Is Scarcity an Aesthetic Value or a Pricing Trick?

Rare wine has a peculiar power over us. Tell someone a bottle is hard to find and sold only through a mailing list and the bottle will have an aura of prestige even before the cork is pulled. That in itself is not unreasonable. Scarcity can indicate genuine value. Vineyards that produce distinctive wines are often small. Yields must be limited to keep quality high and the producer may not want to buy fruit that would compromise that distinctiveness in order to increase production. Wine is interesting because of very fine-grained differences. Unique sun exposure, a rare clone, or a peculiar soil can make the grapes from a site unique. If increasing production destroys those differences, then limited production protects the conditions under which the wine can be distinctive. That is a win for aesthetic value. But scarcity has a dark side because it creates desire. Once a wine becomes difficult to obtain, people begin to want it partly because other people cannot have it. The price…