Thanks for your comments, Ian. I think you are correct about wine-searcher as not always being indicative of the ‘fair market value’ for certain wines, particularly true for rarities IMO. I think it can be useful as a proxy for FMV when considering wines that are made / purchased / consumed in higher volumes.
Certainly auction data is informative, but it can be difficult to compare apples to apples due to variations in condition and their impact on hammer price may - I haven’t studied this in depth, so there may be some ‘rules of thumb’ that hold true, but I’ve also not observed any references to condition in the WMJ data.
As far as a race to the bottom goes, so long as condition, service levels, reliability, etc. hold constant, I am of the mind that more transparency and competition is better for the consumer. Just because someone is the best today shouldn’t entitle them to hold that position tomorrow, the market will reach equilibrium eventually, won’t it?
You hit the nail on the head with the flaw of WMJ. If a bottle sees a huge dip in price, what was up with the bottle? That’s an outlier result, so why does it qualify?
I hear your last point, but racing to the best price shouldn’t be everything. I’ll duck after saying this for fear of something being thrown in my general direction, but much to the chagrin of those on this board- retailers are allowed to make money
Customer service costs money. Hiring good people to pack and ship costs money. Shipping costs are getting out of control. Dollars can really start to add up. It’s not that Donkey Kong gets to stay on top, but the tit for tat pricing model probably isn’t netting most retailers a good, reliable customer.
Fully agree, Ian. It cannot be everything, and customers also (rightly) expect all of the other pieces you’ve mentioned to be done well. I appreciate your perspective.
Circa 2012, one of my friends who works for a huge negociant house was in Hong Kong. They really hadn’t cracked the market before, so it was an interesting exercise. They would show up with price lists and what not, and my friend got cornered a bit by a guy who moved tons of wine in HK, and he asked him point blank-
“How do I get the prices the guy in California gets?” Shocked, my friend replied with “who in California are you speaking of?” to which the answer was “Premier Cru”. He said, we’ve never sold them a single bottle of wine. To which he replied with “well, I know you have to offer some kind of special pricing, you guys can’t all be selling everything for the same price. So how much wine do I have to buy to get XX% off when I buy?” (I don’t recall the exact number he threw out, but it was commensurate with what PC was charging, so like 30 or 40% off).
My friend was completely speechless. He didn’t even know how to respond. He didn’t want to start explaining what we all knew about PC and that it was fiction. He gave his best shot, but the meeting quickly ended after that.
He said he had that same conversation 5 more times on his trip. He got a bit better each time.
PC was a graduated failure before it became total. A lot of what it offered, it did deliver though later than other places did. And, on the basis of that, people expected that it would continue to do so. I agree that the 05 Bordeaux future offerings were a pretty healthy tip off (though I understand that things started well before that). But I did order Southern Rhones from them for years after that and they all came in. Even so, I started to get more cautious when I saw the absurd prices they were offering on very ritzy wines. Still, one can understand that people who had gotten wine before thought that they would still get it.
I should note this is thread drift, and I have no reason to think Vint resembles Premier Cru in pretty much any way.
But yes, it was and still is such an interesting illustration of so much irrational thinking. People were presented with evidence and extremely knowledgeable opinions about what was actually happening, and many actually dug in further to their belief that everything was fine. Rather than consider what they were reading with curiosity, quite a few people started hurling insults and any sort of concocted reasoning that came to mind, to discredit the people who obviously saw the truth. Daniel Kahneman could write a whole book about it.
Or people put more stock on their personal experience than what they hear on the internet. That’s not irrational, although it might very well lead to poor outcomes because personal experience may be misleading in the larger picture. If it were so easy to distinguish good evidence and knowledgeable opinions from shit generated by internet cranks, our world would be much different.
Sorry, how did we even get on the topic of Premier Cru in the first place? I’ll note that Vint doesn’t have the W-S low for all of the wines that I’ve looked at (some far from it), and for those that it does it maybe is a maximum of 10% below the lowest price. Is that really the kind of thing that rings alarm bells for folks?
Anyway, I placed an order earlier this week for some relatively inexpensive wines and will give an update once I receive them in a few months.
Unfortunately, we don’t really have a good process for that at the moment out of our DC facility. That being said, our shipping rates are coming down since we’ve launched, so we have decent common carrier options depending on your view of that mode of delivery. Not sure where you are located, but we can also support local delivery in a number of key markets in the Northeast, as well as the greater DC area.
