WinePrices.com's most actively traded fine wine indexes were up from between 10%-17% in May 2009 based on global auction results (the Dow Jones Average was up 4.1%). See full summary results page for all nine indexes.
What's going on?
As noted in my prior post, Asian wine buying influence continues unabated, I'm sure these prices reflect the impact of higher auction prices being paid in Hong Kong. Of the 11 auctions held in May worldwide that we tracked, four were in Hong Kong and about 25% of the price data points derived from these auctions. I'll be doing a separate analysis soon to try to quantify the "Hong Kong effect" although Asian buyers continue to be active in New York and London auctions. Note that these results exclude the first mainland Chinese wine auction for reasons I will address in a separate post (the results would have been skewed upwards further).
The sharp upturn in The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Survey during May (see press release) also seems to correlate with these May auction results.
California fine wine prices performing particularly poorly
The California 100 index has turned in the worst performance of the nine indexes since January 2005 (101.11 index versus 100.00 in January 2005). The 2009 price recovery which has positively impacted all other indexes has largely skipped the California 100 with only a 1.2% increase YTD to May. The lowest other index for the same YTD period is +9.1% for the Italy 25 and +31.3% is the highest for the Bordeaux First-Growth 100.
