"Wine excellence starts in the vineyard"
The economic importance of fruit quality is especially valid for the wine industry, where the price of fine wine is guided by expert panel ratings. Higher ratings mean higher prices per wine bottle. For an answer to the question "what is the $ value of a point", we turned to the Wine Spectator Top-100 wines list of December 2018.
We compared wines rated between 90 and 98 points and their published prices for the 100 wines listed.
No surprise, there is an exponential relationship between rating points and price per bottle.
The value of one additional point, when improving the rating from a 90-point wine to a 91-point wine, is $5 per bottle.
At the high end of the spectrum, the price increase from a 97 to a 98 point wine is $27 per bottle!
For a typical winery in California, a single Wine Spectator point increase could mean $15,000 additional winery revenue/acre. All the more reason to be serious about implementing practices to improve fruit quality and consistency.
