All financial bubbles must pop, right? Earlier this year the Chinese (businesspeople, mostly) were buying Chateau Lafite like crazy, and prices skyrocketed. Seems Lafite was drunk by very popular actors on a Chinese television show, and before long newly-wealthy Chinese were buying all they could.
Unlike us and the Brits, the Chinese typically open and drink the wines within days or weeks of receiving it. A way to impress your lunch companions, I suppose. The thought of all that Lafite, the numero uno amidst the rarified air of the five First Growths in Bordeaux, just vanishing in a day, kind of makes me shudder. By comparison, I opened one bottle of it on my fiftieth birthday.
I think prices for Lafite, as sold into China, reached about $2000 per bottle, in the middle of 2011. Wow. But now it's closer to $1000 (little higher for great years; little lower for not-so-great years), and prices are still dropping.
Just one province in eastern China was consuming 300,000 bottles of Lafite per year. See article here.
The good question is: Will the bubble re-form, once some of the present global economic uncertainties are resolved?
And: Just think about how much wealth has been created in China, to allow such lavish spending on a lunch drink.
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