It's been 12 years since I started taking a serious interest in Bordeaux's en primeur market. Back then, when I was just starting out in the wine trade, the top wines—Château Lafite, Latour, Mouton Rothschild—were around £90 a bottle, or £1,080 a case. As a young graduate, I remember thinking that £90 was an awful lot of money to spend on a bottle of wine and used to suggest splitting the cost with a handful of friends in order to "educate our palates," as we rather pompously referred to it. At the time, this exercise would only require six of us putting in £15 each for a glass of one of Bordeaux's best wines. Today, that same practice would cost us around £85 each.