If you mention liquor with rising prices, you may think of Feitian Moutai at the first time. After all, there are too many people who have "speculated" these days. But compared with some foreign consumers' enthusiastic collection of whiskey and the price increase, "speculating" Feitian Moutai is really nothing.
"Big Master" in whiskey
especially van Wink's whiskey. Nowadays, let alone overseas enthusiasts, even local whiskey consumers in the United States rarely come into contact with a bottle of whiskey from Van Wink in real life. Their "suggested retail price" is between US$80 and US$250 (518-1619 yuan).
But once it flows into the market, it can usually be sold for $750 to $5,000 or above. (It's 480 to 320,000 yuan, and it can't be stopped). Note that this is not a special bottle or a collection-grade product, but a regular wine model from the brand. This crazy value growth has surpassed the top brands of Riviera.
Simplely put, the "uncle" in this whiskey. In the hearts of American drinkers, it has become a "Hermes" and is really not worth mentioning compared to the domestic scramble for Feitian Moutai. Because if consumers want to buy a few bottles of Parbi Van Wink from a dealer, they not only have to queue up overnight to play on the floor, draw lots to seek character, and honestly admit to the price increase...
, but also have to obey the dealer's "distribution policy", that is, they can get the whiskey from Van Wink's family first. Even Julian van Winkle III, the head of the brand of Van Wink whiskey, said: "For a long time, buying whiskey from our distillery depends on whether you have the right connections, whether you pay an outrageous price, or both."
The origin of "The Uncle"
So the question is, why are the whiskey from Van Wink's family difficult to buy and the price is raised? In fact, the price of "uncle" is not so outrageous from the beginning. Like many Bourbon wineries, Pabi Van Wink was positioned as "country wine" for a long time.
In the 1990s, a bottle of 20-year-old Van Wink could be bought for about 50 US dollars (at that era's exchange rate , about three to four hundred yuan). At that time, the entire Kentucky bourbon whiskey industry model was mainly "internal consumption". The winery produces a small amount, so just do some business of the villagers, which is simple and unpretentious.
But by the 2000s, everything was different. In the mid-2000s, Mad Men swept the North American cultural circle, and also brought the soft popularity of old fashioned and bourbon into thousands of households. At the beginning, celebrities began to praise "bourbon". Then the mass media promoted the fire, and a large number of ordinary consumers began to become very interested in this "heartless liquor in their hometown".
The best ones you can't get
In the next 10 years, bourbon production increased by more than 150%, and the number of new breweries increased by five times. And the most eye-catching one is the "uncle" Pabi Van Wink. In just a few years, this brand has won almost all the heavy prizes in the global liquor industry several times.
From the World Whiskey Awards (WWA) to the San Francisco /Los Angeles Spirits Challenge (SFWSC/LAIWSC); from Jim Murray's "Liquid Gold Title" to the American Beverage Testing Agency (BTI) scores up to 99 points. Especially the most classic 15 and 20 years of Van Wink. When you open the product page, you can't cut off all their long winning lists without scaling the web pages by 50%.
While "high quality" has become a consensus, consumers have also personally felt the scarcity of Van Wink. First of all, the production of this winery is very small - the annual output is only about 7,000 boxes. In addition, the alcohol consumption during the aging process is one of the reasons why the winery has fewer stocks.
It is reported that in 2015, several barrels of wine in Pabi Van Wink's warehouse were directly destroyed because the angel share was too large and it did not meet the standards of the parent company's bison footprint. This led to halving of winery inventory that year and a series of lagging reactions have occurred, with the impact continuing to this day. The opposite of
is the rising demand year after year under the scattered inventory of
. The imbalance in supply and demand has led to the rise in real transaction prices of Parbi Van Wink; and the market phenomenon of "market is priceless" further stimulates consumers' unlimited desire to buy. After all, "what you can't get is the best."
Just like that, Pabi Van Wink stood out in the Bourbon frenzy at the beginning of this century and became the most famous brand.
The last bit of thinking
In fact, in addition to its own excellent quality, Papi Van Wink's path to the gods is also the result of the combined effect of market opportunities and cultural changes. This trend is somewhat similar to the current surge in Feitian Moutai in our country, but it seems even more crazy because of the larger whiskey consumer market in the United States.
In the foreseeable future, this "Borbon Frenzy" will surely intensify, and the price increase of liquors such as Feitian Moutai is also a trend. But what I want to say is that from the perspective of consumers, I really hope that this trend will heat up a little slower in China and let our wallets breathe for a while. What do you think?
