Crazy Prices for '14 Duckhorn Three Palms Merlot on WineBid

I’ve been watching in awe as people are paying ridiculous prices for the '14 on WineBid just because this wine got #1 of '17 by Wine Spectator.

I really don’t understand though. I bought a '12 of this wine for $45 this summer on WineBid. This wine is lovely but even at its normal $80 or so normal retail price it seems overpriced. Now people are paying $250+ for the '14. Someone bid up and paid $325/bottle for 6 of these last week. What is wrong with people??!! This isn’t a rare, limited production wine, why are these bids so high? Is there something else going on that I don’t understand?

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” – H.L. Mencken, 1926

[welldone.gif]

Sheep. Mehhhhhhhh!

As my grandfather would say, “… those are people with more dollars than sense …”

Everyone has their own benchmarks by which they judge what they want to buy. With what is essentially the creation of a highly liquid secondary market in fine wine in the past 20 years, plus the proliferation of critics and message boards such as this- we have an incredible wealth of information and a fairly transparent marketplace that makes it much easier for those of us who seek to learn and also to find wines that we would like to have. The community of savvy wine drinkers is far larger than 20 years ago.

However, with that growth has also come a truly vast portion of the wine consuming public who are either still learning or, like most people in any hobby, are perfectly content to find a benchmark or two on which to make their decisions and then just buy and enjoy (be it by drinking, reselling or “owning”.)

When I started working retail part-time ITB during college in the late 90s I had every expectation that Wine Advocate scores drove everything. As a Bordeaux collector at the time, it was a reasonable assumption. But I learned very quickly in retail that for every $100 bottle of Lafite I sold, I would sell 30-40 cases of under $20 wines.

I also learned that it was the Wine Spectator that really drove the markets in a big way. The WA mattered a great deal for the occasional high end sale, but it was the WS scores that drove the real sales volume in the wines that make everyone ITB a living- i.e. the under $20 world.

That degree of influence also spills over into the higher end- and the sheer volume of people who spend $20 or less most of the time is such that those among them who will occasionally spend a lot more is still a very large number of people.

Clos St. Hune is a great example of what the WS can do to a really high end wine. I do not remember the particulars of what honor it was granted, but way back when the WS went absolutely nuts over the 1996 Clos St. Hune (maybe the 1998- I am not 100% sure.)

Everybody who really knew wine already knew about Clos St. Hune. It sold for around $60 a bottle and took a while to sell. It is also, like many great wines of the world, a real love it or leave it kind of thing. Hune is amazing, but it is not for everyone. The petrol notes are so strong in it that many people actually feel ill after drinking a glass or two.

That one WS article sent the price soaring. Granted that would have happened in time with the markets such as they are, but when you consider that it is only in the last few years that the very, very top German Rieslings have really taken off in price, I think it is safe to say that the WS accelerated the widespread demand for Hune a good 15 years ahead of schedule.

Make it something like Duckhorn that is already widely popular and respected among the far broader audience outside of serious collectors and students of wine, and voila you have a $325 bottle of Merlot just like that.

It’s likely not someone in the US doing the crazy bidding. Probably someone in HK or China.

Reason #289 why I detest the WS Top 100 list, especially WOTY.

Bruce

The prices of older Duckhorn reds have markedly softened.

Every year, I am just hoping that there is no wine I like on this list …

It’s because people completely misunderstand the WS Top 100. They think it means that wine is the best wine in the world. The Top 100, assuming it’s not biased by economic or other concerns, factors in price and availability. If that wine were over $100 and hard to find, it might not have made the Top 100, let alone #1.

Simple solution: buy no advertising. [snort.gif]

I’m all in favor of Duckhorn winning. I bought a six pack (only 6 of them came into Las Vegas) a week before the announcement when they were revealing the top 10 list one day at a time. Boy am I smart…er…lucky. Wasn’t the Cinq Cepages one of the first to elicit this type of behavior? The guy that sold me the wine said his phone didn’t stop ringing the day after the announcement.

I saw this exact wine in the Cheese Shop wine store in Williamsburg, VA for $120.

Because one vintage of one wine one time per year goes way up in value? A bottle you rarely, if ever, were going to buy?

I was at Hi Time today, the 2012 Casanova di Neri Brunello (#4) was still abundant and at the same price as before the list. It’s only #1, and only for that vintage, that goes up a lot in price.

Take the bread ends and house, leave the Duckhorn.

Thanks, now I’m going to be distracted the rest of the day dreaming about eating a roast beef with cheddar and extra house on one of the benches along DOG Street.

I’ve been around Duckhorn Merlots for many many years and it was not really that sought after. Look what a little publicity will do. Don’t get caught be a sheeple.

Off-Topic (but on-par for my WB behavior)…

There’s a LOT of Ridge wine (154 items) up for bidding this week! :astonished:

I got turned on to Paloma for this reason and stayed on their list for many years after 2001. I don’t think they raised their prices after they got woty and their merlot was great for the price.

Wow should have bought everything when I saw it at $84.