systemic early marketing
The reasons why Bordeaux wines are released too early are rarely clear. Context clarifies which interpretations are plausible in practice – and where misunderstandings arise. This article presents applications, borderline cases, and typical misinterpretations – and refers to the canon (systemic early marketing canon) as a conceptual anchor. The focus is on observation rather than judgment, and on the question of when patience, air, or temperature truly help – and when they don't.
What Systemic Early Marketing Means
What is meant is not a single event, but an entire system geared to the young wine: barrel tastings, early critic scores of the still-unfinished wine, the sales calendar of the pre-market trade, and resale on the secondary market. The moment of judgment and of purchase moves forward, while the wine's inner logic remains built on time. How this pre-sale works in detail is covered in the context piece En Primeur.
Bought Young, Drunk Late
The purchase comes at the start, long before enjoyment. Whoever buys en primeur — a private collector as much as a merchant or reseller — then puts the wine away for many years, until it is ready to drink. Ideally, its value is meant to rise during that time: the private buyer hopes, in hindsight, to have got a bargain; the merchant hopes to grow their margin. That is the economic logic behind the early sale, and it holds up as long as enough people are willing to pay today for an enjoyment that still lies far in the future.
Why the Model Has Grown Harder Lately
That willingness has been declining for several years now. With the vintages from 2022 onwards, early marketing has been noticeably harder going: fewer buyers want to tie up their money in wine that will not be ready to drink for many years, and the release prices of younger vintages have fallen markedly on the market. Several campaigns were seen as disappointing even within the trade itself. That says nothing about the quality of the wines — it merely shows that a system which relies so heavily on the future and on value appreciation reacts sensitively as soon as that future becomes less certain.
Why This Creates the Impression of Being “Too Young”
Bordeaux is built for time. Acidity, tannin and structure are meant to come together into a whole over years; accessibility is a later state, not the first one. When such a wine is judged young — or drunk young, because it has long since been bought — its tension easily reads as harshness and its reserve as a deficiency. A young wine is simply in the middle of its development; that does not make it flawed. Why a young Bordeaux can seem closed and still be intact is addressed in the context piece too young in the glass.
How We See It
We move the moment of release to where the willingness already exists: we hold our wines back and release them only once they are ready to drink. The risk of ageing and the years of storage stay with us, not with the buyer — and with them the task of determining the right moment. Whoever buys from us does not have to store the wine themselves for years until it is ready — it is ready to drink as soon as it leaves the house. What release at drinking maturity means for us is set out in the context piece released ready to drink.