Two years ago we posted a blog titled Time to sell
Lafite? At that point the Liv-ex Lafite index had reached a new high, and
ex-Morgan Stanley analyst Andy Xie expressed concerns that the rapid Lafite
bull market was really a bubble about to burst.
Which it did a few months later, as shown on the chart below (the date at which we posted the blog is marked by a black line).
The most recent Cellar
Watch Market Report noted that the ensuing price correction was fair, but questioned
whether it had overshot. The ten most recent physical Lafite vintages have dropped an average of
36.5% in price from their peak, with many back to prices last seen twenty months ago.
As you can see, in the last few months both the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 and Lafite indices have stabilised. Growing appetite for ‘off-vintage’ Lafite has even seen some vintages rise in price in November, with the 2002 and 2004 moving up 5.7% and 3.8% respectively.
Carruades de Lafite (which at one point was trading at First Growth prices) may still have further to come down. But two years on, Lafite's future is looking less uncertain.
