But this year one of the biggest names, Château Latour, will not be available when the other 2012 wines go on sale in the coming weeks. Anyone who wants the 2012 Latour will have to wait years, thanks to a decision by the chateau’s owner, the French billionaire François Pinault, to withhold the wine from the annual sale of Bordeaux futures.

The move reflects broader trends that are shaking up the clubby wine industry of Bordeaux, the largest producer of high-quality wines in the world, and stirring tensions between the people who produce the wine and those who sell it to affluent clients across the globe. Each side accuses the other of greed; hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.

“If you do anything that goes against what’s been traditionally done in Bordeaux, it’s controversial,” said Stephen Browett, chairman of Farr Vintners, a wine merchant in Britain that specializes in Bordeaux. “When it’s one of the richest men in France that is thinking outside the box, it’s doubly controversial.”

Mr. Pinault is used to getting his way. For more than two years he battled his main rival in the French luxury goods business — Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton — for control of the fashion house Gucci, eventually prevailing in 2001. Other holdings, via companies his family controls, include Yves Saint Laurent, the auction house Christie’s and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.

Mr. Pinault has owned Château Latour for two decades. But that still makes him a relative newcomer to Bordeaux, where the old money frowns on the ostentatious tastes of men like Mr. Pinault and his son, François-Henri, who now runs the family holding company, Artemis, and who is married to the actress Salma Hayek.

For as long as anyone here can remember — at least three centuries, some say — the high-end wines of the region have been sold via local intermediaries, called négociants, rather than directly by the chateaus. The négociants sell the wine to merchants, distributors and importers in the spring after the harvest, while the wine is still in barrels, through a futures market called en primeur. Elsewhere, wine producers generally sell directly to distributors, importers or private clients, without the added layer of négociants.

Many chateau owners and négociants say the system benefits both sides. Chateaus get the upfront revenue they need to invest in the production of the next vintage. The négociants whip up interest in the new vintage, and their marketing prowess has helped Bordeaux beat its rivals into new markets like China, now the biggest importer of the region’s wines.

In return, the middlemen get up to 15 percent of the wholesale price of the wine — not bad when a bottle of Château Latour sells for around 300 euros (nearly $400) in a mediocre vintage, much more in a great one.

“The négociant system has survived the Revolution, two world wars, the Great Depression and phylloxera,” said Patrick Bernard, who runs one of the biggest firms, Millésima, referring to the insect pest that ravaged the vineyards of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “The economy of Bordeaux is based on en primeur. If you break this, you break the Bordeaux wine economy.”

But chateau owners complain that they have not been getting their fair share of the gains from a recent surge in global demand for high-end Bordeaux. In vintages like 2005 and 2008, the price of many wines doubled or tripled after the initial sales, and much of the profit went to wine merchants and other customers, not the chateaus.

More and more chateaus have been sold by longtime family owners to corporations or to tycoons like Mr. Pinault, whose family has an estimated worth of $15 billion, according to Forbes magazine. Mr. Arnault, for example, has snapped up two other famed Bordeaux properties, Cheval Blanc and d’Yquem. Proprietors with such deep pockets do not need to worry about how to pay for the corks, bottles and labels for the next year’s wine, so they can do without the revenue from the early sales.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/business/global/chateau-latour-breaks-with-a-bordeaux-tradition.html?partner=rss&emc=rss