Wine Business Consulting, Forecasting and Analysis Services

Work is getting to be really busy. I've realized that, though I really focus on forecasting, this industry has a lot of need for more customized or generalized financial help. And I build really great financials. So, I've been lucky to get to do that for a lot of young, local businesses lately. Plus, there are always AVA valuations rolling in nowadays. And then there's cannabis/hemp/marijuana. A lot of work from there. I mention all of that as an excuse for why I haven

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

So, as I’m sure happens to many of my readers, anytime someone sees a news article about wine, I’m asked, “Is it true?” Typically, this is pretty easy to answer. The recent video from Vox, however, is so packed with claims, that it takes more than just a Facebook reply to answer. So, I figured, if I’m going to answer it, I may as well write a blog about it. I’m pretty slammed with clients needs right now, so it will be a bit before I put together a more heavy-hitting post

I've been hearing a lot of talk about grape prices rising too fast and squeezing wineries' margins too much. I decided to investigate whether or not this is true. The claim, it turns out, does not line up 100% with the salient facts, which follow and are derived from Wine Institute, Bureau of Labor Statistics and USDA-NASS data. The data are all summarized in a jpeg at the end of this article. It's in .jpg format to make it easy to copy and send around. Since 1999, Califo

As previously seen on Wine Industry Advisor, my review of the Crush Report: For some of us in the wine business, the release of the Crush Report is one of the most exciting events of the year. It means that the time has come to browse, analyze, cut up, re-arrange and make sense of winegrape prices to look for trends, find opportunities and verify or improve our own pricing models. For the vast majority of the wine industry, however, it just means that they can take a look a

Though I’m waiting for the final crush report numbers to assess my projections’ accuracy, I wanted to go back to one projection, in particular. District 3 (Sonomarin) Chardonnay was a bit of a question for me, though not as enigmatic as Anderson Valley Pinot and Lake County Cab. In the case of Sonomarin Chard I got it right, predicting a price of $1998.32. The preliminary numbers show an average price of $1987.15, for difference of $11.17, meaning I was about half a percen

Summary: Scores, prices and appellations of wines from a subset of premium wines, continue to be unpredictable. No statistical modeling I know of could accurately predict one variable from the two others. Sub-appellations produce higher scores and prices than do the California, Carneros or county-based appellations. The highest average points per dollar for 2011 Pinot Noir goes to the Santa Lucia Highlands, followed by the Central Coast. The worst average points per dollar g