer Andrew Shaw believes that those buying en primeur from Waitrose would be buying Bordeaux like this anyway from another merchant if not from them. It just makes sense for these customers to buy from Waitrose as it’s where they buy their everyday wine, he explained. ‘Volumes are not that big, but we’ve definitely got a market for it,’ he told ThirtyFifty. He added, ‘We are definitely going to continue and develop it, but it has to make commercial sense.’