The Drinks Business and Liv-ex have just published the 2013 edition of the Liv-ex Power 100 – the annual list of the most powerful brands in the fine wine market. Chateau Pavie becomes world’s most powerful brand in the fine wine market. A premiere for this list published by the UK Magazine and the global marketplace for professional buyers and sellers of fine wine: for the first time in its eight-year history, the brand at the top of the list was not a First Growth or DRC.
Gerard Perse: “Chateau Pavie is unique in Bordeaux and we are thankful to international wine experts who, year after year, are giving us the best scores. St Emilion is an extraordinary place to make wines with a great elegance and a long aging potential. Being world’s most powerful brand in the fine wine market is a great reward for the tremendous work done at Chateau Pavie since 1998.”
The starting point of the 2013 edition of the Liv-ex Power 100 was to take a list of all wines that traded on Liv-ex in the last year and group these by brand. They then removed all those that had traded lightly. Brands were ranked using five criteria: year on year price performance, average critic score (Robert Parker, The Wine Spectator, Allen Meadows, Stephen Tanzer and James Suckling), trading performance on Liv-ex, number of wines and vintages traded, and average price. Only the wines and vintages that traded on Liv-ex in the last year were included in the calculations.
“Powerful brand” is defined by critic scores, prices and trading?
That’s a big deal in the auction world, but it’s a weird definition of powerful. Seems that something like Apple or better, Coca Cola would seem “powerful” - recognized world wide and affects markets even beyond the soft-drink market (fast food, etc.). So seems like the most powerful brand in wine would still be something like Yellow Tail or some other hugely successful brand.
Plus, Yellow Tail may not get the secondary market trading, but it gets nice scores too!
Had they been drinking while compiling their list? There is a lot more than Pavie to pick on here. We are dealing with big-time diddlers here. I am not sure why anyone would take Liv-ex seriously. (It does not even seem to stream on Jeff Leve’s website anymore!) Angelus is in the 2 spot, Pape Clement in the 4 slot, Penfolds Grange rounding out the top 10, and something called “Chapoutier” in the 11 slot. The great man himself, rather than any of his wines? (I have to tell you, however, that with, what, 10,000-15,000 wines on earth (how many first-growths? how many grand crus?), there can be no question that Violette deserves its place at #55 and Clerc Milon its #87!) The whole schtick is fatally flawed by the fact that Liv-ex quasi-subjectively decides who makes its “50” and “100” lists in the first place. Here is how the Liv-ex 100 is calculated:
“How the index is calculated
In order to qualify for the index, wines must have attracted critical acclaim from a leading critic (a 95-point score or above) and attract a regular market on Liv-ex. They must also be physically available in the UK market, so recent vintages that are only trading on an En Primeur basis are ineligible. The wines included in the index are reviewed on a quarterly basis by committee.
The Liv-ex 100 is calculated using the Liv-ex Mid Price for each component wine. The Mid Price is the most robust measure for pricing wines available in the market and is calculated by finding the mid point between the current highest bid price and lowest offer price on the Liv-ex trading platform. Each price is then verified by our valuation committee to ensure that the number is robust after taking into account all data at our disposal, including merchant offer prices and historical Liv-ex transaction prices.
The Liv-ex Mid Price for each wine is then multiplied by the wine’s average production level – such as 20,000 nine litre cases – with this figure gradually reduced as the wine ages. When the wine reaches 25-years from vintage it is removed from the index as available volumes are too low to attract a strong secondary market.”
And here is the link to the Power 100, which tells you, among other things, that their “average critics’ scores” are, in fact, Parker’s alone to the extent possible! (They had to look elsewhere for some Burgundy scores, it seems.) And then they fiddle about a bit more until this comes out the other end:
I once beat a ranked squash player. Very impressive, until I tell you he was #2 in the over 90 category, and there were only three of them (and I think he beat #3 by default, when his opponent forgot how to get to the club). If you narrow the criteria enough, you can get any result you want.
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