cult wine
/kəlt wīn/
noun
- A wine priced far higher than it’s intrinsic quality.
“I can’t believe I paid this much for this cult wine, just an overrated bottle of fermented grape juice”
The topic as it relates to American wines was covered two years ago in a thread captioned Do You Agree With This Definition of a Cult Wine. It began:
For the past 25 years, American “Cult Wines” have generally been defined and understood as possessing the the following three qualities:
- They sell out quickly at prices far exceeding the average price for their category
- The total or large percentage of production is sold direct to the consumer
- They receive very high numerical ratings from Robert Parker, Jr.
“Cult Wines” do often possesses other qualities such as:
- Relatively small production
- Made or advised by a famous consulting winemaker
- High ratings in the Wine Spectator
- Flipped by consumers to make a profit
These last qualities, while common in some combination, are not necessary individually or in any combination for the wine to meet the “Cult Wine” definition.
Ultramarine
Cult:
Price > quality
Cache > quality
Winemaker unable to make wine in any salable quantity greater than barrel to barrel variation.
Enjoyment of posting about owning it > enjoyment of drinking it.
Posts about owning it > posts about drinking it.
The wine has special coded nicknames that insiders use to describe their relationship with the wine.
The wine appears as a group photo in people’s avatars.
They are usually known just by shorthand abbreviations like DRC and SQN and Screagle
Might be guilty of paraphrasing some posts, and yet I am guilty of a number of infractions here…
Basically a wine that is relatively overpriced and takes too long to show up in your cellar.
Well, I’ve seen Chateau Musar often described as a cult wine of sorts, yet it isn’t too hard to come across, definitely not overpriced and made in rather large quantities.
Perhaps that one has to do more with the unique qualities of Musar - it not being everyone’s cup of tea - and its enthusiastic group of followers?
Nit de Nin
Apropos to this, just saw a CT note for 2013 Hundred Acre Wraith that was a 100pt rating from some a$$hat who hadn’t actually tried the wine but just said, “based on the ratings, I bet this will be amazing”. Can you censure another CT user?
I will say, that Hundred Acre does have crowd appeal. I was at a dinner party where the host had magnums of quite a few wines, including the Hundred Acre. He had to pull more of it, people were bombing it like cocktails. And this was not a wine geek crowd, the people did not know exactly what this wine was. I was almost left all alone with a maggie of 2000 Lynch Bages. Was a wonderful night . . . .
Funny side note, I ditched my TWA subscription in the '90s where Parker was just going bonkers over these so-called cult and garage wines. I had already tired of the pretention of Wine Spincter, then finally quite TWA, too.
Well they wouldn’t be able to charge 5k for 50,000 case productions. Simple economics.
Cult wines are wines that have a cult following. People who are willing to pay high prices for a wine that may or may not justify it. Typically a wine that has greater demand than supply year after year, thus driving the price higher and higher.
You have basically described any allocated wine, from Gonon to DRC, Who’s prices differ by almost 2 orders of magnitude. I think such a liberal definition is useless
You’re missing the “original” cult Cab … Grace Family preceded almost all of these by around 15 years.
Gonon can’t command the same price as DRC, because it doesn’t have a cult following. I’m confused by the relevancy of your point? Basic economics drive the secondary market price. Which is why Gonon is $100 bottle. If it had a cult following it would be a $1000 bottle. I don’t see how it’s a liberal definition…
It all depends on what cult you belong to.
You can do two things. There is a link to report a note that isn’t a note right on them. You can also block certain users from showing up in your view.
MACDONALD is probably the “purest” form of a cult wine nowadays. Small production, super long waiting list, and noticeable demand on the secondary market for recent and back vintages.
ScrEagle and Scarecrow are the only others that are difficult to find at release price. This is excluding Old World producers from being considered as cult wines.
Your definition: people are willing to pay high prices that may or may not be justified by the quality:
That is true of any coveted or scarce/allocated wine. Price is set by numerous and complex market forces that include -perceived- quality, reputation, reviews, scarcity, and price. Your definition pretty much includes everything under the sun, which is why it’s a liberal definition that is not useful.
I would tell you that Gonon definitely has a cult following, and prices have escalated by 100% over the past 4-5years as demand has outstripped supply, as the 3-tier system takes increasingly big bites to capitalize on that demand, etc. Same is true of Jamet, Allemand, Juge.
A recent thread suggests that the same price escalation happens at DRC, and to a similar extent, relatively speaking, so I’m not sure what point you’re making there, except that DRC’s price has been escalating for a longer time.
With cult Cali cabs, now and in the past, the pricing was aspirational and fueled by Parker reviews. A lot of people find them undrinkable, some people love them and still seek them out. Other then the silly-priced Screagle, most of those wines still hover between $150-400/bottle. So if you have some arbitrary threshold for cultish demand, the likes of Most cult cabs don’t make it there. They way they trade in the secondary market suggests that, with very few exceptions, most older vintages are available for relatively close to the release price of current vintages, not multiples. And there is a metric ton of them out there, so are they no longer cult wines?
And relatively huge distribution wines like Petrus, some first growths and other Pomerols command absurd pricing that seems to have no relation to scarcity, and I have never heard of Petrus being considered a cult wine.
Grace Family was a cult wine in a way, but it didn’t have the stratospheric ratings and price that the others on that list obtained. Although Grace Family still has a certain cachet among some people I know,
it’s not nearly as sought-after among the collectors I know who chase CA Cult Cabernets.
Bruce
i thought the only people still buying grace are the ones that used to do coke with him before he got into the dalai lama? 