Futures Investors Hope to Toast ’95 With Bordeaux : Commodities: Barring seasonal rain problems, London wine merchants expect this year’s harvest to be of high quality.

With the Bordeaux region having basked in sunshine all summer, the wine trade is abuzz.

“If the weather carries on like this, we’ll have a cracking 1995 vintage,” said Oliver Hartley, head of the wine broking department for Justerini & Brooks Ltd., a wine merchant owned by Grand Metropolitan Plc. and based in London, which is the center of the international fine-wine trade.

For wine connoisseurs, the implications of a good harvest means pleasurable drinking in the future; for those who treat wine as an investment commodity, it also affords an opportunity to make money by buying wine futures.

Wine futures for the 1994 vintage of red Bordeaux wine produced by about 50 of the top chateaux already have risen, on average, by a third since the futures were first available this spring.

For some 1994 wines, futures prices have really soared. Take Chateau Le Pin. When merchants first started selling the wine in May for delivery about two years later, the price of a case of 12 bottles on the London market was about 800 pounds ($1,280); four months later, it’s more than doubled to about 1,750 pounds.

Once the quality and size of this year’s grape harvest are confirmed, it will immediately affect prices for the 1995 wine and others.

“Prices look as though they’re going to be quite high in 1995,” said Hartley of J&B.; “This will have a knock-on effect on 1993s and 1994s, whose prices will hold and might even drop.”

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That’s why merchants recommend waiting to buy 1994 wines until the outcome of this harvest is known.

“In my mind 1994 isn’t a vintage to go banco about,” said Adam Brett-Smith, managing director of Corney & Barrow Ltd., a London-based wine merchant. “There are some great wines and a lot of good wines. People who buy 1994 wines will be left holding perfectly good wines, but which are probably not worth what they paid for them.”

Wine futures are a mechanism through which wine makers pre-sell their produce. It’s a small international market and focuses on only the wines that command the greatest demand: generally top red and white wines from the Bordeaux and Burgundy regions.

Merchants will sell wine futures about eight months after the crop has been harvested. Then speculators, brokers and wine lovers will buy and sell these wine futures, which give the right to delivery of the wine.

This process is known as selling a wine “en primeur.” The wines are in casks being matured before bottling and won’t become available for 18 months to two years. The wines may not be ready to drink for decades.

Any reputable wine merchant will be able to help you buy wine “en primeur,” provided you are prepared to buy wine by the case, a box of a dozen bottles.

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Pre-selling wine guarantees a price for the producer and shipper. For the wine lover or investor, the en primeur system provides an opportunity to buy the wine at a cheaper price and to secure a wine early.

A caveat: “en primeur” wines require time, sometimes decades, to mature to peak drinking condition. Poor storage and handling can at best spoil a wine, and at worst render it undrinkable and usable only in a vinaigrette.

Speculators whose wines don’t appreciate in price can, of course, seek consolation by drinking their investments--more pleasurable than eating an unsellable bond or stock certificate.