By Sisi Liang and featured on Forbes LifeStyle on 2/23/2017 Enrico Bernardo became the youngest world champion sommelier when he achieved the title in 2004 at the age of 27. I have recently been lucky enough to meet Enrico at La Pizza Fresca Ristorante in New York City, through a small gathering after a wine auction. Late at night, the restaurant was quiet, and only a charming bartender and the owner of the restaurant (who would lock himself in a super packed basement wine cellar, workin...
Read more | 0 commentsby Joseph L. Breeden and Sisi Liang, featured on Forbes Lifestyle on 9/14/16 “We know how to make wines that will get higher Parker ratings, but we want to stay faithful to the terroir.” — Marie-Hélene Dussech, Commercial Director, Château Brane-Cantenac. After almost 40 years, wine ratings are still controversial in the wine industry. The comment by Ms. Dussech is a clear statement that vineyards do not see wine ratings as the complete arbiter of quality, a...
Read more | 0 commentsby Joseph L. Breeden and Sisi Liang, featured on Forbes Lifestyle on 6/29/16 “Wine has been an investment for hundreds of years. Buy five cases. Sell two. Drink three.” Joe Marchant from BIWine offered this straight-forward answer. When a chateau holds back 20% of their production for sale after the value appreciates, that is an investment. When a distributor buys inventory to resell, that is an investment. When a restaurant fills their cellar for the pleasure of elite diners ...
Read more | 0 commentsBy Joseph L. Breeden How important is where you buy and sell to the price of the wine? Rarely can we compare the same wine sold at two houses in a similar time frame. Rather, to assess the importance of auction house, we included auction house as a predictive factor in our price model for fine wine. This has the affect of first normalizing the price of the wine for all the other factors in our model: age, vintage, rating, etc. Thereby we can make a kind of adjusted basket of fruit to basket of ...
Read more | 0 commentsBy Joseph L. Breeden Wine ratings such as those by Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate are intended to describe the flavor of a wine. Rated in the blind by experts, they serve as a guide to buyers on the quality of the wine when it reaches maturity. A natural question is, do ratings reflect price? It seems reasonable to assume that a high rating may drive up the price of a wine. Statistically we can only determine if a relationship exists, not whether ratings drive price. That said, our analysis...
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