the Wine of the Year does indeed see a sharp increase in price. Over the past decade, the average release price for the Wine of the Year was $67.60; the current average price is now $172.50. That?s an increase of 155%. But if we discard the past two winners, the Kosta Browne 2009 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir and the Saxum James Berry 2007 Paso Robles, the price increase falls to 95%.
Dawson goes on to note that the price hike generally evaporates for the next vintage of the winning wine and that the price increases trail off quickly as you go down the Top 10.
How about the rest of the top ten? Turns out only the runner up wine sees much of a spike in price soon after the list comes out. The average release price for the runner-up wines was $68; today you can get those wines for an average of $100.50 per bottle, an increase of nearly 48%. The 10th-ranked wine has seen a price increase of 22%, which is not nothing, but not exorbitant in the higher-end wine market.
The piece goes on to mention our Scoop the Spectator contest and notes that you all have successfully predicted the winner each year the contest has been run.
Now, I used to think the entire concept of a Top 100 list was silly. This year, mine was the first guess on Dwyer?s site. As Dwyer explains, his contest is designed to help consumers.
?The fundamental motivation for knowing the winning wine ahead of time is to provide an opportunity to buy that wine before the street price goes up,? Dwyer told me. How do you know that you can get the winning wine based on Dwyer?s contest? Well, so far, Dwyer?s contestants have sniffed out the winner in advance.
Have one of you guessed the winner already? I think so. The Wine Spectator reveal starts Wednesday (pushed back a couple days by Hurricane Sandy). We'll keep the contest deadline tonight - November 9th, 2012 at 11:59 pm Eastern. While you're waiting, jump on Grapes the Wine Co's wine offer email list. Despite being without power at home and at the store he's still been pounding the offers, with a particular focus on 2010 Rhone (How Could it Not Be 2010 Rhone?). Gotta love it. Subscribe to the WWP for commentary as the wines are revealed next weekThanks again to all who have entered. And good luck!
This may sound odd, but there is a link between packaging innovation and the increasing focus on biodynamics and ‘natural wine’, it just isn’t a simple one. I am not suggesting that natural wine producers are better served choosing tetrapacks, paper bottles or aluminium cans for their wines (although they might), but sometimes the simplest [...]
Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass…
The Wine Spectator Affect
When I received my November 15th issue of Wine Spectator on October 11th, featuring a cover shot of Tim Mondavi and an feature article on him and his estate winery Continuum, I captured some online research reference points so I could have a baseline to measure the effect that a flattering Wine Spectator cover story might have on a winery in the digital age.
Using Wine-Searcher,CellarTracker and Google Keywords search data to track various data points, the results, while not directly linked to conclusions, do indicate a small bump in interest as a result of the cover piece.
For example, Wine-Searcher data indicates that the average bottle price, an indicator of supply and demand, rose $2 month over month, from $149 a bottle to $151 a bottle.
In addition, the Wine-Searcher search rank (always a month behind) indicates that Continuum was the 1360th most popular search in September. By Friday, November 11th the Continuum search rank had increased to 471st for the month of October. (See the top 100 searches for October here).
Likewise, interest at CellarTracker increased, as well. The number of bottles in inventory from October 11th to November 11th increased by 177 bottles, likely no small coincidence.
Finally, Google searches increased fivefold from an average of 210 monthly searches to approximately 1000 monthly searches.
What does this all mean? Good question. The truth is, a Wine Spectator cover appears to have moved the needle a bit, and while the easy route is to take a righteous Eeyore approach to mainstream media and its blunted impact in the Aughts, as contrasted to what a Spectator cover feature or glowing words from Parker meant just a decade ago, I believe a more tangible takeaway is to realize that these sorts of cover stories don’t happen in a vacuum and that Wine Spectator cover and feature was likely a result of weeks, months or even years’ worth of effort from a PR professional.
In an attention-deficit, social media-impacted, offline/online hybrid world of information consumption with mobile and tablets proliferating, in order to break through to (and ultimately assist) the consumer, the value of the PR professional, an oft neglected part of the marketing hierarchy, in reaching out and facilitating the telling of a winery’s story seems to be more important than ever.
It’s not about press releases, it’s about people supporting and telling the winery story, repeatedly, as a professional function – that leads to media notice, and that leads to 14 cases of wine being sold and inventoried at CellarTracker in a 30-day period of time. It’s perhaps obvious, but not adhered to.
Wine Labels
To me, a wine bottle is a blank canvas that can either inspire in its creativity or repel in its insipidness. While I have a reasonably conservative approach to the kinds of wine I want to drink relative to technological intervention, I am unabashedly progressive when it comes to the kind of wine labels that appeal to me. In support of my interest with wine packaging, I keep an eye on The Dieline wine blog to see what’s happening in wine label design (another example from The Coolist here) and I also pay attention to the burgeoning field of wine label design contests.
What say you about progressive labels? Like ‘em? Loathe them? I placed a poll to the right.
I will lobby the nominating committee of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on behalf of anybody who can help me understand how it is that in the span of a week I can see multiple research reports (here and here) on a revived sense of fiscal austerity by consumers yet other reports (here and here) indicate that wine above $20 is the fastest growing segment this year.
These two clearly don’t jive with each other, yet I’m witless to understand why wine is “trading up.” Help!
After visiting more wineries and tasting more Washington wines than I can count, meeting many of the best winemakers in Washington, and walking the rows in many of the best known vineyards in the state, these are the Wine Peeps team?s picks as the best of 2012 in Washington Wine Country. BEST WINE: 2009 Rasa [...]
This is our second suggested trip for a quick getaway to the wine country. Last post we suggested a trip to the Carneros wine region; this week we suggest the Silverado Trail on the south end of the Valley. This trip is about an hour away from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. We like going through the back side of Napa; it saves a little time when headed to the Silverado Trail. Print out these driving directions. Continue reading →
Which corks will pop at the lunch immediately after President Obama’s second inauguration on January 21? With Charles Schumer as the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee planning the inauguration festivities, wine enthusiasts could anticipate that New York wines would make a showing. Indeed, two appear on the menu: the 2009 dry riesling from Tierce [...]
In this post you'll find an overview of the ratings of the 2007 St. Emilion Grand Cru Classé wines. We have gathered all ratings from Robert Parker, Decanter and Wine Spectator.