Predicting Washington Wine Grape Prices
I've been looking for new regions to sell my services in. I love Sonoma and Napa, but I enjoy getting clients from other regions. Last year, I made public forecasts for Washington, Oregon and Lake County grape prices. With the Crush Report released, I'm starting to grade them. I have arbitrarily started off with Washington (it's the leftmost tab in my tracking spreadsheet.) Ironically, Washington doesn't report its prices in the Crush Report (they have their own report).
I predicted a nominal price for all Washington wine grapes of $1,207.19. I also predicted a price of $1,172.60 in 2017, constant dollars (I measure inflation as July to July.)
The preliminary report indicates an actual, nominal price of $1,206 or $1,176.60 in 2017 dollars. The errors for those were -0.10% and -0.34%, respectively. Looks like I did a bit better predicting grape prices than inflation. But either way, it's a welcome result.
If you were going into grape contract negotiations, you would rather have me working for YOU than the other guy, right?
Let me be clear about one thing. I don't expect most of my forecasts to be this close. Some of my forecasts will be more like YouTube videos of a guy hitting 5 out of 6 free throws in a row or something like that. But, what you can expect of me is to reliably measure the uncertainty of each forecast and provide probability distributions of outcomes that you can trust and that can help you make more money. But today, I'm going to enjoy a victory lap, pop a bottle of bubbly and turn up the Queen.
Final Note: If you are using these forecasts in any way, understand that (a) you'd be better off hiring me to forecast exactly what you need and (b) you can expect that, unless I update them (I probably won't), then the further out we get, the less accurate you can expect my forecasts to be. You can check my results, as I post them, to get an idea how accurate I am on longer-term horizons and you can also pay close attention to the prediction intervals in the full report.