Wine trade
Wine trade has existed since around 1000 BC. BC, since wine is not only drunk where it grows and is expanded. Traders purchase the wine from the producers and sell it to their customers.
Several gaps are overcome:
- spatial distance
- temporal distance
- financial distance
Bridging spatial distance
In earlier times, wine merchants bought wine in amphorae or large containers / barrels and filled them from the barrel for their customers. This procedure is rarely used nowadays. One example is the wine from Bordeaux : Wholesalers had ships loaded with barrels (the tonneaux) at the Gironde estuary and shipped them to London and the Hanseatic cities ( Rotspon ). There is still a dealer in Lübeck where you can buy Rotspon.
However, since the 1920s, when the Baron Philippe de Rothschild , owner of Château Mouton-Rothschild in Pauillac near Bordeaux, took over all the production steps up to bottling , the trade in wine in barrels declined. The "normal" procedure today is the filling of bottles at the winery and their dispatch in boxes and on pallets .
Wine is also transported in tank loads and only bottled at the destination, which is then transported to the dealers. This process is particularly common for inexpensive wines from overseas and partly from Spain.
Bridging temporal distance
A winery has costs. Many wines have to be stored and aged for a long time before they can be sold. During this time, a lot of capital is tied up by the stored wine . In order to initiate pricing between the winery and the wholesalers, wine was started to be traded as a futures contract . The winery offers its wine for sale for the first time relatively quickly after the harvest, after about six months, when the quality of the end product is evident. This is done in tranches in which lots are offered. A first sub-lot, usually with a small volume, serves as a test balloon to see how the market could react. Then, in a large second tranche, the large remainder of the wholesale sales are determined. This subscription process enables wineries to finance themselves more quickly.
In the second step, the wholesalers advertise their wine allocations to retailers and, in some cases, private customers. They have to purchase it as part of the subscription and pay for it immediately to ensure that they receive the sometimes rare wine later. The wine, however, remains on the winery for at least one and a half years, it is stored in the barrel for aging before it is bottled and delivered to the customers. This delivery phase is called " Arrivage ": the arrival of the newly filled wine.
Another type of wine trade is selling older wines. Either wine dealers with a large capital base and corresponding storage capacities store wine themselves in order to sell it much later as mature and more valuable wine, or they buy rare wines from dealers and especially private individuals. At the moment (2005), purchase discounts for older Bordeaux of 40% to 45% on the retailers' sales price lists are common. So if a bottle of wine is supposed to cost 50 euros on sale according to the price list, the dealer is willing to buy such a wine from private hands for 30 euros. Prerequisite: the storage conditions for the wine were such that the wine did not suffer any damage (temperature control or air conditioning at 12 to 14 degrees, avoidance of light ).
Old wines are also sold at specialized auctions . At first this was practiced in England ( Christie's ), now such auctions are common in Switzerland , France and now also in Germany. Usually, boxes with 6 or 12 bottles are auctioned at auctions, or sets of several bottles: a "mixed lot".
Wines are also traded on the Internet , where wine merchants operate websites with shopping cart systems for wine, and wine has its own section on auction platforms ( eBay ). The problem with retailing older wines is that it is not clear what condition they are in.
Wine bottles are usually closed with a cork . A capsule above is supposed to ensure that the bottle was unopened. An undamaged capsule should generally guarantee the intactness of the wine underneath.
However, there are extremely valuable old wines, the prices of which are so high that counterfeits and incorrect refills have appeared. Examples of this are the Château Margaux from 1900, the Cheval Blanc from 1947 and the Château Mouton-Rothschild from 1945, whose prices in euros are in the four-digit range.
For wines that are more than 20 years old, the level of a bottle is a determining factor: the cork is always kept moist when stored horizontally, but is usually not completely tight, which leads to a very slow drop in the liquid level. This level loss is also used for the evaluation. As a rule, it is required that wine should be at least halfway up the shoulder in a vertical position ("mid shoulder"); underneath, the wine could be too oxidized and no longer be enjoyable.
A special variant is trading in collector's bottles, which is only indirectly related to the wine trade. Based on the annually changing artists - labels such. B. from Château Mouton-Rothschild formed a collector scene that collects these bottles regardless of the wine quality.
Development of the market
In the mid-1990s, the prices of Bordeaux wines rose due to the successful economic development in the industrialized countries and several years of very good quality. This phase lasted from 1996 to 2000. The prices for wine are now falling again - also due to the fluctuating, nature and weather-related quality of top-quality cultivation in the climatic border areas - and the wine industry is facing major problems in many European countries.
In 2005 there was an oversupply in the market.
In 2013, BASF SE was the ninth largest wine merchant in Germany with its wine cellar .
The largest wine retailer in Germany is the food discounter ALDI .
Development of prices for high-class wine since 2005
Since then, a very special branch of the wine trade in particular has taken on an interesting development: the trade in delivery rights for Bordeaux wine. Based on the unusually good quality of the 2005 vintage, a run on the highest quality began in the context of the subscription , which achieved the highest prices of all time for Premier Cru wines due to the volume restrictions and partly also new market participants in the demand sector: between 500 and 600 euros per bottle.
This development was received with some amazement, and as a result there was a high demand for high quality wine (Premier Crus and wines with high Parker points ) from Bordeaux from earlier very good vintages such as 1986, 1989, 1990, 1995, 1996 and 2000. These shifts led to an intensive trade in top quality wines. In the period between mid-2006 and mid-2007, well-known high-class Bordeaux wines have not infrequently doubled in price.
The arrival prices of the quite average year 2006 then picked up on this trend, and the extremely astonishing thing happened: the wines of the Premier-Cru-Güter were traded, sometimes only at low discounts, at an almost equally high extreme level, in the range from 350 to 500 euro. The beginning of the autumn auctions 2007 in Switzerland seems to reflect this trend: the best wine of all good vintages has been auctioned consistently at a very high level.
Since the price-setting top-class goods are now almost all in the hands of very experienced and economically powerful trading, luxury and other corporations, there is also talk about an artificially created high price policy of the wineries, in which they allegedly their courtiers, the wholesalers , only with very low contracts equip contingents and store substantial quantities of wine in the chateaus without wanting to sell them at short notice.
See also
Web links
supporting documents
- ↑ Focus.de of May 27, 2014: BASF is the top-selling wine retailer in Germany , accessed May 27, 2014
- ↑ Aldi is by far the largest wine retailer in Germany Report in the daily newspaper DIE WELT on March 20, 2014, accessed on December 11, 2017