The world’s most expensive Australian wines?

The world is full of expensive wines, which are often treated as more for investment than for consumption. Each year, Wine Searcher publishes lists of them from certain regions and of certain alcohol types. In this post I thought that I might look at some of the lists over the past decade, from one particular wine-producing region: Australia.

Obviously, these wines do not come anywhere near close to the prices of the top Burgundies or Bordeaux wines, but they do represent top wines of a more affordable class for the rest of us.

Each yearly list of 10 wines covers “The World’s Most Expensive Australian Wines on Wine-Searcher”. [Note: only 9 wines were listed for 2014.] The criteria for inclusion over the years have generally been: “a wine must have been produced over five consecutive vintages and have a minimum of 20 different offers in our search engine.”

The lists available to date are for the years: 2014, 2016, 2018, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Obviously, the prices have varied greatly over that decade (as discussed below), but this does not obviate a study of which wines made it into the list for each year. These wines are shown in this next figure, with one row per wine and one column per year (click to enlarge).

There are 25 wines in this list, which indicates a fair turnover between years. Indeed, 10 of the wines appeared in only one year each. Furthermore, only one wine made it into all of the lists: Penfold’s Grange Bin 95 (label above). This is no great surprise, as Penfolds deliberately created this wine, in 1951, to be Australia’s best, and it is usually treated as its most collectable wine (see the history in Wikipedia).

You will also note that all 25 of the wines are red, mostly based on the Shiraz grape (18 of them). Australia does make some very nice white wines, as I can personally attest; but apparently the buyers of expensive wines are not prepared to put their money on them. ** Australia also makes some very nice red wines based on grapes other than Shiraz; but this particular grape certainly makes wines unlike those elsewhere in the world — and this is presumably what the investors in expensive wines are looking for.

Similarly, 16 of the wines are specifically from grapes grown in the Barossa Valley, north-east of Adelaide in South Australia. This was originally Australia’s best-known wine-making region, and so this success is perhaps no great surprise — it is a warm region that makes very powerful wines. However, there are many other regions that make equally good wines, but of a completely different style, notably with more elegance than power. McLaren Vale and Eden Valley are both somewhat near Adelaide, and both appear twice in the list of wines. The Clare Valley, Gippsland, and Heathcote are much further away, and each appears once — the latter two are from the state of Victoria, not South Australia. No wines from the state of New South Wales appear on the lists, which state also has some well-known wine-making regions (eg. the Hunter Valley, with Tyrrell’s Vat 1 Sémillon), nor does Western Australia appear.

As far as the wine prices are concerned, obviously they have increased in each yearly list. The average prices of the 10 [or 9] wines in each year are:

    2014    $397
    2016    $474
    2018    $581*
    2021    $561
    2022    $624
    2023    $644
    2024    $713

That is, Australia's most expensive wine prices increased by an average of 80% over the decade. Not bad for a financial investment.

It remains only to compare the bottle prices to the assessed wine quality scores (out of 100). We do not expect much of a correlation, and we do indeed not find one. The data are shown in the figure above. ***

The three lowest scores do have the lowest prices, but the highest price has a middling score. Otherwise the data form a blob, with a statistical correlation only = 0.216. As we all suspect, the price of investment-grade wine has little to do with the quality as assessed by ordinary wine drinkers.

As a follow-up to this post, I might do a future post comparing all of the Wine Searcher 2024 lists for different regions and wine styles.

---

* Minus the Para “port”.

** The label below is from the wine my wife and I had last night with dinner. The 26-year-old wine from the Clare Valley, with its screw cap, has a label that notes: “Red loamy soils over limestone or schist produce wines of great flavour, crisp acid and longevity ... This riesling displays an intense floral bouquet with limey, citrus fruit flavours on the palate and clean crisp finish. It has the pedigree to age gracefully for many years, yet retain its youthful freshness.” All of this was emphatically true. I am so glad that I bought this wine! (It is currently still available in my local liquor store.) The dessert wine to follow was Gramp's 2013 Botrytis Semillon, which was also excellent.

*** The price data have been standardized to allow for the increasing average price across the years.