Listed: the Australian wines getting their prices right

Wine Lister’s Economics scores are based on a variety of price and liquidity metrics, including a wine’s three-month average bottle price, six-month price performance, and three-year CAGR. This week’s newly updated Listed section features the five top-scoring Australian wines by Economics score. Noticeably, all are red, and red wines outperform for Australia in this category (the top white, Leeuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay, has an Economics score of 498, its top traded vintages only trading 10 bottles in auction over the past year). While there is quite a difference in points between the first and fifth wine on today’s list, all are considered very strong (750–900) or among the strongest (900+) wines in Wine Lister’s database.

Several of Australia’s best-known producers feature in our top five, including Penfolds, which accounts for the top two entrants: Penfolds Grange and Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon. While both wines excel on three-month average bottle price and three-year CAGR, Penfolds Grange is particularly strong for liquidity, its top five trading vintages having traded 626 bottles over the past four quarters.

The third wine on this list, Torbreck Run Rig, experiences good trading volumes but has the lowest three-year CAGR of the five (3.27%). Fourth place goes to Henschke Mount Edelstone Shiraz, which is the lowest in price and sees fewer bottles traded than the others, but has an excellent six-month price performance of 11.88% and good price stability. Finally, the list is completed by Grant Burge Meshach Shiraz, which has one of the higher three-year CAGRs, at 6.4%.

Listed_Top five Australians

Don’t forget – if you’re not yet a subscriber to Wine Lister, you can still fully explore this week’s five Listed wines, and those for the previous four weeks, via the homepage


Down with the establishment in the USA

The graph below shows the average long term price performance of top scoring Wine Lister wines by country, and the USA bucks the trend of elites on top (with an early congratulatory nod from France).

We have split out performance for an elite group of the 15 highest-scoring wines, and compared this to performance for a wider panel of 50 wines. For the majority of countries, the elite wines – let’s call them the establishment – have seen their stock rise over the last three years.

In the USA, it is the broader-based group (the red column) that has trumped the establishment (gaining more than 9%). The same is true in France, where a broader group of wines has penned a tale of higher returns.

Our measure of long term price performance is the 3 year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) which facilitates comparison to other investment products.

screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-11-12-48

Elsewhere, Italian wines have seen the best returns among their elite group, averaging annual price gains of almost 10% – the most impressive of any group analysed here. One of the top performing wines in Italy’s top 15 scorers is Bartolo Mascarello’s Barolo (of “no barrique, no Berlusconi” fame), whose average (cross-vintage) price performance is 23% CAGR over the last 3 years.

mascarello_etichetta_no_barrique

The elites also outperform the up-and-comers in Spain, Germany, and Australia, perhaps explained by the fact that there are fewer really well established top-end brands in these countries compared to France, and so their respective top 50 groups are less entrenched, and their top 15 groups still have room to grow in recognition and price.