Got the one thing I was looking to buy at the price I wanted, probably should have taken more of a flyer on the Willi spatlese, but no regrets once so ever.
Egon, lol.
Good auction. Between the Haag prices and the Willi spat price, it feels like it was turned a few years back in a vintage that should have been priced like a few years back. In other words, mostly sanity. I was sad to underbid the Lauer TBA, but it seems like the ā18 TBAs are coming in bits and pieces, both auction and non-auction, and itās a special TBA vintage. I will echo Russell - Iāve never seen such divergent opinions in the room over so many wines, and while there are always big changes from Thursday to Friday morning to Friday afternoon they were even bigger this year. Will be good fun to figure out what Iāve bought over the next 10 years.
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I won nothing today, and didnāt even think I was especially low-balling. But I was cautious. I didnāt bother bidding on some producers (Willi Schaefer, GrĆ¼nhaus) because I was scared off by last yearās prices. Too bad though, as I would have been interested at this yearās lower prices.
So why the broad (non Egon MĆ¼ller) downturn? A lesser vintage for sure, though I feel like the quality delta between 2021 and 2022 (highly conjectural since Iāve yet to taste a bottle of 2022) seems to be smaller than the hype delta. 2021 was epically hyped and last yearās auction reflected that. But I wonder if that same hype and resulting price jumps scared off many regular buyers. Earlier in this thread there were reports that large volume regular auction participants were notably absent.
Perhaps what weāre seeing is a reflection of the transition of auction buyers from mostly local/insiders to more retail oriented middlemen outside Germany. I definitely saw many more retailers offering to carry bids for me than I have in the past. In the long term I have to think that expanded global buying networks will inevitably drive prices up. I will be very curious indeed to see what happens in the next hyped vintage, whenever that arrives.
I imagine many others did the same, which is what helped prices stay so low. Iām not complaining, as I benefited from that, but it seems like a rookie move to avoid bidding on a wine you actually want because youāre worried about the price being too high.
Put in a bid at the price you are willing to pay and let the chips fall. If you bid 150ā¬ and it hammers for 450ā¬ did you lose anything? I bid 172ā¬ on Schaefer Spat and figured Iād get nothing and instead I got my full case.
If I didnāt already have 20+ years of Riesling in the cellar- this is the question I would be asking myself. It would be hard to get inspired by the events of today if it turns out down the road that every time a ā2021ā comes along - the dickswingers will show up and bid my favorite wines through the roof. That does not make for a sustainable business model based on customer loyalty long term- and things are not yet to the point they are in Burgundy where demand is so high that customer loyalty can be completely disregarded if one wishes.
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The flip side of āwhat the hell Iāll throw in more low-ball, almost certainly not going to win, bidsā is when the market is soft and you end up with huge numbers of bottles flooding an already stuffed-to-the-gills cellar. Iāve been there. The only way to dodge this bullet is to not bid on everything.
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You should split it up by pradikat 
What are people saying about 2023 so far? Doesnāt seem like thereās much to talk about if only grapes for kabinett have gotten picked so far.
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From what I have heard from growers from Mosel: āa lot of rot mixed with sunburnsā. Hot summer with long wet periods is not a good a combination.
Iām way ahead of you. Thereās a ton of interesting data. Iāll do a full proper rundown of all the auction data after all the auctions end. In the meantime, happy to share any interesting data folks may be interested in
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A freak in the sheets, love it!
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For reference, hereās the figures from last yearās auctions. I didnāt break each auction down by pradikat, so Iāll have to go into my 2022 data to get the pradikat breakdown for each auction. Iāll do that when I have some more free time.
I have now completed my own analysis of the data.
The most immediately obvious singular aspect of this yearās results is just how dramatically āall over the mapā they are. Prior to 2015, it would be unusual for a wine that regularly comes to auction to vary by more than maybe 10% from vintage to vintage- up or down. Additionally, while individual results could vary- generally speaking in a given vintage there would be a clear upward or downward trend in the results.
Not so in 2023. Of the 50 lots where the same wine/format was auctioned last year, 34 lots - or 68%- achieved results more than 10% different from prior year. 23 lots, or 46%, saw hammer price variances greater than 20%. And to make matters even more interesting- there was no clear trend in these variances. There were more instances of wines dropping by more than 10% in price than increasing by 10% in price (and same at the 20% mark), but there were a good many examples in both directions- and without any particularly compelling patterns based on Pradikat or bottle size (only one Auslese showed gains this year, but there were so few to begin with that it does not create a compelling pattern.)
My broad interpretation of this data is that we are seeing the aftereffects- in the auction of a vintage whose long term quality is under debate- of a several-year unprecedented run up in prices driven by a rapidly expanding base of customers that culminated last year in the auction of a vintage that is generally held in very high regard.
In such a scenario you see continued strength in estates that are newer or have typically sold in the past at lower prices, you see sudden apparent weakness in wines that dropped significantly from last year but remain expensive when considering the past 5-10 years of data, and in the case of Egon Muller you see the rare examples that have become more collectable brands than wines for all practical purposes, like DRC or Lafite, and are unlikely to be dampened by anything other than a cataclysmic event that broadly impacts the wine markets as a whole. This is further complicated by factors such as the restructuring of the auctions themselves to accommodate a new audience- most notably the increased presence of large format bottles.
I think we will need to wait 2-3 more auction cycles to see how this all shakes out moving forward, but clearly this year was a major inflection point.
As the auctions took place and all these extreme individual results started rolling in, I was getting certain trend notions in my head- but when you look at the data as a whole, on average things were surprisingly stable.
For the 50 lots which had prior year comparatives, the simple average bottle price per lot was down 5% from last year. Within the Pradikats, the changes were a drop of 2% for Kabinett, a drop of 4% for Spatlese, a drop of 23% for Auslese and an increase of 18% for GGs. However, if you remove the biggest outlier of them all (a 153% increase in the hammer price of the 3L of 2022 Egon Muller Kabinett), then you have an overall drop of 8% in prices, with a 10% drop in Kabinett prices- or overall results a lot more close to a historically typical range of outcomes.
Looking at bottle size- and here I dropped the Auslesen from the analysis of the 50 lots with prior year comps since they were mostly in 375ml and had an outsized decrease as noted above that would have made the bottle size analysis less useful- the overall data is also fairly uninteresting. For the 43 non-Auslese lots with prior year comps, the simple average hammer price was down 1% - down 5% each for bottles and magnums, and up 13% for 3L and larger formats. Remove that one big outlier again (the 3L of Egon Muller Kabinett) and the overall drop in simple average bottle price per lot is 5%, with bottles and magnums each down 5%, and larger formats down 4%.
From a trend perspective, one thing is very clear- and that is overall it is getting more and more expensive to play in the Mosel Auction sandbox. That seems obvious when one is focusing on the really jaw-dropping results, but fundamentally everything is shifting upwards. Looking at the below, you see the up and down trend to some extent in the overall average hammer price per lot and the number of lots selling for under 100 Euro or over 1,000 Euro- but notice the average hammer price for all lots under 100 Euro or over 1,000 Euro is steadily rising. This is the more useful metric because measurements within pricing bands eliminates the distorting effect of outliers from other pricing bands when looking at a broader data set.
2023 Mosel Auction
Simple average hammer price per lot - 994 Euro
Lots hammering under 100 Euro - 26 lots, or 35%, with an average hammer price of 61 Euro
Lots hammering over 1,000 Euro - 15 lots, or 20%, with an average hammer price of 4,191 Euro
2022 Mosel Auction
Simple average hammer price per lot - 1,067 Euro
Lots hammering under 100 Euro - 18 lots, or 25%, with an average hammer price of 54 Euro
Lots hammering over 1,000 Euro - 16 lots, or 22%, with an average hammer price of 3,954 Euro
2021 Mosel Auction
Simple average hammer price per lot - 622 Euro
Lots hammering under 100 Euro - 21 lots, or 32%, with an average hammer price of 50 Euro
Lots hammering over 1,000 Euro - 10 lots, or 15%, with an average hammer price of 3,236 Euro
That does it for me. I hope everyone got what they wanted today! I am a happy camper with 5 bottles of Adam Spatlese, 4 bottles of Maximin Grunhaus Kabinett and 2 halves of Maximin Grunhaus Eiswein- but most of my bids are in tomorrowās sale. So fingers crossed and hopefully everyone gets what they want this weekend as well. See you in the morning to report on the Bernkasteler.
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The increased variance must certainly reflect how many fewer bidders there are this year compared to the most recent years. Iād love to know how many individual bids were placed in given lots, anyone know if these data are available?
I think itāll be interesting to see what happens Sunday with the VDP Nahe auction, with proportionally more dry and off-dry wines being offered.
You really only need a few high bidders to drive prices, so I donāt think itās solely a matter of number of bidders. I imagine the price variance we saw today is due in large part to many folks acting much like Richardās described experience: estimating prices would be higher on many lots and not submitting bids on lots at all. I myself came very close to not submitting bids on the Willi Schaefer wines, but Iām glad I did now.
Iām curious to see the Bernkasteler results. Seems this yearās auction is going to have more bidders than usual from talking to folks.
The Nahe auction always fetches crazy prices and I imagine this year will be no different for the likes of Keller and others. I think the Keller kiste pricing is going to be a significant step up from last years. Aside from being GGs this year vs. last years kabis, the quantity being offered is a third of last yearās. E-S wines may be a touch flat or slightly up with 100 more 750s being offered vs last year. Only time will tell. I imagine it will be similar to the Mosel auction today with a fair bit of variability in pricing.
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The fine wine market is just much softer in general than it was a year ago. I think that has at least as much to do with it as the vintage.
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One thing to keep in mind is that price of regular vdp prƤdikat bottlings esp. kabinetts have also increased quite a lot and In that sense this year prices were surprisingly low compared to regular onesā¦
I have no doubt the reputation of the vintage was a major factor. There was a run of stellar vintages, and I suspect cellars are filled, so that there was no pressing need to buy a perfectly solid but far from great year.
For me, the results show surprising strength rather than weakness, as prices seem to have stayed reasonably close to the record levels of last year.
And as wiser and more experienced writers have said, it is hard to extrapolate from a single auction.
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Hi yāall,
Just following up on this thread - thanks to @Tom_Reddick and @Brian_S_t_o_t_t_e_r and @Rodrigo_B for the insight and play by play.
My group won Kabinetten from Zilliken, AJ Adam and Fritz Haag. We moderately overbid on the Adam and Haag and slightly underbid the Zilliken (no comps!) though we hit our backstop.
The shock of the tasting to me were the Schaefer wines. Iām surprised they had no price support from last year wven though itās more in line with the historical trend.
Thanks,
Zachary
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Is the Keller Kiste for auction the same as that being offered ex-cellars or are there 2 different Kisten?
Thanks