Wine Business Consulting, Forecasting and Analysis Services

Turrentine has announced the winners of their 2016 Crop Prediction Contest: https://www.turrentinebrokerage.com/blog/2016-crop-contest-winners/. I won the Statewide Chardonnay portion. This was the first time I participated. For the category I won, I decomposed the problem into multiple parts. First, how many bearing acres will there be? Second, what will yields per acre be? Both of those questions were decomposed into an estimate of base-level rates and trend. That is,

So, Lew Perdue reported on something that's been keeping me up at night - the fact that possibility that the federal government may defund the Crush Report and the Acreage Report. Check out his report, it's a concise breakdown of the issue. If this were to happen, it would be a shame. This is not a big program, yet it is an essential tool for us. Our planting decisions are long-term and the feedback mechanism of price movement is delayed by several years. Furthermore, th

I've finished my updates to my grape data tool. It will save me a bunch of time and, in all likelihood, if you start using it, it will improve your data usage and save you time. If you don't know what it does, it basically gives you access to the most important parts of the USDA Crush Reports for California and the Acreage Reports back to 1991 and automatically provides a bunch of automatic calculations. Soon, I'll be adding some serious advanced features. Anyways, direct

Today I posted to my site an updated Grape Data Tool. If you haven't used this thing yet, you need to. It allows you to very easily look up wine grape data by district or all California and by variety, color or in total. It pulls data from 1991 through 2016, including prices, yields, acreage, total sales, yields per acre, sales revenue per acre and the year on year change for all that data. It also provides a variety of automatic calculations of averages and compounded av

Historically, our industry has been cyclical. Prices rise, we start planting. Then the new vines start producing. Prices fall, we stop planting. Consumer demand continues to grow, while vineyards age and yields fall and then prices rise. Rinse. Repeat. This cycle continues to describe our industry rather well, with four caveats/exceptions. First, the prices of very top-end of the market, grapes like Napa Cabernet Sauvignon and the top five percent or so of Sonoma County fr

Recently, I've had the chance to focus a bit on the El Dorado AVA. I did work for a client there and also put together a presentation for the El Dorado Wine Growers Association. Click here to get the report I put together for the growers. In the process, I noticed that the reported El Dorado grape prices look pretty easy to forecast. In fact, the report and presentation included a regression that could be used to forecast prices for 2016 (the El Dorado Wine Grape Survey ha

Last month, I presented to the El Dorado Winegrowers’ association. The topic of the presentation was the economics and pricing dynamics of the market for El Dorado wine grapes. Just last year, the UC Davis Extension service put out one of their characteristically detailed and accurate cost studies for the Sierra Nevada Foothills, which illuminated the challenge of planting and operating a profitable vineyard in the region. I enjoyed giving the presentation for three reasons