What Is En Primeur? Buying Wine Before Bottling
Updated
So what is en primeur? It is a contract to buy wine before bottling. You pay in the spring after the harvest, while the wine is still in barrel, and the case reaches a bonded warehouse roughly two years later.
Bordeaux runs the version everyone else copied, and FINE+RARE sets out the rhythm: primeurs week at the end of April, release prices "normally between May and the end of June", and wines "shipped two to three years after the harvest". The wine poured that April is six or seven months past picking. FINE+RARE calls it "the system of buying unfinished, young wine, essentially as “futures". What you are buying is an allocation, a price, and a promise about a wine that does not yet exist in its final form. The price comes in bond, so duty and VAT arrive later. The only question that decides the trade is whether the release price beats the price you will see when the wine lands.
How does the Bordeaux en primeur campaign work?
Three parties stand between the château and you, in a fixed order.
The château sets a price with a courtier, a broker who reads demand across the trade. The Wine Cellar Insider counts "over 120 active courtiers" in Bordeaux and adds that "less than 20 courtiers are actively working with the most famous estates". The courtier "earns 2% of the transaction", which is why, in that source's words, "many courtiers are addressed as Mr. 2% by Bordeaux insiders". iDealwine puts it more bluntly: the courtier "plays a decisive role in setting En primeur prices". The arrangement is older than any wine you could buy. The Wine Cellar Insider records that it "became law in 1680 when it was decreed by King Louis XIV that all negociants from every wine region had to work with courtiers".
The courtier then places the wine with négociants, the merchant houses that buy the château's allocation and sell it on worldwide. There are "more than 400 negociants active in Bordeaux" by The Wine Cellar Insider's count, and the spread per estate is wide: "some properties work with 5 different negociants, others work with over 100".
Prices rarely arrive all at once. A tranche is, in The Wine Cellar Insider's words, "a small slice of the production that is designed to test the strength and price of a wine in the market". A first growth "could release 5-10% of its wine on a first tranche" and hold the rest back, according to The Wine Cellar Insider. That is why a wine you passed on in May can reappear in June at a different number.
You come in at the end of that chain, through a merchant. The Wine Society allocates rather than selling first come first served: members get "at least two weeks to request their wines", after which "members who have shown the greatest level of support to The Society (as a whole, not just for En Primeur offers) have a better chance of securing the wines they want".
When do you actually get the wine?
About two years after you pay, and the calendar appears in advance.
| Stage | 2025 Bordeaux vintage | Attributed to |
|---|---|---|
| Harvest | Autumn 2025 | The vintage itself |
| Trade tasting | 20 to 23 April 2026, Hangar 14, 173 Quai des Chartrons, Bordeaux | Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux |
| Release prices | May to end of June 2026 | FINE+RARE |
| Payment | When the order is placed and the invoice is raised | FINE+RARE |
| Bottling, shipping, arrival in bond | Two to three years after harvest, so 2028 | FINE+RARE; iDealwine puts it at 18 to 24 months from the sale |
The tasting week itself is a trade event. The UGCB limits En Primeurs Week to wine professionals, the Bordeaux wine trade and the specialist press, with the Monday session at Hangar 14 running in three slots, 9am to 11.30am, 11.30am to 2pm and 2pm to 4.30pm, and tastings by appellation at host châteaux from Tuesday to Thursday. The union dates from 1973 and has 126 member châteaux across 13 appellations. Close to 5,000 professionals attended in 2026, attendance up 10% on the previous edition, according to Vintage by UGCB.
Some wines run longer in barrel. iDealwine notes deliveries "sometimes longer for Sauternes or premiers crus classés", so those slip beyond the standard window. Delay is normal rather than alarming. Jamie Wolff of Chambers Street Wines told Punch that "there are almost always delays, so even pessimistic ETAs can run late, and occasionally we don't receive exactly what we've contracted for."
Burgundy, the Rhône and Port run their own futures calendars on different dates. Those belong in the wine futures guide rather than here.
What do you pay, and when does the tax land?
The en primeur price comes in bond, so duty and VAT are not in the number you are comparing.
The Wine Society states it directly: en primeur wines are bought in bond, and "duty and VAT are payable when you take delivery or have them transferred to Members' Reserves". HMRC's own rule says the same thing in tax language. VAT Notice 702/10 states that VAT "is due on the last supply of goods in the warehouse regime" and "must be accounted for and paid (or deferred) when the goods are removed from the warehouse regime to home use", and that you "must include any excise duty in the value". Excise Notice 197 handles the duty side, setting out the warrants a warehousekeeper submits to account for the duty due on goods released for consumption.
That sequencing has a consequence worth understanding before you buy. VAT falls on the price of the last in-bond supply, which is what you paid, not on what the wine is worth on the day you take it home. FINE+RARE puts the same point in buyer's terms: "VAT will be payable on the purchase price (not the wine's current market value)." A wine that trebles between release and delivery is taxed on the release price if you never sell it in bond.
Duty applies to alcohol, not to bottles. GOV.UK lists £30.62 per litre of pure alcohol for products at 8.5% to 22% ABV, under the rates in force from 1 February 2026. A 75cl bottle at 13.5% contains 0.10125 litres of pure alcohol, so £3.10 of duty per bottle and £37.20 on a twelve-bottle case, before VAT applies to the goods plus that duty.
UK offers come per twelve bottles in bond; US futures prices come per bottle. Cult Wines' 2024 UK list shows the spread that convention hides: Château Kirwan at £300 a case, Château Léoville-Las-Cases at £1,146 and Château Haut-Brion at £2,880, all 12x75cl in bond. FINE+RARE notes the price "includes shipping from the producer to our warehouse and insurance of the wine, but does not include onward shipping", and that wines left in its warehouse "will be subject to annual storage fees". Run the whole stack in the landed-cost calculator before you set an in-bond release against a duty-paid shelf price, because those two numbers are not the same kind of number.
Does buying en primeur save you money?
Not reliably, and the trade has stopped claiming otherwise.
Wine Spectator's assessment of the 2025 futures campaign is blunt about the mechanism that used to justify the whole exercise: "the wines are no longer gaining measurably in value between en primeur and release." It reads owners as now "thinking about positioning their wines for future sales, once the wines are bottled".
The two most recent campaigns show the swing. In 2024, Château Lafite Rothschild led the campaign with what Cult Wines called a "30% discount to last year's price". A year later the direction reversed. Wine Spectator's 2025 futures table, priced per bottle for the US market, has Cheval Blanc up 27% from $372 to $473, Mouton-Rothschild up 24% from $340 to $423, Château Lafite Rothschild up 20% from $393 to $470, Haut-Brion up 20% from $332 to $398, and Lynch Bages up 19% from $84 to $100. A handful moved the other way: La Fleur-Pétrus fell 34% from $295 to $194. Currency moved underneath all of it, with Wine Spectator noting the dollar at 0.85 euro, "down from 1.03 euro in 2023".
The upside case still exists, and iDealwine gives a concrete one: a Château Latour 2008 "was released En Primeur at €150 (€180 including tax)" and by 2023 "was selling at €521 (iDealwine auction estimate)". Note who that example names. Château Latour announced in 2012 that it would stop releasing its grand vin en primeur, and Cult Wines reads the move as proof that "participation was no longer automatic, even at the very top": by holding wine back and releasing it later from the estate, the château keeps "full control over provenance, timing and price".
So the first test Cult Wines lists is the right one: "clear value against back vintages". If a young vintage costs the same as a bottled, scored, drinkable Bordeaux 2015, you are paying two years of storage and risk for nothing.
What can go wrong between paying and delivery?
The wine is usually fine. The chain is where the money goes missing.
You are an unsecured creditor of a merchant for about two years. Michael Steinberger's framing, quoted by Punch, is the honest one: buyers give producers "interest-free loans" and in return "would be able to buy the wines more cheaply than if they waited for the wines to hit retail shelves". When the discount stops appearing, only the loan is left.
The Premier Cru case is the documented extreme. Wine Spectator reports that the Berkeley, California retailer filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on 8 January 2016, and that owner John Fox was sentenced on 15 December 2016 to six and a half years in prison. He had sold roughly $20 million of phantom wine between 2010 and 2015 and was ordered to pay $45 million in restitution to at least 9,000 customers who never received their bottles. One buyer lost $669,000, according to Wine Spectator. Judge Donato called it "a long running empire of deception that Mr. Fox carefully tended to for years."
The second risk is the sample. You are buying on scores that critics give to unfinished wine, which is why they publish ranges rather than points. Cult Wines' 2024 UK list carried spreads like 92 to 94 for Château Pavie-Macquin and 93 to 95 for Château Haut-Brion. A three-point range at the top of the scale is a wide range in price terms.
The third is plain price risk, and FINE+RARE says so in its own offer terms: "there is no guarantee of financial return when buying wine en primeur; it is always possible that the value of a wine decreases." The wine investment risks guide goes through the rest of the exposure.
How do you judge an en primeur offer?
Work through five checks, in this order, before you look at the score.
One, compare against a bottled vintage you could buy today. The 2016 campaign is the useful case study because the growing season was unusual and the trade knew it. Wine Lister, writing in April 2017, recorded heavy spring rain, a dry period during flowering, an intense summer drought and a rainstorm on 13 September 2016 that arrived in time to finish ripening. Nicolas Corporandy, chef de culture at Cheval Blanc, said "the 2016 is fresher and more tannic" than the 2015. Alfred Tesseron, owner of Château Pontet-Canet, called the 2016 "the most accomplished of all Pontet-Canets". Nicolas Audebert, then general manager of Canon and Rauzan-Ségla, put the pricing question to the trade in one line: "Anyone who is intelligent will make their margins on the volume not on the prices; if the prices stay more or less the same when the quality is even better, everyone will be content." Set any offer against Bordeaux 2016 and the premium becomes visible.
Two, check the drink window before the score. A wine you take delivery of in 2028 and cannot open until the 2040s is a storage bill first and a pleasure second.
Three, check who holds the wine and under what title. Ask which bonded warehouse, under whose account, and whether the stock is allocated to you by name.
Four, price the total, not the case. Add duty, VAT on the purchase price plus duty, storage from 2028, and onward delivery.
Five, watch the market between release and delivery. The market index shows where the region is trading, and the Bordeaux producer atlas shows which neighbours of the estate you are weighing have moved.
Know the moment the release price stops being the best price
The strongest en primeur decision is usually the one you make second. You see a release in May, you do not chase it, and eleven months later the same wine appears in bond below the number you were asked to commit to. That only helps if someone is watching for you.
Put the wines you are weighing on a watchlist and we will alert you when the price moves, when a bottled back vintage undercuts the current release, and when the wine you paid for in barrel finally clears its bonded warehouse. You get the two years of price history that the campaign asks you to bet against, on one page, in the currency you buy in.
If the case is already yours and the question is when to open it, start at the drink-now list. If the question is whether to commit at all, the risk guide above is the more useful next read.