Wine bid for Prum lovers

What vintage Schubi?

Pullled a 14 Schubi and 15 Goldtropfchen. I recall these being slow sellers back then at around 35 bucks. lol

1 Like

And lastly, not all prices were wild from this auction. 2013 Keller Auction Pettenthal Auslese Goldcap for 162. The odd year Pettenthals are magical.

Waiting for the Burgundy shoe to drop next :grinning:

For me, the demand for these German wines was the shocking thing about this week’s Winebid auction.

Want to see huge Burgundy drops from trendy, in-demand and frothy-bid-inducing producers? Well that happens every week in the auction world (see HDH, Acker, Zacky’s, K&L, Winebid, etc. etc. and these are just in the US. There is a lot more in Europe).

I haven’t seen this kind of auction madness for German wines (well, except for the top names at the annual VDP auction). And I’ve been looking. Maybe German (Riesling) wines have turned a corner?

4 Likes

I felt the same way. I had not seen an auction like this for German wines ever (I have only been into German wines seriously for about 6 years). It was really fun to see all of the demand for the German Rieslings. Possibly because this is a once in a lifetime type thing, but hopefully it shows these larger auction houses that there is a huge demand for Riesling heavy auctions.

1 Like

To be fair, the madness was really about the Haart wines. I didn’t really notice much else that was nuts, not that I was tracking everything. As I said earlier, I got my wines (other than the one Haart I bid on) at the reserve price uncontested, including the Falkenstein, which can be hard to source at retail.

No, this was a one-off blip for wines that are hard to source

1 Like

Ok, some more post-game analysis. I got outbid on nearly everything I bid on, so I figured there was a ton of demand across the board. But clearly some things had more demand than others. Taking a look now, I still see many dozens of lots for big names like JJ Prom, Willi Schaefer, and Von Schubert Maximin Grunhauser. So these either didn’t get touched last week, or only bid on partially. Even a few Falkenstein left - I’m surprised to see those 2019 Kugel Peter Kabinetts still unbought, but they won’t last this week.

I wonder if anyone studied these more carefully. Obviously the Julian Haarts were snapped up. But for other producers there was a more carefully selection process.

Is it possible to see the auction results somewhere on the website?

1 Like

The Webers at Hofgut Falkenstein have no desire to be exclusive. They just want to produce real wines at affordable prices, without pretension. This makes them hard to find.

4 Likes

As someone who was bidding on some of the Prum lots, the higher end stuff was being heavily bid upon. This is likely because they are almost never seen at action especially for those of us in the states. The long gold cap varieties all basically had a decent amount of bids.

The more readily available items weren’t bid on. This is likely because most people who might normally bid on these items had their eyes on a bigger prize.

I also noticed some really strange pricing in my opinion. The Eiswein and Berenauslese were both started rather low and some other bottles like the auction bottles seemed to be started at relatively high prices. It will be interesting to see what those bottles sell for.

I bid on one non White Label Haart lot earlier in the week and it received zero bids. I would say that the Haart bottles brought a lot of extra traffic to the website and specifically the German section. I would have never bid on that bottle if I had not been paying attention because of the white labels.

2 Likes

In fairness, I was pretty shocked by this pricing.

I understand that we have an impact on the market with certain things, but this one doesn’t even really make sense to me.

The way I see it, a lot more people will decide to sell. It means the wines will probably start to show themselves on Wine Searcher as that is a price that not everyone is ready to jump on, However, I am not sure that sets the new price in which they will easily sell. It seems like it was just an opportunity for someone to push up the value.

I do think that the wines should probably be more around the price of Morstein/Hipping, and it’s fair to say they should be more as you really can’t buy them unlike Keller.

I am not sure that is the going rate however and this hardly corners the market so besides adding a data point to the market, its a little confusing.

I might just put some more on the website at $225 for fun now. I think there are still some Kistes too :joy:

It’s nice that we can show value now lol

5 Likes

This happens all the time with rare vinyl. A record is not seen for years, one sells for a crazy price and then all of a sudden several more appear and the price drops.

1 Like

It’s that way with all rare collectibles, not just records.

Guaranteed this is going to shake-loose some white labels. Might get to see if the hype is real, after all.

1 Like

I see another huge German list and can’t help but think this is round 2 of QT (Quantitative Tightening) on wine inventories. Silicon Valley Bank and some regionals went puff last Spring due to the sharp rise in interest rates and fleeing deposits (I.e. borrow short, lend long). It stressed a decent amount of west coast wineries.

One year later, high rates are still here and over this period, very fine (especially scarce) wine kept escalating or atleast remained lofty. If business models are borrowing for inventory, it could make sense to sell valuable inventory given you need continued appreciation above borrow cost going forward… and that was a hell of a run. Germany is a small fry compared to Burgundy so if this is part of the dynamic perhaps more to come.

2 Likes

How did the SVB blow up stress wineries? I know they did some business with producers and even had wine consiglieries for their high end clients but would like to Bette tinder stand the causal mechanism. Happy to take it off thread if this is a drift.

It was a big issue at the time- feel free to google as it’s in the public domain but here are a few links. It seems they banked hundreds of wineries or wine related businesses…

https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/wine/article/silicon-valley-bank-wine-california-17831927.php

In short, when insolvency became a possibility, it posed a stress to wineries (or any client) who would need access to funds if they were frozen. Making payrolls or any payments become a concern. If I recall, First Republic also had wine clients and was touch and go.

If you mean Thatcher’s list of Keller, I doubt that is the reason