Typically, the avaricious, unprincipled Bordelais are already gearing up for the launch of the precocious, unproven 2008 Bordeaux vintage when much of the 2007 vintage has not been sold.

Not so many months ago investing in fine wine was touted as being as safe as houses, outperforming gold and fine art. However, what goes stratospherically up is just as likely to come tumbling down. The finest and rarest vintages of France are now suffering almost as much as the housing market. Even the great 2005 Bordeaux vintage, one of the three top vintages of my lifetime — the ’61 and ’82 are the others — is getting cheaper by the week; 2005 first growths that were happily being bought and sold for about £10,000 a case last autumn are now fetching £6,000.

With new wine markets such as Russia and the Far East nowhere near as enthusiastic wine consumers as they once were, fine wine prices, as some British wine merchants confess privately, are in freefall. However, it will be a foolish and strangely incurious British wine merchant who writes off the 2008 Bordeaux vintage at this stage.

Just like the dismal 2007 Bordeaux vintage, nature seemed to have thrown every foul trick at its command against the 2008s — frost damage, poor, irregular flowering during a wet spring, a cool damp summer, dehydrated grapes at the close and not enough long, sunny, autumn Indian summer days. Yet preliminary reports of the analysis of the vintage, now that it is in barrel, look surprisingly good.

Of course, primarily this only concerns that small part of the crop that survived to make the top 50 wines of the Bordeaux pyramid. These are the wines, though, that will dictate 2008 Bordeaux’s prestige and prices.

The average British wine drinker will not be getting any of this, but even at the bottom end of the market, Bordeaux has been providing some of the leading retailers and supermarkets with impressive bargains in these recession-ridden times. Indeed, British wine drinkers started trading down earlier than most with Tesco noticing and reacting to falling sales as early as July and August last year. By September, with customers defecting to cheaper competitors, Tesco’s reply was to cut dramatically 40 or so of its wines down to £3.99.

Even worse is the news that the most ambitious and much respected family fine wine merchant, Lay & Wheeler of Colchester, founded in 1854, which recently boasted the most extensive fine wine list in Britain, has sold out to Majestic Wine Warehouses. Tellingly, Lay & Wheeler’s profit for its most recent trading year was only £500,000. By comparison Majestic’s profit for the same period was £16.7 million.

Fine wine has always followed the money and the prospect for both do not look great at present.

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