2013 Chave Hermitage

Last night on WineBid, a 2013 Chave Hermitage rouge (750mL) went for $600 before tax and auction premium. It may have gone higher as I snapped the screenshot with several minutes to go. Wine-searcher shows multiple US stores with the bottle in stock under $250 and that price would be steep even for a magnum, which this clearly is not. Can someone help me understand this?
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A fool and his money?

weird stuff happens. sometimes.

Wow. Just bought the 2015 online for 156€ from a reputable retailer.

More dollars than sense.

Somethings off on winebid. A 2012 Ravenèau Foret went for $550 last week. Doesn’t sound right to me especially based on recent sales of the same wine and wine searcher pricing and availability. This example also leads me to believe something is going on.

Hi Luc@s, please explain what you mean by “something is going on.” I can tell you that WineBid uses it’s 20 year auction pricing history to set reserves on the wines, including hand inspection of every bottle for provenance and quality, all of which we make apparent on the site. We set a reserve price based on current market conditions and then let the market decide what they want to buy at what price. There are global buyers who want specific wines for specific reasons, and sometimes they are less price sensitive than the average consumer. But we run a highly transparent market available for all. If you have any specific questions, happy to take it offline- you can direct message me here or email me.

As Russ says, sometimes bidders just get… overenthusiastic. I love it when there’s a bidding war for a bottle I’m selling, happy to have someone want the wine more than I do.

One wonders, however, if computers should come with breathalyzer interlocks for auction sites [wow.gif]

Not that first time that wines get bid up above available retail pricing and it won’t be the last.

Hey Russ,

I’ve been a longtime purchaser from winebid and watch the auctions weekly. Some of my most favourite bottles have come from winebid! The reserves always seem fair.

When I say something is going on I am referring to an oddly high price being paid for wines that are readily available thru similar and far less expensive channels which to me seems odd. Especially once you were to factor in the commission rate we’re talking 2-3-4 times the price being paid for the exact same product.

If this is genuinely consumers making these purchases when they could have the exact same product from an equally reputable channel, then I must not have a clear understanding of how the general wine purchasing population works. Is this phenomenon something you’ve seen over your 20 year history?

Once again my comments were not intended to reflect anything below board but I would be shocked to learn that people pay that type of multiple for wines they could find in a multitude of places at a lower price point.

Cheers!


Hi Luc@s, no worries and thanks for the clarification, and thanks for being a customer. I can tell you for a fact flat out that these were “genuine consumers” bidding on that bottle, but I don’t know their individual circumstances or motivations, that would be a breach of privacy.

As for the general circumstances of “bid-ups:” I only came to the company earlier this year, but what I’ve seen so far is that some wines get “hot” and create bidding wars for no apparent reason. Sometimes it’s a special occasion vintage (birthday, anniversary). Sometimes it’s a foreign buyer who needs something specific to impress a client. Sometimes it’s a collector trying to fill out a vertical. You may also have noticed we’ve been changing up our marketing and highlighting more bottles in different ways, which has been drawing more bidders to more bottles (sorry for all the deal hunters out there, but that’s our job as an auction platform.) I’ve been in digital marketing for 20 years for all kinds of products and services, and buyer behavior never ceases to surprise and amaze me! Very often the results of A/B marketing tests are the opposite of what I predict.

Hope that helps, thanks again for the questions and for being a customer. Always feel free to ping me directly if you have any questions or concerns.

Do share examples! Sounds very interesting.

Definitely an interesting discussion and thank you for being a great site!

The thing I am still unable to get my head around is that whether the item is a birth Year item a celebratory item, an overseas buyer, or a collector filling out a vertical - the same product can be had for significantly less from trusted retailers even within the same state!

I do appreciate your marketing is probably driving business however the pure commerce of buying something for twice the price when it can be had elsewhere doesn’t make a lot of sense. Additionally it is my understanding that wine generally sells at auction for less than they it does at retail whereas in this particular case the exact same bottle that we are discussing could purchased at retail at a lesser price.

Well ultimately I’m not looking for an answer I am a firm believer of common sense and something here isn’t quite making sense for me…

Regardless I guess it’s good for the seller!

Cheers.

Lucas


I’ve seen this happen in other auctions as well. Last year at K&L, several bottles of Pichon Lalande (either 2000 or 1996, I don’t recall exactly) sold for 2x their retail price at that time - and the same wine was in stock at K&L on that day (roughly speaking, the wine was listed at $200 retail and the lot hammered for $400/bottle).

One explanation I could come up with is that there may be people who are trying to accumulate certain wines, and they don’t care to finesse the auction pricing - maybe they are going to bid on ten lots and try to win them all, so they just pick a price that will win, knowing that most of the time, the hammer price will be reasonable. Then if two such people collide, you get a weird price.

These might be brokers as well, where they need to amass some number of bottles and care more about average price.

Another thought I had was that some people, possibly overseas, might have an easy way to get wines to them from a particular source, but couldn’t easily move wines from other places. That might cause them to overbid on a bottle they really want when it shows up in a particular place. Again, you need two over-bidders to collide, but these cases seem very rare.

Great call out here as you would need at least two bidders willing to pay this incredible premium on any given lot to drive pricing to these stratospheric amounts for wines that are readily available for less.

I didn’t even think of that!

Cheers,

Lucas

I was going to give this exact example

The competitive spirit coupled with a few extra glasses of wine probably makes for this sort of thing more often than is noticed. I think there are too many people willing to fork over extra cash just to stick it to the person they are competing with. At 2-3x valuation of a bottle available at retail? Well, I guess that’s the wine talking. :slight_smile:

The psychology definitely enters into it. Totally different marketing dynamic. What do you call it when you are the high bidder at an auction? Winning! People like to win, and they hate to lose. When A outbids B, A has bested B, and B is going to lose, and let A win, if B doesn’t step in and do something about it.

Obviously, many in B’s shoes will either bow out and console themselves with the thought that failing to pay more than you think the wine is worth is not really losing, or bow out once the price exceeds retail and just buy it at retail, but many others in B’s shoes get caught up in the moment and the competition. The good news is that they end up “winning”!

You are assuming people are “rational” actors, and this is not always the case. Despite what classical economical theory teaches us, the world is messier and many other factors come into play, as others have mentioned.

I do find this remarkable, esp given my own practice is that almost every bid I make at auction (except something I know is very inexpensive) is weighed against retail pricing if I can find it and all-in cost.