2018 Power 100: Burgundy continues to shine

In conjunction with The Drinks Business, Liv-ex has released the thirteenth edition of the Liv-ex Power 100 – the annual list of the most powerful brands in the fine wine market.

The Drinks Business’s full report on this year’s Power 100 is published in the magazine’s December edition. You can also read it online, here.

Key findings this year:

The broadening of the market for fine wine has been relayed in this year’s rankings. The number of wines that traded was up from 4,000 to 5,700, and the number of brands that qualified for consideration rose from 220 to 248.
Overall, Burgundy continues to be the star of the show, with 29 brands featuring in the list, compared to 24 last year. Moreover, 14 of the top 20 price performers came from the region.
For the first time ever, Leroy is in the top spot. Domaine and Maison Leroy were counted as one brand this year, rather than separately as they were before. Last year, Domaine Leroy was 94th on the list and Maison Leroy did not make it into the top 100. Had the two been combined in 2017, then the resulting brand would have been ranked 85^th.
The market’s broadening has largely been at the expense of Bordeaux, which has seen a decline in the number of labels that placed in the top 100 – they have fallen from 53 in 2017 to 45 this year.
Champagne, Italy and the US have also seen movement in the secondary market, both in terms of market share and price performance. The perennial underperformer – the Rhone, has continued to plod along, and Port has also been gradually rising.

To calculate the scores, we took a list of all wines that traded on Liv-ex in the last year (1st September 2017 – 31st August 2018) and grouped these by brand. This year, we combined Burgundy labels with both domaines and maisons as one. We then identified brands that had traded a minimum of three wines or vintages and a total trade value of at least £10,000. Brands were ranked using four criteria: year on year price performance, trading performance on Liv-ex (value and volume traded), the number of different wines and vintages traded, and the average price.

The individual rankings were then combined with a weighting of one for each criterion, except trading performance which had a weighting of 1.5 (as it combined two criteria: value and volume traded).