The fine wine market is still only at the start of the recovery, according to its newly released January report, but Liv-ex’s co-founder and CEO James Miles remains optimistic about the outlook for 2026 and beyond.
Speaking to The Drinks Business last week, Miles said that even though the market was still finding the bottom, particularly with younger wines as it works through an oversupply, there were lots of positive signs that demand and supply were coming back into balance.
The fact that prices are down 30% and more in some instances, and that global interest rates have come down a lot in the last two years – those two things are very supportive of a better market,” he said.
Greater tariff transparency
He pointed to the Chinese market starting to grow again “for the first time in a long time”, even though this was from a much lower level than in 2012. And the US, having seen a dip in Q2 last year was also returning, how that the tariff situation, while not ideal, was showing “a little bit more transparency”.
As the Liv-ex January summary showed, tariffs “have not been disastrous for the secondary market as a whole”, even though it prompted US buyers, who had been 2024’s most significant buying segment, to take “a backseat in 2025”. And European buyers stepped into this breech, with the total purchase from European buyers rising 48.2% by value year-on-year. And this trend doesn’t show signs of stopping in 2026, the report noted, with European buyers expected to continue to do so in 2026, even as US buyers are already coming back into the fold.
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