(Wine-Searcher) - It's obvious what effect a big score can have on a particular wine, but what about the wider impact?

As a commodity, the value of wine is one that draws a lot of skepticism. The higher the price tag a wine has the further divorced its cost seems to be from its production.

It's a reductive perspective, but certainly the most expensive wines command prices far removed from the cost of production; instead scarcity, demand, terroir, story, the market economy and – hopefully – quality are what drive prices higher.

But another trend in wine pricing is reputation and the power of popular and critical reception – think of Robert Parker's 100-point wines or Wine Spectator's Top 100 List. And it doesn't just influence one wine or vintage but has the transitive, time-traveling ability to manipulate the past and future of a single wine, potentially rippling through a producer's entire catalog in a halo effect.

This is pretty clear when looking at Wine-Searcher's database, which shows the price history of a wine or spirit over the past five years, and shows how its market value has changed.

Let's take the most obvious example for starters. In Jim Murray's 2015 edition of the Whisky Bible, the 2013 release of Suntory's Yamazaki Sherry Cask Single Malt Whisky was named the world's best. In October of 2014, the Yamazaki Sherry Cask had an average per-bottle price of $128 and – across all releases – was ranked 8510th in searches on Wine-Searcher. When Murray's Whisky Bible was released a month later, Yamazaki leapt 8509 ranking places to be the most searched item on the website; by February 2015, the average per-bottle price was $3998. Whether you agree with Murray or not the popularity of the Sherry Cask 2013 obviously took off and the market was willing to accommodate it; the bottles became rare, so the price climbed even higher.

But what about the 2012 release that had already been on retail shelves for a couple of years?

In the same October, the 2012 release sat at an average price of $160. Across all releases, the Yamazaki Sherry Cask had fluctuated but never had a higher bottle average of more than a few hundred dollars when, for several months in 2013, it hovered around the $300 dollar mark. But by the following May, the 2012 release was averaging more than $2000 a bottle. Suntory has only had one more release of the Yamazaki Sherry Cask since it was named best in the world and that was earlier this year. Now the bottle price across all releases is in the thousands with the average – as of writing this – at $3030; the 2016 was released in February with only a 5000-bottle run, meaning it is unlikely to be affordable for long.

But the demand for Yamazaki wasn't limited to the Sherry Cask Single Malt. Virtually all of the Suntory Yamazaki range has steadily increased in price since the 2015 Whisky Bible. The relatively entry-level Yamazaki 12 Year Single Malt doubled in price from $60 in late 2014 to $120 today. Over the same period, the ultra-premium Yamazaki 50 Year Old Single Malt has increased from around $14,000 a bottle (a price it held for more than two years, give or take $1000) to its April 2016 average of $51,480 – although a lack of availability is certainly also at play.

One of the loudest examples of the halo effect is the success of Screaming Eagle. From its inaugural release in 1995, Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon has received regular critical praise. The first vintage, 1992, was given a near-perfect 99 points by Robert Parker. That first release also cost less than $100 a bottle. But the cult success of the winery, coupled with very limited quantities sold through allocation, has meant bottles regularly sell on the secondary market in the thousands. The 1992 now averages more than $9000. Whether you think the wines are worth that much or not, they have received consistently high scores from Parker and others and several vintages have been awarded 100 points. The splash effect of the Cabernet's success was blindingly obvious when Screaming Eagle released 600 bottles of a Sauvignon Blanc to reward long-standing mailing list members at $250 a bottle – the wines found their way to the secondary market, where the demand for the label sent prices upwards of $2000 a bottle. The even more limited releases of subsequent vintages has brought the average price across all vintages to more than $3000.