Vincast: Analytics in Wine Valuation, 12 Aug 2015

If You Give a Scientist Data...

I remember being 5 years old and seeing my father record bundles of fives on a piece of paper by marking four straight lines and a fifth diagonally. "How cool," I thought. You can count by fives just with straight lines. (These tally marks may have been the most ancient numeral system, going back tens of thousands of years and the origin of our written numerals.)

So I put an aluminum lawn chair in our yard where I could see the cars on the highway. For each car, I made a line...until my sheet of paper was full. I was gathering data and I was thrilled.

As I recorded my data, I noticed the patterns in the cars. They came in clumps because of the stoplight down the road. There were busy times and quiet times...I had just done my first data analysis. Data has been my passion ever since. Sunspots, tree rings, star maps (satellite and paleolithic), crop yields, college basketball, hockey, and golf...Data is cool.

When people ask me why I have a wine forecasting website, I say, "because I found the data". Simple, but true. After three years of work, we now have over 1 million auction values for collectible wines, long range forecasting, a real-time auction bidding tool, a portfolio management tool, and an analytics blog... because the data is cool.

More than that, wine data has all the same dynamics as retail lending data. For those of you with long memories, my first retail lending article was "Becoming a Better Vintner" in RMA Journal, 2002. I guess we've come full circle.

So if you love wine or you want to get into wine investing or you just love exciting data analysis, check out Vincast), lending analytics in wine valuation. I know it's not retail lending, but it's great dinner conversation.

Read the Vincast Blog for Insights

With a database like this, we can't keep ourselves from exploring. Since wine investment analytics doesn't have an academic journal, we had to create a blog.

Lafite wines are the most traded in our database, in particular, the 1982 vintage. Château Lafite Rothschild became astronomically popular among the Chinese buyers and its price went through the roof in 2010 and 2011. Find out what happened with the "Lafite Bubble," in our post)...

We invite you to check out Vincast at auctionforecast.com, sign up, and explore our features for free. We love to hear from the community, so please feel free to reach out to us with any feedback.

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