(Note the links in this post require a subscription to the Wine Spectator website)
For a long time now the Collecting section of the Wine Spectator (WS) has been the both positionally and metaphorically at the back of the magazine. It has been a quiet column which has focused on people and famous auctions. Not any more. In recent issues the Collecting section has been both expanded and is using big bold graphics.
There are two main reasons for this. Peter Meltzer the long time editor and writer of this section has just written a book ‘Keys to the Cellar: Strategies and Secrets of Wine Collecting’.
This is a book focused on issues relevant to a Winevestor and we’ll be reviewing it in a future post.
The other reason for the focus is that the auction market is on fire at the moment. WS did a big focus in their Nov 30 edition where it was a cover story. In it they reported that in the last 3 years their auction index has increased 54%. That’s not a bad return compared to just about anything.
The Wine Spectator has a lot of good information on auctions which include:
This is helpful, but there are some obvious ways that this information could be displayed in ways more useful to a Winevestor. For instance their auction index which is occasionally published numerically but is not available as an updated graph on their site. Also WS has all of that auction information but they do not show it as historical rates of return. Oh well, maybe another site will start to focus on this - 
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