Auction Forecast

Empowering Collectors to be Investors

The Art Of Wine: 9 Lessons From World Champion Sommelier Enrico Bernardo

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...

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Are Wine Ratings Good for Wine Investment?

by 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...

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Can Wine Be a Good Investment? Four Key Tests

by 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 ...

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Price Dynamics by Auction House

By 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 ...

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Wine Ratings and Auction Prices

By 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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