A bunch of you folks are burying the lede here…
While several of you have correctly pointed out the dubiousness of their math, I would suggest it is still spot on for this crowd. No one here is buy 3-dollar wines, while most if not everyone is buying cellarable wines–exactly what they surveyed.
This review says about 10 bucks…
https://www.northbaybusinessjournal.com/industrynews/6588305-181/us-wine-tops-10-a-bottle-average
Does it really matter whether the wine-searcher database is truly representative of all wines, fine or not, sold on earth? The far more interesting consideration is the trend of increasing wine prices. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
Maybe the W-S database itself is skewing toward more expensive wines over time, but I don’t really have any reason to think that.
What would also be interesting would be to do paired analyses so that we could eliminate any variability wrt the W-S database. Also interesting would be to look at price changes by wine region. Certainly, classified Bordeaux wines have experienced major, persistent price increases since the 2013 vintage. Given the sheer volume and widespread distribution, I’d have to think Bordeaux would have an outsized contribution, say, compared to Muscadet.
The average price of wines I bought today is $10
It seems that much of Germany has been immune to these rises.
The average price for a bottle of wine is about 2 Euros something in Germany. Based on the study of a reliable institute for consumer science. Only few people are ready to pay 10 Euros for a bottle of wine and even fewer idiots like us pay more than 50+.
This is a good article and the statistics are revealing. Thanks for posting. People are wrong to dismiss it. The average price per bottle purchased globally, by all consumers, is completely irrelevant to people posting on this board. We are not ordinary consumers. It also irrelevant to most people who are sufficiently into wine to use Winesearcher. So let’s stop talking about that statistic like it’s some kind of clever point.
What the Winesearcher metric seems to be picking up a widespread increase in the price of mid to upper tier collectible wines. Have people seriously not noticed that in their own collecting? It’s been very striking to me what has happened to the price of what might be called “semi- affordable” great wines over the past year or two. The very top tier wines haven’t inflated as much – if you look at the Livex indexes, which are heavily weighted to super-premium wines like first growths and top Grand Cru Burgundy, the inflation is there but not as extreme. But prices for back vintages of stuff like good premier cru Burgundy, good but not first growth classed Bordeaux, and formerly affordable Northern Rhones have been going up rapidly, to the point where many are becoming unaffordable on a middle class income.
Most of WB posters are quite blessed, such that a wine maker or retailer might separately post about the inexorable rises of customer wealth and income, which largely finance the inexorable risk of wine prices. A tango requires two dancers.
Looking at things from the opposite perspective can be good, and self-shocking.
But do we need OWC’s and mailers and cards??? All that drives up the cost (labor and materials, and inevitably the price).
I agree with Marcu$. The data describe one way of estimating prices, and it’s accurate for what it is. It doesn’t describe what you or I or the “average” wine buyer buys, and it isn’t weighted by volume. So it may be unrelatable or unrealistic compared to our experience. But it does give one reasonable measure of broad price changes over time. And because the article does a decent job of describing the methodology, allowing us to critique it, it’s a pretty good job of reporting.