Ditton Wine Traders’ fine wine blog

I just returned from a lovely week's holidays in the south of Spain. Expecting to come back to a lot of wine news, I was surprised to see it has been very quiet. I hoped to see some more Bordeaux En Primeurs releases, but after Angelus, nothing has happened really. The release of top St Emilion Angelus was newsworthy though. Normally they are one of the very last to release, this year they were the first, immediately after the tastings had finished. More importantly, at GBP 725 (UK price), they have dropped the price by 40% when compared to 2007 and at that price level, it is more than GBP 100 cheaper than any other vintage. That's encouraging, although I don't believe it has been selling like crazy. 

I thought I'd take advantage of the lull in activity by sharing some info on Ditton Wine Traders. We have just ended our Financial Year – a good time to take stock of what we have been trading. Here's the top 10 (wine):

You can see that at positions 1, 2 and 7, Lafite dominate sales. This reflects the state of the market, where exports to Asia are strong and demand from UK merchants and consumers is slower than last year. As you might be aware, any wine from Domaines de Baron de Rothschild is very sought after in China. It is the ultimate status symbol and Carruades – the second wine of Lafite – is better regarded than say Mouton Rothschild. Looking at price/quality, this is a bizar situation as pretty much any vintage of Carruades pre 2006 sells at prices similar to some of the cheaper vintages of Mouton, a far better wine.

The champagne market has taken a bit of a hit. Worldwide champagne exports have seen a dramatic shift, as commented on in my blogpost of March 16. In the UK, we have been selling far less champagne in the last 6 months than pre credit crunch. It's just not "done" at the moment – even if you do have the money – to be seen spraying expensive large bottles of Cristal in trendy London clubs, where believe it or not, a lot of the expensive bottles ended up. These are our best selling champagnes in March '08 – Feb '09:

In terms of total sales, it has been a very exciting year. Very happy return customers and a host of new ones have resulted in us doubling turnover. More importantly in the longer run, we have fought ourselves a modest position amongst the UK wine trade, slowly moving from the new and unknown kid on the block to being well regarded and established wine traders.

I have also been developing the website, introducing this blog and adding some features. The latest addition is a "share this" button.

It's a very handy little application, that makes sharing what you see on this website very simple. You can choose to use email, add to your blog or post to your social networking site. In addition to the previously added RSS functionality, we hope this will help us to reach more and more people that are interested in Fine Wine.