2015–2018 Bordeaux and Burgundy: which bottles have actually delivered on the Asian secondary market

Four vintages, two regions, and a genuinely uneven scorecard — some of the most hyped years from this period are still trading at their 2020 lows, while a handful of specific labels have quietly compounded at rates most equity portfolios would envy. This is a vintage-by-vintage, bottle-by-bottle look at what the Liv-ex data actually shows, not what the en primeur marketing promised.

Why vintage reputation and price growth rarely move together

The four vintages in question — 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 — were all released with considerable fanfare. 2015 and 2016 were both billed as exceptional, back-to-back Bordeaux years; 2018 arrived with comparable acclaim. Nearly a decade on, Liv-ex’s own transaction data tells a more selective story: strong critical scores created initial demand, but sustained price growth has concentrated in a much narrower set of specific labels, while other equally well-reviewed wines have gone essentially nowhere.

Liv-ex’s most recent trend analysis, based on actual transaction data rather than asking prices, defined an upward trend strictly: three or four consecutive quarter-on-quarter price increases over the past year, specifically to filter out wines moving on isolated offers or thin trading rather than genuine, repeated buyer conviction. That bar matters, because it separates wines that look good on a single auction result from wines collectors are consistently coming back to buy.

Bordeaux: Mouton’s dominance, and the limits of a big name

Château Mouton Rothschild has been the standout performer across this window, appearing with five separate vintages — including both 2015 and 2018 — among Liv-ex’s strongest recent performers. But the two vintages tell different stories even within the same label. Mouton 2015 is currently trading at its 2020 lows, with limited evidence of further upward movement. Mouton 2018, by contrast, shows a clearer, newer upward trend still building momentum — a reminder that even within one of Bordeaux’s most liquid and recognisable names, vintage selection changes the investment case considerably.

The more striking numbers, though, sit with Pomerol rather than the first-growth Médoc estates most buyers default to. Château Lafleur’s 2015 and 2016 vintages have posted a compound annual growth rate of 27% and 30% respectively since their ex-London release, according to Liv-ex — figures driven specifically by the estate’s constrained, limited production rather than broad market enthusiasm. For a Singapore-based collector comparing Bordeaux to Burgundy on growth potential alone, Lafleur is the clearest evidence that scarcity at a smaller, highly regarded estate can outperform blue-chip brand recognition.

2016 carries its own distinct narrative. Long considered “the great year that time forgot” relative to its price, Liv-ex data shows 31 of 45 red wines in its Bordeaux 500 index from the 2016 vintage were, as recently as last year, still trading below their original ex-London release price — only to begin rising meaningfully after bottoming out in 2025. Cheval Blanc and Haut-Brion 2016 specifically have been singled out by Liv-ex as having “decisively stabilised,” now viewed as the lower-risk entry points within that vintage for buyers willing to accept a slower but steadier growth profile than Lafleur’s Pomerol trajectory.

2018, meanwhile, sits in a more cautious position overall: Liv-ex’s broader index data shows the vintage down roughly 7.8% over one year even as short-term monthly momentum has turned slightly positive — a vintage still finding its floor rather than confirming a clear upward trend, Mouton’s strength within it notwithstanding.

Burgundy: a different kind of growth story entirely

Burgundy’s performance over this period looks almost nothing like Bordeaux’s, and that distinction matters for anyone allocating between the two. Where Bordeaux’s gains have concentrated in specific reds from specific estates, Burgundy’s most dramatic growth has come from an unexpected direction: white wine. Liv-ex data shows the value of white wine traded on its exchange has surged 650% since 2010, with Burgundy driving the overwhelming majority of that increase — the region now accounts for 69.3% of all white wine trading by value on the exchange, compared to just 10.5% for white Bordeaux.

This isn’t abstract index movement. Brett Fleming, managing director at merchant Armit Wines, has described the trend directly: significant, sustained increases in premium white Burgundy, concentrated in producers like Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey and Ramonet, with the same bottles being repeatedly traded as available supply shrinks. Liv-ex’s own market analysis points to deliberate volume restrictions from top Burgundy producers as the structural driver — a genuine supply constraint, not simply a marketing-driven price cycle.

Red Burgundy from this period has moved more cautiously by comparison. After a sharp run-up prior to 2023 followed by a meaningful correction, Liv-ex’s Burgundy 150 index showed renewed stability only recently, with Christie’s international wine director Tim Triptree describing continued strong global demand and a well-established secondary market “driven by scarcity and thirsty collectors” — language that, notably, echoes exactly the dynamic driving Lafleur’s Bordeaux performance, just in a different region.

What this means structurally, for a Singapore-based buyer

The regional picture has shifted meaningfully over the past decade in a way directly relevant to anyone building an Asian secondary-market wine allocation today. Bordeaux’s share of total Liv-ex trading volume has fallen from over 70% in the early 2000s to around 35% as of early 2026, while Burgundy has climbed to account for roughly 25% of total trade — its highest share on record. Over the past decade specifically, Bordeaux has underperformed Champagne, Burgundy and the broader rest-of-world category on a straight price-index basis, even though it remains, by a wide margin, the deepest and most liquid segment of the market.

That liquidity is itself the case for continuing to hold Bordeaux alongside Burgundy rather than rotating out entirely: Bordeaux’s transparent, high-volume pricing data gives collectors and family offices a level of exit certainty that Burgundy’s much smaller production volumes and correspondingly thinner trading simply cannot match, even when Burgundy’s headline growth numbers look more dramatic.

The specific takeaway for this vintage window

Across 2015–2018, the data does not support a simple “buy the best-reviewed vintage” strategy. The real winners have been narrow and specific: Lafleur’s 2015 and 2016 for sustained, scarcity-driven Bordeaux growth; Mouton 2018 for a blue-chip name still building momentum rather than resting on 2020-era pricing; Cheval Blanc and Haut-Brion 2016 for buyers prioritising stability over velocity; and premium white Burgundy, Colin-Morey and Ramonet specifically, for the clearest structural growth story in either region over this entire period. A collector treating “2015–2018 Bordeaux and Burgundy” as a single undifferentiated basket has, by the numbers, left meaningful value on the table — the compounding has happened at the level of specific producers and specific bottles, not vintages as a whole.