At the start of every year there is always a bit of studying of tea leaves, animal entrails, rune stones or tarot cards.

I indulged in a bit of clairvoyance before Christmas and came up with a dreary result unlike The Wine Investment Fund that predicted a large surge of interest and corresponding increase in prices.

The truth of the matter is that we just don’t know and as such I am bringing together a collection of articles which allows you to decide whether the market will pick up, stay flat or drop further in the next twelve months.

There is for a change, some kind of consensus between the Châteaux and the merchants and buyers, in that both sides agree that there has to be some kind of reduction on last years prices. The sticking point is obviously how much of a reduction is needed to stimulate the market?

In the modern world, it may seem a little ridiculous that we could have ever looked upon Bordeaux fever as anything other than a psychological problem. Nevertheless it is originally thought to have been caused by bad air; subsequently it was believed that poor hygiene was causing the condition to spread through stemware. We can look back with some amazement that many years were spent looking for some kind of pathological cause. It was only relatively recently that we came to understand the condition as a form of mass hysteria.

The post Christmas headlines screamed out that the fine wine market was doomed and anyone holding first growth Bordeaux may as well have some tulip seeds or a bath full of South Seas bubbles.

Making comparisons between the scores given by Robert Parker for the 2009 vintage and any other scores are little more than useless. The amount of factors that could skew the results are countless, a few of the most obvious being, time since bottling, ageing potential and the sheer number of 100 points awarded.