Wine Rating

The rating of the wine is an essential factor when you sell your wines or for their estimation. It is a note stating the purchase prices of bottles in auction rooms and recorded in a database. How is this price initially defined? How does it affect the estimation of a bottle or a vintage?

The rating, a factor of the estimate

The rating is actually a reference price which is based on auction sales figures that have been entered into large databases (some of these databases have millions of entries). The figures collected can correspond to a vintage or to a category (white Burgundy, sweet Bordeaux, etc.). Thus, the rating of a dry Bordeaux wine from 1964 can be easily obtained, for example.

This wine rating is useful because it relies on sales that had been made in the past. It is updated regularly, it is not based solely on subjective opinions, but on the law of supply and demand. Besides, to a lesser extent, the rating is representative of market trends. Wine is in fact, a stock market product, represented particularly by the WineDex index. Nowadays, wine is a trendy product. It exports and is a very attractive product, especially in China and Russia. All this affects its rating (and thus a possible repurchase of bottles or a repurchase of a cellar) positively, which makes wine an investment product.

Thus, besides being objective, wine rating can be used to identify the various market trends. However, the rating of a wine and its estimate should not be confused. The rating is actually a factor in the estimation of a wine. On the other hand, the estimation, takes into account other elements to give a price to a specific bottle: its scarcity, reputation of the domain, its tasting notes, etc. To the partially speculative nature of the wine rating is added the various characteristics of each bottle, resulting in the final estimate that can be used in the auction room. Which allows the repurchase of particular wine.

What you need to know about the pricing

Let's check it out again: the rating reflects the price paid for a specific bottle of wine in the auctions. But it should be kept in mind that the prices entered in the databases are not always comparable: some figures are hammer prices, that is to say the amount that a buyer bids for a wine in an auction. But other prices in the database include the fees charged. Remember that the buyer adds on average between 15% and 25% of the hammer price, and the seller pays on average 15% of the same price. These fees set by the exchange platform depend partly on its logistics.

Another case is that of special sales. Actually, how is the price calculated if a vintage records very little or no annual sales? In this case, normally they look for an equivalent wine, in order to have more information to define the price. In order to do this, experts will look primarily for wines of the same appellation or the same vintage.