In September last year approximately half of his lifetime collection of wines were put up for sale — 487 lots, which included 5,477 bottles, with a focus on Bordeaux, Rhône and California, featuring the best wines from the best years. A Louisiana native, Ryder donated a portion of the proceeds from the sale to Louisiana-based charitable organizations and schools.

Highlights of the sale included a full case of 1982 Château Pétrus, which brought $56,762, a case of 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild, which sold for $26,887 and a case of 1982 Château Mouton Rothschild which fetched $19,120. A case of 1990 Château Cheval Blanc (mentioned here) sold
for $17,925.

What got you started in wine collecting?

It was a hobby I started when I was 25 that allowed me to escape from the stress of what I was doing at the time and the way that I gave myself intellectual relief was to go up to Napa Valley at the weekends, talk to winemakers and drink wine. This didn’t start as an effort to collect wine. Of course, it was the early days of California wine, not a lot of people went and talked to the winemakers. They were farmers, artists and scientists all wrapped into one and I found them fascinating and fun to be with.

Is wine collecting a pursuit for people with a certain kind of culture?

I’m not sure. I’ve met a lot of people who collect wine. I suspect we’re not a lot different from people who collect stamps or coins. When I was a kid I collected baseball cards and I pursued that with the same sort of intensity which I’ve pursued wine collecting.

Would you share one of your treasured bottles with someone who might not appreciate it?

I certainly have over the years. It’s not nearly so much fun. I tried not to do it twice.

Why do collectors end up having so much wine in their cellar which they can never consume?

You do get carried away. When you discover a truly extraordinary wine, let’s say a 1990 Cheval Blanc. It never occurs to you that you can’t really drink six cases. So you buy six cases and it costs a lot of money. It’s stupid and you wind up with more wine than you can drink.

How do you stop yourself drinking some of your great bottles in a rash moment either when you’re on own or in front of the TV? Doesn’t it require a lot self discipline?

The whole point of having these wines is that any time the whim strikes you, you can have a great bottle of wine. My wife and I enjoy cooking together and for us there’s nothing like cooking a simple roast chicken. I like red wine with roast chicken and we have drunk the most extraordinary bottles of wine such as Château Petrus, or great Burgundies sitting in our little kitchen. I try never to exercise discipline where great bottles of wine are concerned.

Do you ever think about the value of the wines when you drink them?

You know I didn’t for a long time but it does become a bit oppressive when you find that some of these wines have become two, three, four or even five thousand dollars a bottle. I’m not sure you ought be to drinking that. You ought to be putting it into a museum. So, yes I do  think about it. For most of the time I was really good in ignoring it and just enjoying the wines for what they were but in the last few years I must say I do think about it and part of the thinking process brought us to the idea that there was something better we could do with these wines and hence the sale which is in part to support the state of Louisiana.
When the auction house folks first came around we did a sort of ‘testing the cellar’ and we picked a 1982 First Growth at random. We were enjoying the wine and it was quite extraordinary and we were really thrilled with it and it went down awfully fast so I said we should probably try something else just to make sure we understood how good it was so I picked a 1968 Beaulieu Vineyards Cabernet Private Reserve which I knew very well because I’d bought it at the winery years and years ago and kept it. There was no question – the ‘68 BV was truly one of the most magnificent wines I have ever tasted. It was significantly better then the ‘82 First Growth which cost about twenty-five hundred dollars a bottle and there was absolute unanimity about that. It had been on my list of wines to sell and I quickly took it off because it would have sold for $150 a bottle and it is simply one of the greatest wines ever made. There are some wines like that. I mentioned the 1990 Cheval Blanc. I remember that wine absolutely taking my breath away. I am selling some because I bought quite a lot but I’m keeping some. 1974 Ridge Vineyards which is a wine that is truly magnificent… and that will sell for $150 a bottle.. crazy!

Are you surprised the value top wines have acquired? Was it something you imagined 10 or 15 years ago?

Shocked! Absolutely shocked! I wish I could say that I was that smart. Hard to imagine.

Are you in the market in today to buy them?

I’m not. What I do is what I have always done which is to buy new wines which are particularly interesting for me. What I am buying now is… Riesling — fabulous wines from Germany which were a little expensive but under $120 per bottle and most a lot less than that but these are for drinking. I’ll drink them over the next few years and this will make me quite happy. I also buy really expensive Burgundy because, unfortunately, nearly all great Burgundy is really expensive.

Do you have advice to pass on to an aspiring wine collector?

Yes. First of all, decide whether you want to really collect or drink intelligently. If you want the latter there are some spectacular wines which you can buy that are less expensive than the collector wines. For example, early California wines particularly from the early 1980s and 1990s are truly magnificent wines and they are hugely under-valued compared to, say, Bordeaux often, I  think, the equal to great Bordeaux. I’ve spent 40 years drinking them side by side so I feel qualified to say it. I would also say that truly magnificent bargains can be found in slightly off years in Bordeaux. I’m talking years like 1981, 1983, 1985. Years that surrounded magnificent years like 1982 where the wines just over-shadowed the market around it. These wines have never gained market currency so they are tremendously inexpensive relative to what I call the collector’s wines. They will never have great value in the market place but hell, the whole point is to drink them. The wines of the Rhône Valley are still relatively under-valued particularly wines like Hermitage and Châteauneuf du Pape. I’m also now writing a column about inexpensive wines — under $15. I would tell collectors particularly to look particularly at areas like Washington State in the US, Spain, Argentina (which may be the best developing wine region in the world), still lots of bargains in Australia. If you want to be a serious collector, something I guess I have been over the years then I think you need a strategy and a strategy for me was best wines, best years and that kind of principle gives a focus to your collecting effort.

This interview is available as a podcast on iTunes and other podcatchers.

This article is published in Fine Wine magazine

Interviewed by Fabian Cobb

Thomas O Ryder is a post from: Fine Wine Journal

What a difference a year makes. In early summer 2007, when we last reported on fine wine for Fine Wine Magazine, the market was seeing large month-on-month price increases, the new Bordeaux vintage was widely viewed as strong if unspectacular and confidence was sky high. The Liv-ex 100 Fine Wine Index – the wine trade’s leading benchmark that tracks the performance of 100 of the world’s most sought after fine wines – was putting on record gains, up 11.8% in May 2007 alone.

Fast forward 16 months and the fine wine landscape looks remarkably different. The massive price rises have slowed dramatically, Bordeaux 2007 is widely viewed as the worst vintage since 1999 (at least) and the credit crunch has sent shock waves through the financial markets.

Surely the most interesting aspect of this, however, has been that the prices of the word’s finest wines have been remarkably resilient to this market turbulence. Fine wine’s performance as an investment has been little short of remarkable when compared to other assets, such as equities.

If you look at the performance of the Liv-ex 100 Fine Wine index (www.liv-ex.com) since August 2004 (table 1), we can see that during May to July  2007 the fine wine market experienced an extremely strong period of growth. Fine wine prices rose on a wave of increased demand from new entrants and new markets, with yearly returns on a number of wines as high as 100%. And then the credit crunch hit. Wine traders, much like their brethren in the city, became more cautious in their outlook and a number decided to take profit and divest of stock. The market reacted, with the Liv-ex 100 sliding slowly down in value for four moths in a row, the first time this has happened since the index was rebased at 100 in January 2004.

Since then, however, a slow and steady recovery has been apparent. Since December 2007, with new capital continuing to enter the wine market and confidence returning, the index has edged up month-after-month with the only aberration a small decrease recorded in July. By the end of March 2008, the market beat the level it had set in July 2007 and it has continued to increase since then: as of 31 August the index was 6.0 % higher than it had been at the end of July 07 and was up 9.5% for the year to date. A modest gain, perhaps, but on that looks extremely good when compared to the main stock market indices over the same period.

So what can we expect from the market over the coming year? Perhaps the most pressing issue that collectors and merchants in the US and UK are facing is currency. Since last May the value of the Sterling against the Euro has crashed – moving from 1.47 Euros to the Pound to 1.23. The US dollar has seen a similar movement over the same period, moving from 0.74 to 0.69 Dollars per Euro (half the level the Dollar reached in early 2001).  This near 15% reduction in buying power on both sides of the Atlantic has had two major knock-on effects for collectors and merchants.

Firstly, any older vintages, where the stock available in the UK is low, will now have to be sourced from Europe with obvious ramifications for pricing. This is also true of younger wines where the production was low to begin with, particularly right bank châteaux. Anyone who is a keen follower of wine prices on Liv-ex or who receives the monthly cellar valuations as part of the a Liv-ex Cellar Watch package will have seen a jump in list prices for wines where the UK stock has been exhausted (or where there is a lack of willing sellers).

This trend brought the US market back into play as a supplier of stock to the UK. Wine  that has gone over the Atlantic and back again is has traditionally been viewed suspiciously by the UK trade, although the price differential made the argument for shipping cases back across the Atlantic too compelling to ignore. As 2008 progressed we saw a marked increase in the availability of ex-US stock. The recent slide in the value of the pound versus the dollar may make this uneconomic as we move towards year end.

The second issue regarding currency emerged in early May and June and was of particular bother to Bordeaux-based merchants and their international partners – namely that en primeur purchases (where you buy the wine in barrel, as a future) became a lot more expensive. The currency movement meant that a 15% drop on the prices for the 2007s over the 2006s meant US and UK consumers effectively paying the same price for a vastly inferior vintage.  With many of the 2006s having barely moved in price – not to mention the good value 2004s and 2001s – demand for the 2007s was thin, at best. This was particularly true in the early weeks of the campaign with some of the major names only dropping their prices by 5-10%. Thankfully, the reduction on price compared to 2006 became larger as the campaign progressed. The First Growths were reduced by as much as 25% when they finally emerged in mid June. Even this, however, was not enough to spark more than cursory interest.

One hope was that emerging markets, particularly the Far East, would take up the slack inevitably left by the drop in demand from the Anglo Saxon markets. The growing importance of Asia as a market for fine wine has been the hottest topic in fine wine circles over the past year. The decision by the Hong Kong authorities to abolish import duty on wine in Hong Kong in April (and Macau following suit in late August) together with a host of reports in the press quoting London merchants reporting booming sales pushed it to the front of the news agenda. The traditional wisdom has been that these markets buy wines to drink rather than cellar and so en primeur demand in previous years has been limited. Evidence, mostly anecdotal, has pointed to this having changed somewhat, but apart from some of the perennial Asian favourites – such as the wines from the Lafite Rothschild stable – it appears that Asian demand was relatively subdued. Not enough, certainly, to make up for the shortfall in demand from more established markets.

To demonstrate the importance of currency movements on the wine market we have converted the Liv-ex 100 into a Euro value on a month-by-month basis and then rebased it at 100 in January 2004 (graph 2)  You can see that compared to the Liv-ex 100 in sterling terms the decline since last July has been steeper and the recovery took longer to take effect. Indeed, the weakness of the pound in the last week of August has more or less wiped out the gains made since New Year. Perhaps it will be the news emanating from the currency exchanges, rather than the wine critics, that will define the fine wine market as it moves into 2009.

What a difference a year makes is a post from: Fine Wine Journal

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