Say goodbye to the recession

If last week's Premiere Napa Valley midwinter trade auction is any indication, the U.S. economy must be on the upswing. Two records fell at the event: the price paid for a single auction lot ($125,000) and the total proceeds of the day ($2.4 million). Optimism about fine wine sales being on the increase apparently lit up the room. As one observer said, "You could feel the buzz from the time the doors opened."

So what does this all mean to the casual wine drinker? Why should you care that wine retailers, restaurateurs, and other wine trade folk from around the world are snapping up cases and cases of great Napa Valley wine at record prices? Think of it as Fashion Week in Paris or New York – the colors, the fabrics, the textures being paraded on the runway today will trickle down into the apparel you'll see before long at Target and Abercrombie & Fitch.

It's the same with the wine market: higher prices for fine wine and higher profiles for certain wine producers will help set the trend for what appears in wine shops, on wine lists in restaurants, and eventually impact prices in the wine aisle of your neighborhood Safeway or Hy-Vee grocery store.

But back to those auction prices. A New Jersey retailer with three wine stores was the top bidder, spending half a million dollars on 300 cases of wine from more than 30 producers. A Japanese importer wrote a check for $125,000 for five cases of a single wine: 2009 Scarecrow cabernet sauvignon. That certainly raises the profile of that particular producer. The vines that yielded those cab sauv berries are 66 years old.

Approximately 1,530 cases were sold at the auction at an average case price of $1,546. That's an increase of 37% over prices at the 2009 auction, and 20% more than the average case price at the 2010 auction. Clearly, those in the industry have put the recession behind them.