Best Value Port Prices - 1963 to 2003

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Derek T.
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Best Value Port Prices - 1963 to 2003

Post by Derek T. »

Prompted by Tom's recent purchase of Warre 1970 for less than the 2003 I spent an hour on wine-searcher digging around to see exactly what you can get for your £ in the UK today. The table below shows bottom market prices excluding tax for 6 shippers across (IMHO) the best vintages from 1963 to 2003. I specifically excluded split vinatges to ensure I could get a price for each shipper in each year.

As always with wine-searcher I had to ignore some prices that looked ridiculously low as they normally turn out to be duff data. I also ignored prices for bottles described as having less than perfect ullage/condition.

Here is what I found - apologies for the doted lines but it is the only way I could get the list into some sort of table format.

Vintage........63....66....70....77....85....94....97....00....03

Dow.............85....66....60....43....29....27....26....30....31
Fonseca......120....80....73....55....35....64....28....35....35
Graham......113....65....60....37....36....35....21....36....31
Sandeman....65....64....35....34....17....24....16....25....24
Taylor.........111....80....60....50....34....70....32....40....37
Warre...........64....69....35....42....24....28....25....32....29
1 of Each....558..424...323..261..175...248..148..198..187

The last row shows what you would pay to get a 6 pack containing one of each wine from each vintage - the 77's, 85's and 97's look like very good value against the 03's, especially for current drinking.

Most striking for me is the comparative value of the 66's - would you rather have 6 bottles of 40 year old fabulous wine to drink now or 12-15 bottles of 3 year old wine that will not be "ready" for at least 15 years and has no certainty that it will live up to the quality of any of the 4 vintages from 1963 to 1977?

Food for thought if you want any more 03's - just look at where those 97 prices are going :shock:

Derek
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Post by Guest »

Excellent work, Derek! Very nice work indeed.

:thanks:
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Tom Archer
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Location: Near Saffron Walden, England

Post by Tom Archer »

Interesting exercise Derek!

The trouble with wine searcher is that the devious crooks - sorry, wine merchants - play little games with it to draw people on to their web sites.

Take the Warre prices that I mentioned:

Your best price for the '03 links to a very venerable and distinguished merchant, but if you search their site for Warre '03, you'll find it ain't there.

Now they would say that they have regrettably sold out, and that wine searcher has yet to be updated - but this happens far too often to be above suspicion.

Try this again with your best price for the 1970, and you find that the merchant has just one bottle, the price does not include duty, and, oh, the delivery will cost £13...

Given that this merchant is set up for dealing in case quantities, with all their stock kept in a bonded warehouse, you wonder why they have any odd bottles at all - unless of course it's to score hits on wine searcher...

Tom
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Derek T.
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Post by Derek T. »

Tom,

I have been a victim of the scam myself many times which is why I ignored some of the very low prices.

However, two of my baseline assumptions were that the level of deception would be fairly constant across all merchants and that the level of non-existent discount would be directly proportionate to the real market price. Both rather sweeping assumptions to make but then again that is why we have assumptions in the first place :P

I also have to admit to using single bottle prices rather than case prices mainly because it was very late at night and I couldn't be bothered scrolling down past all the single bottles to find the case prices for each and every wine :? Perhaps case prices would be closer to the truth.

Have you collected enough real data from your auction hammer price research yet? Perhaps you could compare some of that with the prices I found to see how far away they are.

Derek

PS: I did notice 1 or 2 prices that looked too good to be true that I ignored for the purposes of this posting but will be following up with the merchants just in case - if I do find any half price 63's I'll be sure to let you all know!
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Andy Velebil
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Post by Andy Velebil »

Derek,

Great job! Without doing the research you have, just going off memory for prices around my area, the 80's and some '90's are very good deals compared to the '03s. The '03s seem to be selling for about the same as a lot of 1980's. I've aquired some 80's this last year for that reason, can't beat the prices for a bottle that is already about 20 years old. I am just very careful to buy from reputible sources.
Andy Velebil Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used. William Shakespeare http://www.fortheloveofport.com
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