Bordeaux
Burgundy
Champagne
Rhône
Napa Valley
Tuscany
Piedmont
Mosel
Oregon
Rioja
California sparkling
Valais and Lavaux
England
Douro
Etna
Mendoza
Marlborough
Stellenbosch
Barossa Valley
Tasmania
Beaujolais
Jura
Alsace
Loire
Provence
Ribera del Duero
Sonoma
What land costs
Good years and bad
Appellations
Famous vineyards
Famous wines
Who makes them
Find a vintage
Compare wines
Wine can feel like a club with its own language. Corkonomics is here to open the door. We explain what is in the glass, where it comes from and why it costs what it does, without the jargon.
Who it is for
Anyone who enjoys wine and would like to understand it a little better. You do not need a course, a cellar or a dictionary. Start with the basics and go only as deep as you feel like.
What you will find
- Short lessons. The five types of wine, how to taste, how to read a label, what to serve with dinner.
- Grapes. What each one tastes like, how to say its name and what to try next.
- Regions. Where wine comes from and what each place is known for.
- Famous wines and who makes them. The stories behind the names, with every year rated from difficult to exceptional.
- What a bottle costs to make. Our own estimates, line by line, for sixteen styles of wine.
- For the curious. Opening prices, auction results, tariffs and official statistics, each with its source.
How we handle facts
Every figure comes from somewhere you can check. Some were published by a named source: a producer, a government agency or a wine publication. Some we worked out ourselves from published figures, such as what a bottle costs to make. Ratings of a year are our editors’ judgement. The sources are listed at the foot of each page, and when a producer has not published a figure we leave it out instead of guessing.
Corkonomics does not scrape proprietary price databases and holds no valuations. Its market prices are public figures with a named source: release prices and US retail offers reported by Wine Spectator, Decanter and The Drinks Business, and auction results from the published results pages of Christie’s, Hart Davis Hart and Sotheby’s, each linked to its record. See data sources and methodology.
About the pictures
The colour photographs on this site were created for Corkonomics with AI image tools. They show a kind of wine, a place or an idea, and never a particular estate, bottle or person. Photographs of real estates, vineyards and bottles come from credited photographers. They appear in black and white with the creator, source and licence beside them, and the full list is on the image licensing page. Where an estate has no photograph of its own, the page shows its region and says so.
What it is not
Corkonomics does not give investment advice, does not recommend buying or selling any wine, and does not predict returns. Wine markets can be illiquid; pricing can be subjective; provenance, storage and authenticity matter; transaction, storage and insurance costs materially reduce net returns; past appreciation does not predict future returns. Modeled production costs are estimates from stated inputs, never a producer’s confidential cost. Please enjoy wine responsibly.
For developers and AI assistants
Every page has a stable address and structured data, and there is a free, rate-limited API, an llms.txt file and ready-made prompts for AI agents.
The operating entity
Corkonomics is published by the same family as Preferred Stock AI, REIT Research, Dividendly and Emerging Atlas. The legal operating entity will be named here when the site moves to its permanent domain.