Be careful when you buy wines en primeur – especially from 1855.com

Jim Budd is a wine journalist with a penchant for writing about wine fraud. He runs a site on hazy wine investment schemes called www.investdrinks.org (and a normal wine blog on http://jimsloire.blogspot.com). He has recently taken to write about 1855.com, a French-based online wine shop. 1855.com is well known in the French wine press for having frequent delivery problems and a lot of customer complaints (see e.g. La RVF).

Jim has uncovered that there are a lot of customers of 1855 that have not have their wines (in particular primeur wines) delivered. He is collecting and collating information about never-delivered purchases from 1855.com and has currently (with not much effort it seems) identified €100,000 worth of wines that have still not been delivered, some purchases going back several years.

Jim speculates that 1855.com sells wine “short”, i.e. sells the wines without actually having anything to sell and then tries to source the wines on the open market when delivery time comes. This is obviously a dangerous strategy if prises are on the rise, which is the case for many top Bordeaux primeur wines today… But the company denies that this is the case. Read more here:www.les5duvin.com and www.les5duvin.com and http://jimsloire.blogspot.com.

Contact Jim through his blogs if you have experiences with 1855 that you’d like to share or if you have un-delivered orders.