Fine wine offers pockets of opportunity for cautious investors – how to buy

Many luxury products can be considered a Veblen good – one for which, counterintuitively, demand intensifies even as prices rise. But wine enjoys another attribute that is harder to replicate among, say, watches or cars – its inherent scarcity increases over time, simply because people drink it.

According to wine investment firm WineCap’s recently published Wealth Report, 96% of UK wealth managers expect demand for fine wine to increase in 2025 – more than for fine art (94%), watches (90%), luxury handbags (86%) or coins (78%). Collectors, it adds, are attracted to fine wine by its proven long-term price appreciation and intrinsic scarcity. And should those cases of first-growth Bordeaux fail to gain in value as expected, you can at least open them and drink them. So, where to begin?

Fine wine is a complex and increasingly diverse marketplace, with investment-grade products coming from a number of regional sources – the traditional French strongholds of Bordeaux and Burgundy, but also Champagne and the Rhône Valley, and Tuscany and Piedmont in Italy, along with many more regions from California to Australia. The sector has also been progressively democratised over the past 25 years, thanks to the emergence of the likes of Liv-ex and Wine-searcher.com, which offer their users constantly updated pricing information, critic scores and market intelligence of ever greater granularity.

Nonetheless, expert help is a must, particularly for those who are new to the sector, or who lack the time to research it in detail. “The most important thing is to find a well-reputed wine merchant, ideally who can source both new releases and older vintages in order to put together a balanced cellar, rather than have to wait years to drink the wine – or, if financial gain is a motivation, to provide some diversification across vintages/profile,” says Matthew O’Connell, head of investment at fine wine and spirits merchant Bordeaux Index, and CEO of the company’s recently expanded LiveTrade trading platform.