I posted this in the other 2019 Bordeaux thread, but that one seems to have devolved into minutiae about retailers and tariff policies. Cross-posting here in case others are interested.
I spent some time this evening messing around with the critics’ scores for 2019 Bordeaux to produce a rough scatterplot of scores versus price. Standard caveats apply about the usefulness of this sort of analysis, but perhaps it can help some people make some decisions.
Scores were sourced from the > wonderful table > at Liv-Ex. Scores were then loaded into a spreadsheet and cleaned up. For critics that express their scores as ranges, a scalar value was produced by averaging the bounds of the ranges. For critics that include a “+” in their score (e.g. “94-96+”), the value is imputed as the midpoint between that value and the next value in the scoring rubric. For example, for the “94-96+” example earlier, “96+” is converted to 96.5 and then averaged with 94 to produce 95.25. The score “17.5+” is converted to 17.75. This is not a particularly exact science, but it at least attempts to incorporate these additional features that are included in the critics’ scores.
Each critic score for a wine is then normalized by > z-score > across their scores. Each normalized critic score for a wine is then averaged across all critics (after throwing away the bottom and top quartiles) to produce a final, normalized, aggregated score for each wine.
Price data was pulled from Total Wine and is expressed in US Dollars. Obviously, TW does not have everything so there are some gaps in the data. I also manually entered these in by hand so I may have made some mistakes here and there.
Interpreting the graph:
As we are likely all familiar with, quality is generally not a linear function of price. To reflect this, I plotted the price on a log scale.
So what are the “best values” from this vintage? Well, there is not really a good metric to determine that, but one approach you could take is to roughly look at the convex hull produced by the points in this plot. The vertices of the hull are probably going to be a better QPR than other wines at a similar price point. For this chart, it appears (just eyeballing it) that these are: Gloria, Malescot St. Exupery, Montrose, Ducru Beaucaillou, Figeac, Palmer, l’Eglise Clinet, and Margaux. Honorable mentions are: Leoville Poyferre, Haut-Bailly, Pichon Baron, and Mouton Rothschild. Perhaps these selections are rather obvious to some here more experienced than I, but I found this interesting!
Anyway, happy to share the Google Sheet I used to generate this if others would like to play around with it. Just let me know if anybody is interested and I’ll post it here.
Kris, I’ve only been buying magnums too, with the exception of HB. Any reservations on this format? I always worry that I’ll never find the occasion to open one. Also, not sure of the resale value…better? Worse?
Not reselling, but if I was it’s better resale, so not worried. Since we will open them up each year thru my son’s 18th birthday and he gets what is left after that…I think we will be okay.
My magnums were Lynch Bages, GPL and Leoville Poyferre. I think I got decent pricing for these. They’re considerably cheaper than some of the Napa magnums I had been buying.
Shocking. The Tour St.Christophe that is; full pass on that here. But I think I am in your age group and bought some similar things, a couple bottles or so of each and a few 375’s:
Calon Segur, Phelan Segur
Lynch Bages in 375, P. Baron in 375, GPL, Grand Puy Ducasse, Batailley, maybe will go for P. Lalande
Branaire, Lagrange, Langoa
Cantenac Brown
LMHB in 375, Haut Bailly
Clinet.
Branaire-Ducru
Clinet
Domaine de Chevalier (both red and white)
Fonplegade
Haut Bailly
Langoa Barton
Leoville Poyferre
Pape Clement
Pichon Baron
Pichon Comtesse
I’m trying to be done but may succumb to additional temptation.
I think the an interesting question might be: “which 2019s did I want to buy until I saw the release price, at which point I bought 2016s from the same estate at a 10-20% discount to their EP release prices?”
for me those were:
Cos (bought the 100pt 2016 10% above 2019 release price)
Smith Haut Lafitte (bought the brilliantly reviewed 16 at the same[!] price as 2019 release price)
Figeac (bought the 100pt 2016 15% above 2019 release price)
Conseillante (10% above 19 release)
Mouton (OK, OK - this cost 30% above the 19 release price but you could barely buy the '19 and the '16 has 5x 100pt and is considered one of the top 10-20 bdx of the decade)
And before Jeff Leve chews me out, I bought a case of Mags of 19 Conseillante to hedge my bets in case it turns out to be the better wine
I am generally in the too old to buy futures category, but I am tempted to buy a few wines that would be drinkable over the medium term rather than long term and are at pretty reasonable prices. Wines I am thinking of are (prices based on MacArthur Liquors):
Chateau Croix Beaucaillou $39
Chateau Du Tertre $36
Chateau La Lagune $35
Chateau Lagrange $42
I try to buy certain chateaux consistently so I can have verticals of good vintages.
For first growth Haut Brion and Margaux. Not a huge Mouton fan.
Pauillac - Pichon Baron and Comtesse - I buy these every year for the kids’ future cellars (Son and Daughter)
St Julien - The appellation that got me into wine Ducru Beaucauillou and Leoville Las Cases
Pomerol - Trontanoy, VCC, debating on La Fleur Petrus and L’evangile
Then I mix some earlier drinking wines that are more of a value and mid-term drinking.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}