Fine wine
A market of a few thousand serious participants, priced in cases of twelve, settled in bonded warehouses, and quoted almost entirely gross of cost. It has had a boom and a twenty-four percent correction inside four years and almost nobody outside the trade noticed either.
What a critic point is worth, and why we will not print a number
The trade behaves as though a Parker point has a precise price. A ninety-nine becoming a hundred can move a wine more than the four points below it combined, because the round number is the thing people buy. Everyone in the market believes this.
The academic literature has spent thirty years trying and largely failing to pin the effect down. Ali, Lecocq and Visser found a real en primeur effect from Parker grades; Marks, reviewing the field, concluded that consistent correlations between ratings and prices have simply eluded it, and that where correlations do appear they may reflect speculation feeding on the score rather than anyone's judgment of the wine. That is a more useful finding than a spurious coefficient, so it is what we report.
The best story in the field is Orley Ashenfelter's. He predicted Bordeaux quality from winter rainfall, harvest rainfall and growing-season temperature, published it in the Economic Journal, and was met with open contempt from the tasting establishment. The regression has held up. A site built on prediction markets should probably be on his side of that argument.
Critic scores from Parker, Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator and Suckling are licensed intellectual property and are not reproduced here. Liv-ex launched an API for JancisRobinson.com scores in 2026, which is the one licensable route into this data.
Bordeaux vintages, and when they open
The bar is the drinking window. The wines that are ready now are the ones being drunk, which is why Liv-ex's March 2026 read was that older vintages had already bottomed and were genuinely short. The great young vintages, 2022 above all, are priced today for a window that opens at the end of this decade.
Quality tiers and windows are our reading of the consensus across published vintage charts, not any one critic's scores, and are labelled as a reading rather than a measurement. Reasonable people disagree about 2021 in particular.