Late last year the drinks business published its annual Fine Wine Power 100 list in collaboration with Liv-ex; which showed, rather definitively, that Bordeaux had staged a remarkable comeback in 2016 and Lafite once again sat atop the pecking order.

The entire article can be read online here. In this and one further post we will quickly examine the top 20 wines in that list, why they – in all probability – command the positions they do as a a result of certain market forces that have exerted themselves on fine wine over the past year and, in some cases, from effects that are still making themselves felt from further back.

For those that have seen the list in full either online or in a copy of the drinks business or the drinks business Hong Kong, it is no spoiler to say that Bordeaux has taken an almost total grip on this upper end of the list; with only two wines in the top 20 not coming from either bank of the Gironde.

As for these first 10 wines, aside from what appear to be two rather out of place wines in the form of Ausone and Armand Rousseau, they are a broad church of Left Bank estates, encompassing second to fifth growths and a pair of top Graves properties.

With good volumes, scores and a proven track record, the most definitive statement one can say about them is that they are, without doubt, the backbone of the fine wine market.

Below is a quick summary of Liv-ex’s methodology for the list:

To calculate the scores, Liv-ex took a list of all wines that traded on Liv-ex in the last year (from 1 September 2015 to 31 August 2016) and grouped these by brand.

It then identified brands that had traded at least three wines or vintages, and had a total trade value of at least £10,000.

Brands were ranked using four criteria:

• year-on-year price performance (based on the market price for a case of wine on 1 September 2015 with its market price on 31 August 2016);
• trading performance on Liv-ex (by value and volume);
• number of wines and vintages traded;
• average price of the wines in a brand.

Over 4,000 different wines/vintages were traded.

These were grouped into 670 brands, of which 199 qualified for the final calculation.

The individual rankings were combined with a weighting of 1 for each criteria, except trading performance which had a weighting of 1.5 (as it combined two criteria).

The final 100 brands accounted for 2,046 unique wines that traded, and from the 199 brands that qualified, there were 2,804 wines.