The Bryant thread got me thinking…has anyone ever tried to figure out what percent of wine makes it to cellar tracker? For example screagle has reported annual production of 5-9k bottles (not sure if that includes the second), and I see consistently about 1500 bottles on CT per vintage, indicating about 20% on CT. I would hypothesize that numbers would be consistent by “class” of wine - ie screagle/Harlan/colgin/etc would be around the same percent, but would vary greatly across types. Maybe semi-geeky-CA mailing list wines (Rhys/bedrock/etc) would have higher percent, I’d think European producers would be lower, etc.
Yeah, I’d imagine your suppositions to be correct, super-spendy cult CA wine only really has two consumer bases: the conspicuously wealthy and the conspicuously nerdy and one of those categories I’d think is much more likely to use CT than the average bear. I’d also imagine board darling types also have a higher-than-average input rate as well. I bet stuff like Rhys or Rivers Marie or Cayuse is probably at the upper end of the range of amount logged like you say.
Depends on the wine as geeky people enter more often. I’ve had guys in Napa tell me 20%-25% is a pretty close number based on their release numbers and what ends up in CT.
That’s a huge percentage!
I am amazed.
I would have guessed less than 1%.
I assume this is only for their $50+ bottles? still higher than I would have expected.
Most assuredly.
I think it is only relevant for “cult + high-end + USA”, else the percentages will probably always be below 1%. E.g.: Dom Perignon is relatively high-end, produces 4-5M bottles per year, and you can find on average far less than half a percent on Cellar Tracker. The same percentages seem to hold for Latour, Vega Sicilia, DRC RC, …
CT users are dominated by Americans.
Think of all the wine consumed just in France, an incredibly small number are in CT.
I played around with this years ago in discussions on the CT forum with Eric and others regarding expanding CT. My position was automatic translation was critical to driving non English user growth.
If there was full support for Spanish, Italian and French you’d see a lot more bottles in CT but it’ll still be a rounding error compared to world production.
Heck, what percentage of KJ Vintner Reserve Chardonnay is tracked? Not much.
That all sounds right. Also, I think most Europeans are less obsessive about their wine collections. Few store offsite, and maintaining an inventory is less essential if you can just go down in the cellar of the family house and grab a bottle.
I think the market for those wines is skewed toward the West Coast, too. Perhaps it’s just the circles I move in, but I never hear much discussion of limited production, mailing list West Coast wines here on the East Coast. On top of that, there are more technology adopters on the West Coast, I think. Together, I’d guess that would mean that higher proportions of cult products end up registered on CT.
I used to track this early on for things like Quilceda, SQN and Pavie and figured out 10%. It doesn’t surprise me that it might have risen, but as already noted you have to look at the correlation to more geeky, online driven wines and lists. About half the CT user base is in the US.
When I was living in England and drinking a lot more European wines that aren’t exported to the U.S., I had to add a lot of new wines to CT. So simply from my own experience, coverage of not-internationally-known European wines is very sparse. Since I moved to the U.S., I haven’t had to add a single U.S. wine to CT, even some of the more obscure Virginian ones I’ve had.
There are lots of other interesting things to see though, for example how much various bdx is sitting in negociant warehouses or in chateau cellars. For example 2010 vs 2015 PLL has about 1500 bottles each on CT. For Cos, otoh, there are about 1000 bottles of 15 but 5000 of 10.
Yeah we’re more laid back in the East. We don’t care about status like they do in the Sunbelt, with those big manses and fancy cult wines!
Really? That is not what I see for PLL, but there is in fact a big drop in 2015 Cos.
Pichon Lalande:
2010: 4042 bottles - https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=1128959
2015: 3765 bottles - https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=2353019
Cos d’Estournel:
2010: 6308 bottles - https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=1123179
2015: 985 bottles - https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=2353375
Sorry meant about 3500 not 1500. But ballpark 10 and 15 are similar