Yes, fairly normal, but well off people.
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Yeah, it’s hard to find verbiage, and whatever you pick isn’t going to click with everyone (which is fine).
But I think in some sense, the demand for the trophy wines is more a function of how many very well off (however you want to call that) people there are, versus how the net worth rises and falls among the super rich (again, whatever phrasing one prefers).
Damn. Fairly normal people live in 4M+ houses in the US? Thats absolute high end stuff in Copenhagen…
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No. It was a preposterous thing to write. Only 8% of US homes are worth a quarter of that.
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Thanks Neal. I might have been a bit ironic based on the “fairly normal” remarks. (My danish sense of humour is awful. I am sorry)
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If you live in and among multi-million dollar homes and buy DRC by the case on the regular, you might eventually start thinking that is normal.
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Must be nice….
I was using the word normal to describe the people in the sense of the life they lead. They aren’t celebrities on social media or flying on private jets to the Maldives or taking their yacht out on weekends or wearing new designer outfits every day. They are people that you park next to at the super market or walk by on the street or sit next to at a restaurant that go to work 5 days a week and do most of the same stuff your average upper middle class person does. Maybe they drive a $125k car instead of a $50k car or live in a $4M house instead of $1M or they spend $50k/mo in discretionary instead of $10k/mo, but the essence of their day to day life isn’t any different.
(And a brief note to the usual trolls: don’t even start with all the stuff about the average American because almost nobody on this board fits that description. We’re already talking about upper middle class and above.)
https://www.wineberserkers.com/t/average-household-income-for-a-berserker-2021-edition/172886
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Well it’s one indication of declining sales-- there is vintage variability due to various factors (frost, flowering and fruit set, smoke) so yes, short term economics are hard to sort out from the data, but in the long term I would expect (and have seen some wineries) eventually cutting back on production due to sales pressure. If you dive into the State report, most of the declines are in CA and WA (picking the 2019 to 2023 time frame for example, we see CA going from 705M gals to 609.6M; WA going from 38.3M to 33.1M; but OR going from 15.3M to 17 and NY from 30.4 to 32.4 – all the other states are smaller players)
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Same with Oregon. But in some major Metropolitan areas, Seattle/Los Angeles/San Francisco, it’s not far from nornal.
Median home price in NYC is $785k. SEA is $872,515. SF is $1,292,126. LA is $1.1M. $4MM is far from normal. Unless we are talking about normal in Bel Air and Brentwood.
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Mother nature certainly helps dictate this, but looking at 23 and now 24 coming up, my guess is tht production numbers will be down in most places - and most likely NOT due to Mother Nature.
It will really be interesting as the summer progresses to see how wineries plan out their 2024 grape purchases relative to 2023 and earlier years. Many wineries I’m talking with are planning on cutting back this year - not all of them but plenty of them. The real question - what’s happening at the ‘mega level’? We will see . . .
Cheers
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The decline in Washington is higher than OR and NY put together, to say nothing of the decline in CA. Said decline being larger than Oregon, New York and Washington’s total production put together…
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True . . . but percentage wise, the decline in CA is very similar to the decline in WA.
Cheers
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I noticed today that you can buy various vintages of Penfolds Grange in the USA (in singles, in stock) for $400 or so now, which I think is a decent amount less than those were costing a few years ago. Maybe someone who follows that wine more can confirm whether I’m correct or not.
The huge price spike in Grange a decade or so ago was always pretty odd to me in the first place. I don’t mean that I don’t think it’s great or deserves to be expensive, but when it tripled in price or something in a pretty short period, I found that surprising.
They make a lot of it, so it frankly doesn’t shock me.
I also know they have had a couple of tough years recently.
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I’m guessing this also has to do with the rise and subsequent fall of the Chinese market for them perhaps . . .
Cheers
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The Australian Government has been notified that, from 29 March 2024, China will remove its duties on Australian bottled wine.
Australia sold $1.1 billion to China in 2019, before the duties were put in place in 2020. Hopefully a nice rebound now for Australian producers. Not sure how this affects current price of Grange.
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The list price from Penfolds is $650, but it usually doesn’t sell for that much. According to Wine-searcher, the cheapest bottles of recent vintages in the US are:
2015: $539
2016: $599 (one bottle at my local Total Wine; next price is $699).
2017: $500 (Zachys, of all places)
2018: $536
2019: $550
Still seems plenty expensive.
I believe Chris was talking about auction pricing.