Bartolo Mascarello price jump

Wine Searcher - price for Bartolo Mascarello Barolo and Bartolo Mascarello Barolo Artist Label - shows price jump (for mostly all vintages) at the end of 2017 .
Anybody knows what is the trigger for that price jump ?

Prices for B. Mascarello at retail have been steadily rising over the past 5+ years, and even meaningfully over the past 2 years in my experience, but I don’t recall any significant event at the end of 2017. The recent vintage wines have been extremely high quality and a lot is kept within Italy, which results in a supply/demand imbalance in the U.S. The rising quality of the recent vintages has also definitely led to an increase in the price of older vintages to levels that in my view are probably getting out of whack with their quality + consistency.

Unlike G. Rinaldi, the importer is not taking a crazy markup here, and so high prices are to be blamed on the retailers. If you have a retailer selling the wine at a reasonable markup, the 2015 Barolo should probably be ~$140-150/btl, and $5-10 higher than the prior vintage.

Since Bartolo Mascarello is a board favorite, the price spike means the wine is excellent, smart and savvy buyers with excellent palates have caught on to it, and the wine is deserving of very high prices.

If this were some uncool Napa cab or Sonoma pinot, the price spike would mean that vapid rich point/trophy chasers with yak palates were bidding it up out of vanity and ego, and the winery owners were cynically profiteering off of it.

At least that’s my understanding based on many years of reading this board.



Oh, and Nathan Smyth can weigh in on the role of fiat electrons, quantitative easing, and The Pentavirate as well.

The wines are very trendy, sure. But they’ve also improved markedly since Maria Teresa took over in ~2006, and then they had much heralded vintages in 2010 and 2013. This coincided with recent vintages of Giacosa becoming less trendy. A perfect storm for big price appreciation.

My impression was that the yak palates preferred Loire cab franc.

True. True.

And for the record, my mom calls me idiosyncratic, wife calls me prickish snob at times (usually on the way out the door to the Club in her cute tennis skirt), and Corey calls me - well, too often - but I’ve never been called vapid. And never, insipid.

https://www.wine-searcher.com/merchant/99183

Not much wine to go around. If one looks at the scarcity, along with how popular the region has become, that might explain the increase in price. Some might argue, it’s more in line with fmv.

This is all that matters.

If the Chinese can figure out how to clone Burgundy or the Piemonte, then it’s game over.

There would be a counter effort to mount a psychological campaign to encourage continued investing in traditionalism [in order to maintain the value of existing investments in artificially-inflated assets], but I don’t how successful that effort would be.

Patience and persistence can help in a lot of ways, however, especially as people fall out when wines become less en vogue or in “lesser” vintages. One might be able to snag bottles here and there in the $120s including taxes and fees and end up with a nice cache after some time.

Same for Conterno, but add $40-50.

Just out of curiosity what’s the ex-cellar price these days? The last time I was able to buy was 2010, and it was 47 Euro (1 of which was an Artist lable for the same price).

I hate the Colonel, with his wee beady eyes

Things changed abruptly with 2010 vintage. The winery went from having plenty to sell to selling out within months of release. There was already a trend of Burgundy lovers moving to Barolo and Bartolo is a natural gateway. Then Galloni’s 99 point review of the 2010 came out and the rush was on. After the 2010 went so fast, the 2013 went quickly and people started buying up old vintage.

Ah, our old enemy: demand!

And his friend supply; there’s not much of this stuff.

BTW
I see similar price graphs and jumps, at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018, for G. Rinaldi Baroli. So it’s probably the great vintages of ‘10 and ‘13 —> huge demand but limited supply.

And there was less enthusiasm in general for the '07-'09, '11, '12 and '14 vintages.

I don’t have the breakdown cost per bottle, but my allocation from the estate costs $536. That includes:

6 bottles 2015 Barolo
3 bottles 2017 Langhe Nebbiolo
5 bottles 2017 Langhe Freisa
1 bottles 2017 Barbera d’Alba

Wholesale here did not jump at all. Just the usual scumbag retailers.

All Bartolo - Wow

Why is it that you think that retailers shouldn’t charge market price?

IME, the high prices are driven mostly by bottles sourced from the grey/secondary market. I don’t imagine that bottles from the national importer through normal channels really make it into the open market, they would be offered to customers who have a history and buy broadly. At least that’s how I would do it.

In addition, retailers have to buy a lot of other wine that they make much less or even no margin on in order to even get an allocation of the cherries.