Top Bordeaux brands, such as Chateau Lafite Rothschild and Chateau Latour, are in danger of losing touch with the next generation of wine drinkers.

This is the view of renowned negociants Jean and Edouard Moueix, who told Decanter that the first growth Bordeaux labels are being priced too highly to be appreciated by new wine enthusiasts.

As well as failing to attract new drinkers, the prices of top Bordeaux brands are also driving a wedge between the major estates and smaller Bordeaux producers, they claim.

Jean Moueix, who heads multinational negociant-to-retail operation Duclot, told the wine magazine: "The pressure chateaux put on themselves to keep outdoing each other on pricing is making the whole system highly unstable.

"You have chateaux that can't even cover their production costs, and next door a property whose wine is 1,200 times the price."

His brother Edouard operates negociants JP Moueix, a group that takes pride from never underpaying for wine, but is finding it difficult to maintain this principle in the current climate.

"[We] have never bought a generic Bordeaux at less than €1,000 per 900-litre tonneau," he explained.

"But the Bordeaux system makes it harder for us to keep doing that."

"We all need the smaller estates to work to keep Bordeaux connected to the next generation of wine drinkers."

Simon Davies, head of marketing at FINE+RARE, also recently criticised the "catastrophic" pricing decisions made by some Bordeaux estates over their 2010 wines.

However, speaking to Harper's Wine and Spirit, Mr Davies said that his firm had enjoyed another excellent en primeur campaign for the 2010s.

He explained that the key to FINE+RARE's success was to select wines that scored well in Robert Parker's reviews of the 2009 vintage but were on sale at better than 2009 prices, allowing it to buy larger allocations.