Anyone have any sources or recommendations on sources - how to determine what the prices of wines (especailly Burg and Bdx) were at time of release? Sine searcher and similar are excellent for getting current pricing - but am interested in analyzing select wines prices over a 10 or 12 period.
Any ideas?
Winesearcher (at least pro) can go back 4 years. But no farther. If you subscribed to WS or WA online sites, think their reviews typically have suggested retail- so look for release era notes. But I don't know of any site that systemically has release prices. Production of most classified Bordeaux is high enough probably easy enough to find out (too bad- last week I threw about 4 cartons of old WA, WS, and winestore catalogs out!). Burgundy is tougher, as wines are smaller production, so while every major Bdx retailer sells LLC, Haut-Brion, Montrose, etc, that's not the case for most Burgs even at WHWC, PC, etc.
Ric, I have back issues of WA and CGCW going back to the mid-'80s. Since you are unlikely to find this information on the Internet, I would be willing to look up prices for you, at my standard consulting rate of $250/hr ;-) Alternatively, you can probably find earlier editions of Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide (or the WS equivalent) in your local library and use them to find release prices (I think).
Mark Lipton
This might be part of your answer:
thanks for posting that, I had seen that site once before but not bookmarked. Very cool. Big problem is of course that it seems mostly to archive the home pages, and most pricing would be on interior pages. But of the sampling I tried I could see pricing on some wines at PJ's from 2000, very cool.
The Wayback Machine is indeed a great tool, but I'm not sure how much help it will be here. I'd suspect that most retailers' websites operate a server-side script that queries a database for pricing. If so, then the archived web page will contain little or no pricing information. Still, it can't hurt to look...
Mark Lipton
Decanter is a good source. They have large tastings of Bordeaux, Burgundy, etc for recently released vintages and give prices and sources. Many are UK prices, but also some US prices are given. Then they give auction prices for many wines going back to about 1961 for Bordeaux and even earlier for many Ports. They only follow the wines of D. Romanee-Conti for Burgundy. Sometimes fairly recent wines appear on this auction price list when a vintage has an outstanding reputation early on and thus is soon auctioned. Decanter has been published for many years. You might check their web site. They have some pay services that might be of interest to you.
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