I have seen a bunch of things of Winebid with the provenance listed as “Inherited,” so that should have been selected.
It’s not the winery in most cases. Low pricing on back vintages at auction is something a lot of wineries pricing in the >$200 release range are struggling with. They aren’t selling back vintages on WineBid at $150 while trying to price current releases at $300.
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This is where ask and sell may dramatically differ. You can ask whatever you want, what it actually goes for is the real value.
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Ive seen a lot of wine get sold on auction that had to be coming from inside. Ive seen 4 three bottle lots of wine sold week after week for months on end. As much as some of us here follow auctions many of us do not and even less among the mass retail buyers follow them. Its a good way to quietly liquidate a bunch of wine at well above wholesale and things Ive seen couldnt be explained any other way. Im not saying everyone is doing it but some defintely are
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And this logic is why I would question whether a consumer drank 2 and offloaded at a $100+ loss per bottle when you can clearly find back vintages priced well below current release pricing that are ready to drink now.
If you are aware of WineBid to sell your wine, you are also aware of them to buy back vintages at better pricing.
Maybe this is an elephant in the room for wineries who’s pricing far outpaced back vintages and maybe its distributors offloading slow moving product; it just doesn’t look right that a customer would take a loss on something so steeply and quickly.
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I’m not saying it never happens. But if I go on WineBid at any given time I can see wines from at least 5-10 high-end/culty California producers that I know are not doing this and are frustrated to keep seeing these bottles pop up as they are trying to maintain or raise prices.
One source is people who just buy more wine than they want or need (a familiar problem here, eh!) and periodically cull their cellars, even if that means taking a net loss on some bottles. I bet some Berserkers have done that.
I can’t speak to distributors or even retailers offloading inventory but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s part of it.
Another source, well known within the industry despite being generally frowned upon, is employees of a winery who are able to get free bottles or steeply discounted bottles. If you are making $22/hr in the cellar and you can make another couple grand by selling off your allocation, yeah, maybe you sell some wine. Especially these days.
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speaking of mugnier, leon and son just listed 23 musigny and 23 bonnes mares. i thought these top cuvées were only supposed to be late released?
Bonnes Mares is correct, but Musigny is 2018.
That usually happens.
Its a winery direct allocation rather than sitting on inventory that is unsold. Frankly, I love seeing one of the largest Online Retailers even bringing up words from Christian Moueix like Napa, more affordable, meeting todays market in the same sentence. Some $ is better than none and the Napa Cab producers need to realize that lowering the price a smidge is a welcome gesture being they have gotten too far over their skis…
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LOT of culling. And changes in taste (after you bought hundreds of bottles of X). And a lot of collectors content to take a haircut if needed. For many really it’s a rounding error.
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Thanks for sharing that was an interesting read. I wonder if it’s wishful thinking? What’s stood out to me was the 68% figure for winery revenue from DTC.
“If you want to attract a younger consumer, you need some people that cuss a little bit, and they’ve got tattoos on them and maybe gauges in their ears.”
That’ll do it. 
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This has something to do with the state of the market and a lot, seemingly, to do with eggs in a basket.
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I don’t disagree but I also have a lot of experience with SVB and have heard their annual report speech at winery symposiums and would say that their batting average would not get them a Kyle Tucker-sized contract.
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The egg/basket comment resonates. I think they may also have been a victim of timing - growth mode and plan just before drop in general demand.
One must also recognize that these surveys are far from accurate. Those who are doing well probably state that they are doing better than they actually are. And those that are doing poorly probably don’t wanna say how poorly they are doing.
The data is a nice gauge, but take it with a grain of salt 
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Reading the Swedish newspapers after the last imperialist moves, there is a huge groundswell for total boycott of all US products in these countries. If wine business wasn’t hard enough, I think US wine can pretty much forget any exports for the next few years.
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A friend of mine used to be on the Scarecrow list, stopped buying with the 2016 vintage. They recently got up with him out of the blue trying to sell him some wine. I wasn’t all that surprised, high end lists are probably falling off a cliff.
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