How does the fine Bordeaux secondary market work?

An exchange that publishes its prices

The en primeur campaign sells a vintage for the first time. After that the same cases are sold again, by merchants to merchants and by collectors through merchants, for as long as the wine lasts. The professional side of that resale takes place on Liv-ex, the London International Vintners Exchange, where members post bids and offers and the trades they close become the market’s public record.

Liv-ex does not price a wine by its last sale alone. Its indices use the mid-price: the point halfway between the highest live bid and the lowest live offer. A narrow gap between the 2 means buyers and sellers broadly agree on the wine. A wide gap means they do not.

Five owners, one shelf

In the United Kingdom, where the exchange is based, wine can be held in an excise warehouse in duty suspension: stored without the duty being paid. Under British excise rules the owner of wine in such a warehouse may sell it there at any time, and the duty falls due only when it is taken out to drink.

That is why a case of classified Bordeaux can have 5 owners and never leave its shelf. The buyer takes over the wine and its place in the warehouse; the tax waits until someone takes the bottles out. A case that has stayed in bond also has a history that is easier to prove, which matters in a market where the first question about any old bottle is where it has been.

What the indices follow

The First Growths are counted by their 10 most recent vintages, except Latour (opens in a new tab), which left en primeur in 2012 and reaches the market years late.

Bordeaux’s share, and how it shrank

In 2010 the exchange was, in practice, a Bordeaux market: 19 pounds in every 20 traded went to Bordeaux. By late 2015 the share had fallen back to its 2004 level, before the boom, and the figure for 2022 was the lowest to that date. In 2024 and 2025 the share held a little above a third. Bordeaux did not stop trading. The share fell because the rest of the world’s fine wine took a larger part of the exchange.

Why some wines trade more

A wine trades when there is enough of it in circulation and enough agreement on what it is worth. Liv-ex’s Power 100, its annual ranking of fine wine brands, measures exactly those things. It scores price performance over the year, trading by value and by volume, the number of different wines traded, and the average price. Trading is weighted at 1.5 times the other criteria.

In the ranking published in December 2025, Cheval Blanc (opens in a new tab) came first. Petrus (opens in a new tab), Le Pin (opens in a new tab), and Lafleur (opens in a new tab), all 3 from the Pomerol (opens in a new tab) plateau, climbed on more trade even as prices fell. Some Bordeaux names left the list.

What the list rewards is plain. A famous name, many vintages on the market, stock in known warehouses, and a release price the market accepted: those are the wines with a buyer on the other side of the screen. The exchange records what professionals paid. It does not promise the next price.