Speculation

My friend Mina in Queenstown rang me with a funny story. Seems a young Aussie couple have been scouring the country for every last bottle of Mt. Difficulty Target Gully Pinot Noir they can find, at virtually any price. They bought out the cellar door at the winery, including 7 magnums at something like $180/per, and were seen paying over $90 a bottle at the Wine Deli. They weren't buying anything else, just Target Gully Pinot.

Why, you ask? What possible reason could they have? Do they love the wine that much? Well, who know, because they aren't drinking any of it. They are apparently buying it as an investment, guessing it will become as collectable and valuable as, I don't know, Grange or something.

The fact that there is absolutely no precedent for this in New Zealand wine history seems not to have deterred them. A check of auction sites for other Pinot rarities, such as the Felton Block bottlings, Dry River, Ata Rangi, etc., show no appreciable price increases, or at least none that would justify spending thousands (or tens of thousands, more like) buying out the whole country of a single high-priced wine in order to corner the market.

I struggle to understand this. Auction prices for wine that people buy purely as an investment seem to correlate directly with the longevity of the wine, hence the collectability of Penfolds, Henschke, Wendouree, and their ilk, not to mention Bordeaux and Burgundy. But New Zealand Pinot Noir?

There seem to be California and Oregon Pinots that appreciate in price in the short term, especially on the back of a high score by Mr. Parker. But even they don't seem to have much of a long-term return-on-investment track record. This is very confusing to me. Do they know something we don't? Is Mr. Parker or his Pinot-reviewing minion Mr. Rovani, about to bestow a perfect score on the ol' Target Gully? Or is this wealthy couple from Aussie going to be like the fellow in Texas some decades back who bought up all the silver in the world in a bid to control silver prices, only to have the bottom fall out as soon as he got all of it.

Any ideas? In the meantime, you might want to ring around to some of the big shops in the country and see if they have any Target Gully left. Bet they don't...

10x5