In conjunction with The Drinks Business, Liv-ex has released the 2014 edition of the Liv-ex Power 100 – our annual list of the most powerful brands in the fine wine market.
The Drinks Business’s report on this year’s Power 100 is available in the current Hong Kong edition and will be published in the UK edition at the beginning of December.
Key findings this year:
- Buyers have been broadening their tastes and looking for value beyond Bordeaux. Wines from regions such as Italy, California, Australia and the Rhône have seen increased trade and price rises. Consequently, brands from nine different regions feature amongst the 20 most powerful fine wines this year. This is unprecedented in the nine years of publishing the Power 100: only four years ago, 18 of the top 20 came from Bordeaux.
- The highest new entrant this year is from Italy: the wines of Gaja entered the table at number 14. Close behind was Californian Opus One, a new entrant at number 16.
- Burgundy continued to perform well, accounting for six of the top ten brands by price performance.
- Pavie took the top spot, making 2014 the second year in a row that the brand at the top of the list has not been a First Growth or DRC. Pavie’s high ranking is due to its relative price performance: it has risen 0.56% while the majority of Bordeaux wines have declined. Pavie is still benefitting from the St Emilion re-classification two years ago, when it was promoted to Premier Cru Classé A.
- Although Pavie and Cheval Blanc sit at the top of the list this year, three of the top five fallers are Right Bank brands.
- Latour is the only Bordeaux First Growth to move up the table, rising six places and leaving Lafite the furthest down the table in 18th place. In fifth place, Haut Brion – which we looked at in November’s Cellar Watch Market Report – was the highest of the Firsts.
To calculate the scores, we took a list of all wines that traded on Liv-ex in the last year (September 1st 2013 – 31st August 2014) and grouped these by brand. We then identified brands that had traded at least three wines or vintages. Brands were ranked using five criteria: year on year price performance, average critic score (we used Robert Parker’s scores where possible, and where none were available we used The Wine Spectator, Allen Meadows, Stephen Tanzer and James Suckling), trading performance on Liv-ex, number of wines and vintages traded, and average price.
The individual rankings were then combined with a weighting of 1 for each criteria, except trading performance which had a weighting of 1.5 (as it combined two criteria). The final 100 brands accounted for over 1,500 unique wines/vintages traded in the past year.
Below are the results in full for the 2014 Liv-ex Power 100.
