For The Love Of Port

If you were to take all of the Port sold in 2013 in Euros and divided that by the total number of cases sold, you'd have your answer.

Any guesses?


Question number two: Do you think that the price for one liter of Port (as described above) has increased or decreased over the last dozen years? Food for thought!


Why is everyone running for Google?

6 euros a liter is my guess and did not go to Google; shooting from the hip.

I think it has to be less than 6 Euros liter. There are vast quantities of basic ruby and basic tawny that sell at retail for less than that.

Shooting from the hip, I'd guess closer to 4 Euros per liter. (Which is 3 Euros per standard 750 ml bottle.)

And the bottle, label, cork, capsule is probably close to a euro as well.

As for going up or down, I think relative to overall inflation it probably has not gone up. That just my guess.

Good guesses so far. We certainly do have plenty of Port wisdom gathered here!

I'll wait to see if there are others who chime in, but will respond by the end of the weekend.

Yikes, going for the tough questions...

Probably best to go off the average, which is pretty skewed by the mass amounts of lower quality Ports. And are you talking about just the Port and not packaging???

Assuming it's just for the Port and not including bottle/label/etc.... I'd say 2 Euros??

Er, there were some closer guesses, but yes, the Port only w/out the other frills.

I would surmise 2 Euros since most port made is very inexpensive.

I'll guess 5.36. It doesn't take a ton of premium stuff to raise the average.


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Roy Hersh wrote:Er, there were some closer guesses, but yes, the Port only w/out the other frills.

I lower my estimate to 5 euros.

I was including the bottle, cork, etc in my guess. So without those I'd say 3 euros/liter.

As promised, it is now the end of the weekend for all of us.

In 2001, Port sales reached €409,070,000 with a total of 10.5M cases sold, meaning that the average price per litre was €4.30. A dozen years later while both sales and case volumes decreased, the average price rose slightly. 8.1% to be exact. So, in 2013 sales were down to €367.607,000 with 8.831M cases sold, which equates to an average price per litre of €4,65.

Surprised at all by any of this?

Roy Hersh wrote:As promised, it is now the end of the weekend for all of us.

In 2001, Port sales reached €409,070,000 with a total of 10.5M cases sold, meaning that the average price per litre was €4.30. A dozen years later while both sales and case volumes decreased, the average price rose slightly. 8.1% to be exact. So, in 2013 sales were down to €367.607,000 with 8.831M cases sold, which equates to an average price per litre of €4,65.

Surprised at all by any of this?

Are you sure this doesn't include the cost of bottles since these figures appear to be the cost of the actual sold cases of Port. which would mean they were finished bottles and should have included the price of packaging as well. That would drive costs up per bottle probably around €1.50-2 by the time you add in bottle/label/capsule/cork

The question is Andy, is a liter of Port without a bottle, capsule, cork,and label etc....worth anything to an end consumer?

So over 12 years, that means the price went up 0.66% annually. I'd call that below the inflation rate.

Eric,

You are correct. What it doesn't show is the mix of what was sold. Although the volume/Euros both decreased, if it was the basic Ruby and Tawny Ports that decreased, but the % of Special Categories bottlings increased, that alone would account for the minor % increase in the cost per liter. Parsing those numbers is very difficult to say the least. But as you will soon read, the Special Categories are doing better and better in markets like Canada, USA, UK ... far more so than the countries where French is the primary language.

I'd expect to price to rise momentarily because of the arguadente issue. The price for a liter went up to 3,50 euros per liter from 1 euro or so 2 years ago. They have changed the regulation so you can now use arguadente from distilled grapes components not only distilled wine. This lesser arguadente is cheaper and will bring the price of the top quality down eventually. The demand for high quality spirits is growing up and it has a huge impact on price of quality arguadente.

Russ K wrote:The question is Andy, is a liter of Port without a bottle, capsule, cork,and label etc....worth anything to an end consumer?

If it comes in a large pipe (aka: barrel) it's worth a lot

Roy Hersh wrote:Eric,

You are correct. What it doesn't show is the mix of what was sold. Although the volume/Euros both decreased, if it was the basic Ruby and Tawny Ports that decreased, but the % of Special Categories bottlings increased, that alone would account for the minor % increase in the cost per liter. Parsing those numbers is very difficult to say the least. But as you will soon read, the Special Categories are doing better and better in markets like Canada, USA, UK ... far more so than the countries where French is the primary language.

Will be quite interesting to see what happens if the countries who've traditionally bought boat loads of profitable basic Ports continue to cut back their buying of them.