The 2025 has been released and is supposed to be a strong vintage. So I want to compare it with recent strong vintages — namely 2019 and 2016.

I take current market prices from sources I trust:

• 2016: ~£95 per 750ml

• 2019: ~£53 per 750ml

Consider that the 2016 vintage includes nine years of holding costs, while the 2019 includes six. These are not just storage and insurance, but also the cost of capital over time.

I start by isolating the cash costs.

I take the reception (£10 per 12 bottles), and storage and insurance costs (£31 per year per 12 bottles), and bring them forward to today using the Bank of England rate prevailing when each cost was incurred.

These costs add up to £22 per bottle for the 2016 vintage and £12.5 for the 2019 vintage.

I subtract them from the market prices, leaving £73.12 for 2016 and £41.51 for the 2019.

At this stage, I have removed the physical holding costs, but the prices still reflect the fact that capital has been tied up over time. I therefore discount these adjusted prices using the Bank of England rate path over the relevant period.

The result is £59.3 for the 2016 and £34.30 for the 2019.

In other words, once I strip out holding costs and the effect of time, these are the prices at which those vintages are comparable to the 2025. And both sit below the 2025 release price of £63 per bottle.

For me, Pontet-Canet 2025 is a pass.

Of course, some of you may think it’s unfair — or even ludicrous — to suggest that Pontet-Canet should be released at £34 per bottle. But that is roughly the level at which I would be willing to take the risk on the 2025 vintage, given today’s market conditions and the available alternatives.

This is simply how I think about allocating my capital. Pontet-Canet, in turn, will price its wines in a way that makes financial sense for them.

As one négociant put it to me, there have been too many “great” vintages in recent years. That, perhaps, is the point.

Thank you as always for being here!

Sara

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To those who are devoted to Bordeaux, spring is more than that. It is the opening of the Bordeaux En Primeur season.

Last week, all the common-or-garden variety of the wine trade travelled to the most glamorous wine region bar none to have the first sip of that deep, dark, glamorous juice straight from the new and shiny barrels. That is you. Then you come home galvanised by all the wine, all that beautifully French talk, and all those beautiful people with stained teeth laughing. And then there are the Instagram pictures and the LinkedIn takeaways. You write that this is a nice, fresh vintage—the hallmark of this vintage, arguably. Is this a great vintage? You cautiously wait for the critics to declare it so, and then boast.

At the same time, collectors’ interest in Bordeaux En Primeur is as dead as a bucket of ashes, to paraphrase Hemingway. It is no longer clear why anyone needs to buy early.

And then, there’s me, who spent the last week (and the previous two as well) desperately trying to make sense of the last twenty years’ worth of Bordeaux EP release prices, turning the data upside down and sideways. My laptop exploded, and my sanity went with it.

Just before that happened, here’s what I found out.

I analysed the historical En Primeur release price (ex-merchant) in € for 126 Grands Crus Classés and their closest equivalents in Pomerol and Saint-Émilion (although Pomerol remains patchy in terms of data).

The pressing question I wanted to answer was: have the prices of Bordeaux EP increased over time?

But before I could answer that, I needed to manipulate the data. I took the average, the trimmed average (i.e. excluding the top and bottom 5% outliers), the median and the average of the top 10% of châteaux. The last two produced the most interesting results. Then, I needed to adjust the release prices to make them comparable. Without getting too much into the more tedious details, I made three adjustments:

1. Inflation → I converted the data from nominal to real terms, meaning each vintage has been adjusted for inflation. Simply put, €50 was worth more 20 years ago than it is today.

2. Carry → I adjusted the data to account for interest rates. In other words, the release price only makes sense if I consider the cost of capital over time. I tested both two-year and five-year forward adjustments, and the results did not materially change.

3. Quality → Much of the trade’s focus—and pricing—centres on quality. I therefore normalised release prices using Decanter vintage scores.

The results are shown in the chart below:

• The blue bars show the median release price: the “middle” price—half of the wines are more expensive, half are cheaper. This avoids being skewed by extreme outliers.

• The red bars show the average price of the top 10% of producers, isolating prices at the very top end of the market.

The median shows what is happening across Bordeaux as a whole, while the top 10% reflects how the most sought-after estates behave.

The first observation is straightforward. Neither series follows a clear upward or downward trend. Prices rise, fall, and rise again—but without a consistent long-term direction once those major factors are stripped out.

What this highlights, in particular, is just how dynamic Bordeaux En Primeur pricing really is. Price cuts during vintages such as 2008 and 2019—shaped by the global financial crisis and the pandemic, respectively—were reversed very quickly, with prices rising again the following vintage.

I believe this degree of flexibility is unique to the Bordeaux market.

Zooming in on individual vintages, 2024 was not as cheap as it was often portrayed. For the median producer, it sits closer to the more expensive vintages than the cheapest, while for the top 10%, it ranks as the fourth cheapest.

This gap also reveals that the spread between cheap and expensive wines is much wider at the top end of Bordeaux. In statistical terms, the dispersion of release prices increases as you move up the quality ladder, meaning that top châteaux push prices further than the median producer, both on the upside and the downside.

The cheapest released vintage in the last twenty years is 2008, at roughly 46% below 2024. For top producers, 2014 and 2019 emerge as the next cheapest, at around 15% below 2024, while for the median producer, 2015 and 2006 are among the least expensive.

These findings are interesting because, as a reminder, both vintage quality and economic conditions have been stripped out. This suggests that châteaux may over-discount in weaker vintages or tougher market conditions—or, conversely, overprice in more favourable ones.

Could this help explain why prices have not come down sufficiently in the last two vintages, in most cases, to justify their levels on the secondary market? Perhaps châteaux are testing demand, trying to avoid over-discounting.

If so, there is an important limitation. This analysis focuses on release prices only. It does not account for available stock in the secondary market or the prices at which it trades—both of which are crucial to determining whether a vintage is fairly priced at release.

I believe that while the wine industry is spreading positive news—particularly around prices picking up again and stronger demand in the first trimester of 2026—that is only part of the story. At best, it is one piece of the puzzle.

The broader reality is less reassuring. Luxury and consumer goods may be facing one of their most difficult years in the past two decades—and I say that in comparison with 2008. UK merchants are reporting significant losses, of a scale that begins to suggest systemic risk within the industry (I am working on this separately). At the same time, the traditional drivers of growth for luxury and consumer goods are largely absent: Russia—out. The Middle East—uncertain (as Bernard Arnault warned about the risk of conflict escalating into a “global catastrophe”, while his team in earnings calls remains reassuring). China—weak, with little sign of a meaningful recovery since 2022. The US—highly uncertain. The UK—merchants under pressure.

I was not at En Primeur week, but in conversations with négociants, the tone has been cautiously optimistic—largely driven by those same two factors: prices stabilising and demand improving. One point that did emerge, however, is telling. The issue is not necessarily seen as a commercial crisis, but a debt one. Banks are increasingly asking businesses to reduce leverage as the value of land and wine—used as collateral—has declined. We discussed this in my conversation with Lily Feng at Jera Wine.

While this analysis does not span a long enough time series to definitively identify the “right” price for En Primeur, it does offer a useful benchmark. A 15% discount from 2024 would not seem unreasonable given the current conditions in the market.

That said, I have little doubt that in the coming weeks and months we will hear the case for why price increases are justified.

Data Limitations

Twenty years of data is not that long. This analysis broke my laptop—and nearly me—because it raised more questions than answers. What are the other drivers of release prices? Was there a time when wines were released at the “right” price? If so, what was that price, once adjusted for inflation and other factors?

What do you think?

If you have access to longer-term data and would like me to extend this analysis, get in touch: sara@inthemoodforwine.com.

Thank you as always for being here!

Sara

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More from Bordeaux En Primeur Coverage

And who better to tell its story than Jean-Christophe Mau? Few people can explain how Bordeaux really works from so many angles: château owner, négociant family, operator, insider. Today he is focused on Château Brown in Pessac-Léognan. Before that, he ran Château Preuillac for his family and was part of the Yvon Mau négociant business.

I am genuinely grateful Jean-Christophe Mau agreed to do this. Bordeaux does not like explaining itself, especially to outsiders. I have approached plenty of people over time. The usual answer is: “We don’t speak to journalists.”

But I am not a journalist!—I protest.

Others will talk, but only off the record. Which is precisely why Bordeaux so often remains misunderstood.

More than two decades ago, a young Jean-Christophe told Margaret Rand, in Inheritance: Heirs Apparent, that “too many people in Bordeaux don’t understand what the consumer wants. In the past, there wasn’t the same competition – wine drinkers had no choice but to buy Bordeaux.”

That concern still hangs over Bordeaux. It certainly hung over this conversation. We spoke about release prices, speculation, oversupply, critics, the gap between châteaux and final consumers, and the strain now showing across the en primeur system.

In particular, we covered:

• Why Bordeaux’s problem may be bigger than simply “prices are too high” [00:53], and why release prices have drifted away from the secondary market [01:56]

• How Bordeaux actually sets en primeur release prices [03:02]

• Whether Bordeaux has lost touch with the final consumer [06:18]

• Why volume matters, and why Bordeaux cannot behave like Burgundy [08:43]

• Whether châteaux have tried to take too much of the margin [13:08]

• The strengths and weaknesses of La Place today [19:23]

• The pricing practices that distort the market [28:54]

• What Jean-Christophe Mau expects from the 2025 campaign [38:19]

Happy listening! If you prefer reading instead, here is the transcript.

Thank you as always for being here!

Sara

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My thanks to Mark Bevan and Patrick Headlam at Nexus Wine Collections for their help with the cost-of-carry calculations. Nexus Wine Collections is an independent inventory service that manages, stores and distributes fine wine for private collectors, working with a range of storage facilities including Octavian, London City Bond, Coterie and Hillebrand.

A £3,426 case of Lafite 2024 is not just a £3,426 purchase. By the time you sell it or drink it, the real cost is closer to £6,500.

Patience is one of those virtues people are always keen to recommend, especially when someone else is paying the price for it. Sure, sometimes it does pay off to be patient, but when it comes to Bordeaux en primeur, I would argue that patience has not rewarded anyone much over the past two decades.

The mid-March release of Latour always sets the tone for the campaign to come and a few weeks ago, Latour 2019 was released at 8% less than last year’s release of the 2016. On the face of it, that sounds encouraging but the two prices are not directly comparable.

The 2016 was released with nine years of ageing behind it. The 2019 is being released with only seven. The 2016 is already available on the market at around £500 to £585 per bottle. The newly released 2019, with less ageing and arguably a less established reputation, is coming in at £465 per bottle.

So is that attractive? Was £3,426 for a case of Lafite 2024 en primeur actually an attractive price?

You cannot answer that from the release price alone.

And that brings us back to the £6,500 number.

£6,500 includes all the costs a buyer is likely to incur from the moment they commit to the wine to the moment, perhaps ten years later, they either sell it or drink it. In finance, these are called carrying costs. In wine, these costs are often ignored.

There is storage. There is insurance. There may be delivery, commissions, duty and VAT, depending on what you eventually do with the wine. And above all, there is the cost of tying up capital for years.

That last one matters most.

En primeur is often described as a kind of wine futures market. As I argued last week, it is not. Not really. In a futures contract, you do not usually pay the full amount upfront and then wait 2 years for delivery. With en primeur, you do exactly that.

That makes en primeur less like a futures contract than a form of financing to the château. In effect, the buyer is funding the château in return for the promise of future delivery.

(For anyone who insists that en primeur is not a form of financing, try telling the merchant or château that you will pay on delivery and see how that goes...)

And whenever capital is tied up, there is a cost. Even if you have not borrowed the money in any literal sense, that money still had other possible uses. It could have stayed in cash, gone into an ISA, or been invested elsewhere. Choosing wine means giving up those alternatives.

The real question is whether the discount offered en primeur is large enough to compensate the buyer for the wait, the risk and the lost use of capital. Once you look at it that way, the picture changes.

Back to Lafite 2024.

A case bought en primeur at £3,426 does not remain a £3,426 proposition for long. Once you add receipt fees, annual storage and insurance, and the cost of money over time, the total cost of ownership compounds significantly. By Year 10, the cost is around £5,545 before any exit costs.

If the wine is then sold and the seller pays a 15% commission, the break-even sale price rises to roughly £6,524 per case.

If, instead, the wine is taken out of bond for drinking, the final all-in cost still climbs to around £6,281 once delivery, duty and VAT are included.

This is the mistake people make every en primeur season.

They compare a new release with a back vintage already trading on the market and assume the cheaper number must be the better deal. But unless both prices are adjusted onto the same basis, the comparison is meaningless, as you aren’t comparing apples with apples.

None of this gives you a perfect valuation. Wine is still a market shaped by sentiment, scarcity, brand power and broader economic conditions. Risk is part of the picture, and it cannot be reduced to a neat formula.

But cost of carry does give you something extremely useful: a hurdle rate.

It tells you how much room for upside you need before locking your money away for years. It tells you whether the en primeur discount is genuinely compensating you. And it tells you when a release that looks cheap at first glance may not be cheap at all.

Most people skip this calculation entirely. Which is fine, but if we want to support wines that can age, if we want to sustain a culture of ageing fine wine, we need to start being clear, very clear, about what that actually costs.

To those interested in the calculations, I have published them in a post for paid subscribers only.

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Thanks for reading.

The release price is only the part of the cost equation.

By the time a wine has been properly carried for, say, ten years, the total cost can be close to twice the original purchase price.

That is because the purchase price of a wine is not its full cost of ownership. You also need to factor in the cost of “carrying” the wine until you sell it or drink it 5, 10, 20… years later.

What are these costs?

Wine is a physical asset, which means it has to be stored, insured, and financed. Its physicality is part of its essence and good storage and time can improve wine in a way it simply can’t improve a house or a bond.

And that physicality comes with a cost.

In particular:

• delivery from the en primeur source to bonded storage and receipt

• annual storage cost

• annual insurance cost

• annual opportunity cost

And then, if the wine is eventually taken out of bond for drinking:

• final delivery leg

• duty and VAT

Or, if the wine is sold:

• sales commissions

Some of these are ongoing annual costs. Others are one-off charges. Let’s break them down.

Read more

This may be the shortest piece you will ever read in In the Mood for Wine: a warm-up for en primeur season, without overindulging.

Before the season starts, we need to get one thing straight. En primeur is often described as “wine futures”, including by publications that should know better. But the comparison is not exact.

In financial markets, a futures contract is an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset, such as gold, at a future date for a price fixed in advance. In most cases, no cash changes hands upfront beyond a small margin, and the asset itself is not delivered when the contract is agreed.

With en primeur, by contrast, you pay now and receive the wine later.

That means your money is locked up for 18 months to two years. And whenever capital is locked up, there is a cost, whether or not you borrowed it. After all, that money could have stayed in an ISA, or been invested elsewhere, or been put to some other use.

In practical terms, this makes en primeur a very different kind of contract from a futures contract.

This is key because the structure is closer to a loan to the château than to a futures contract. And if a bank were lending that money to the château, it would want a fixed, guaranteed rate of interest over two years — say, 6% a year.

In other words, en primeur only makes sense if the buyer is compensated in some way for the risk, the wait and the lost use of capital. If not, the buyer is getting a bad deal!

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Personally, I’ve heard this sentiment echoed by merchants.

One told me: “There is no consumer crisis. There is a debt crisis.”

Another said: “High-street banks have basically become too difficult and expensive to deal with. They have zero appetite for risk and no interest in developing meaningful relationships with start-ups and SMEs. This means start-ups rely on friends and family, crowdfunding and seed investors, and larger and later-stage businesses also look to the diverse world of private credit.”

In other words, a new ecosystem is emerging — one that could end up being better tailored to each business’s needs.

Lily Feng is the CEO of Jera Wine, the financing arm of Coterie Holding. Jera specialises in lending against blue-chip wine collections, giving restaurants, merchants and private collectors a way to unlock capital without immediately selling stock.

Jera is far from the only company offering this — and in this video, Lily explains the dynamics of wine-backed lending: how they value wine as collateral, what they will and won’t lend against, how they think about risk in a softer market, and where wine-backed finance might sit in the industry over the next few years.

Happy listening! If you prefer reading instead, here is the transcript.

Thank you as always for being here!

Sara

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Alas, wine isn’t made in an insulated bubble.

Precisely because it’s tied to place (you can’t make Champagne in Minnesota), it’s a heavily traded, export-driven product. And yet it can be both economically marginal and politically useful, a token weapon in trade wars. For example, China’s ban on Australian wine, and more recently President Trump’s threat of 200% tariffs on Champagne. It’s marginal because, in the grand scheme of a nation’s economy, wine isn’t essential to the basic functioning of the state. But it’s also significant: for France, wine and spirits are the country’s third largest export category, which is precisely why wine so often becomes a convenient PR/social media pressure point in disputes.

Which is to say: trade, and consequently, currency moves affect the cost of wine. A lot.

Italy, France and Spain are the world’s three largest wine producers. Together, they account for roughly half of global output — and the picture is even more skewed towards Europe when you look at “fine wine”. (Putting a precise percentage on that is impossible, because there’s no agreed definition of what fine wine actually is.)

When wine is made in Europe, most inputs are priced in euros — labour, electricity, glass, paper and cork — which means wine, and especially fine wine, is largely a EUR-denominated asset. Producers typically quote an ex-cellar price in euros to merchants. Importers then buy in euros and also pay for insurance and shipping, often in euros as well.

Once it reaches the secondary market, fine wine remains, for the most part, a EUR asset — but it tends to also be quoted and traded in GBP. That said, as you can see from the Liv-ex chart below, trading is still largely driven by European players (around 45%) and UK players (around 40%).

That’s why currency moves have a significant impact on the price of wine — and, perhaps even more importantly, on trading activity and volumes.

Brexit & the Sterling

The impact of a weaker GBP (as we experienced around Brexit) is a very practical example of the impact currency has on the price of wine.

If UK buyers suddenly have less purchasing power — about 20% less, in that episode — you would expect trading volumes to fall. A wine that previously cost a UK buyer £100 now costs £120, purely because the local currency has weakened.

And yet, during the same period, the Liv-ex indices were pointing to a rally in fine wine prices.

Why?

First, the Liv-ex indices are widely seen as a bellwether for the fine wine market.

And because Liv-ex is based in London, its indices are quoted in GBP. Over the past 20 years, the main Liv-ex index has risen by roughly 3.6x.

However, the currency you look at matters.

The chart above is effectively saying: if you’re a UK-based (GBP-based) merchant or collector holding mostly European wine assets, the value of those assets has increased roughly 3.6x over the past 20 years in GBP terms.

But how much of that is a true increase in the underlying wine price, and how much is simply a currency effect?

A simple way to think about it is:

GBP return ≈ EUR return + change in EUR/GBP

Investors often underestimate the currency component because it’s “baked into” the total return. It becomes painfully obvious during large dislocations — Brexit being a good example. If you take the same index and convert it into EUR (and USD), the picture can look very different, as the chart below shows.

Over the same 20-year period, that very same index returned roughly 3x in EUR and 2.6x in USD. In other words, a meaningful part of the 3.6x headline return in GBP wasn’t “wine performance” at all — it was GBP weakening.

If we zoom in on that period, the mechanics become clearer:

In 2016, the Liv-ex 1000 index was up 22% in GBP, while the same index was up only 5% in EUR. The gap (around 17 percentage points) was largely driven by the sharp move in sterling.

What does it mean?

That means that, in 2016, if you were a GBP earner holding European wine, you were effectively short sterling and long euros. Your asset would have appeared to appreciate by 22% in GBP terms — roughly 5% from the underlying move in wine prices, and about 17% from the depreciation of the currency you were “short”.

If, on the other hand, you were a EUR or USD earner holding European wine, you would have captured the c.5% move in the wine market, but little (or nothing) from that GBP currency effect.

You may, of course, have had other currency exposures depending on where you bought, stored, and sold — but the broader point stands: understanding your currency exposure is crucial, especially in periods of trade instability.

A disclaimer: of course, the interaction between currencies and wine prices isn’t this clean. As the charts above show, it’s not just two currencies at play. The effects are more complex — especially in wine, which trades globally and moves between multiple currency zones.

Ten years on, we can take the lesson from sterling and apply it to the US dollar — the currency currently experiencing the most instability.

Tariffs & the US Dollar

President Trump wants a weak dollar. President Trump wants a strong dollar. President Trump wants tariffs. President Trump wants low interest rates.

A weaker US dollar can help exports, but a stronger dollar helps preserve its status as the world’s reserve currency. Tariffs can, in theory, support the dollar by reducing demand for imports. Lower rates can do the opposite by making dollar assets less attractive.

What matters, though, is what markets are doing. Since Trump first announced the tariffs, the US dollar has weakened by roughly 10%.

In Trump’s America, two developments have already had clear implications for wine: tariffs and a weaker US dollar.

These two phenomena are linked. Standard economic theory suggests that an import tariff should put upward pressure on the tariff-imposing country’s currency (US dollar): tariffs tend to appreciate the home currency, offsetting part of the tariff’s effect on import prices. In other words, if a 15% import tariff is applied to imported wine, a stronger dollar should make that tariff less painful in dollar terms.

But that is not what happened.

Since the tariff announcement, the dollar has weakened by around 10% against a basket of major currencies. One interpretation is that foreign investors reduced exposure to US dollar-denominated assets, selling dollars and rebalancing towards other major currencies.

This means the tariffs (and, arguably, the instability and uncertainty around them) have delivered a double whammy: they have pushed up the sticker price of imported goods by 15%, while the weaker dollar has made those same goods roughly 10% more expensive again for US buyers. Taken together, the effect is not strictly additive, but the direction is clear: US buyers are facing a materially higher all-in cost for imported wine.

Enter VOS Selections:

Victor Owen Schwartz, a small New York City wine importer, and his supporters took on President Trump over tariffs, first at the Court of International Trade, and then at the Supreme Court. Their argument was that Trump’s broad “emergency” tariffs under IEEPA did not extend to taxing imports. The law was designed to enable financial and other sanctions against states such as Iran and North Korea; it never mentions tariffs.

VOS won unanimously at the Court of International Trade, a federal court that hears civil cases linked to customs and trade laws. It then won again on appeal. On Friday 20 February, it sealed its victory with a decisive Supreme Court judgment.

When asked why he decided to take on the President of the United States over tariffs, what came through was a painful reminder of how vulnerable the wine sector is to geopolitical decisions — and what ultimately pushed Victor Owen Schwartz to take a decision that could have cost him everything. As he put it: “what kept me up at night was my business. Running a business kept me up at night more than this case.”

What VOS Selections did is to rein in unchecked discretionary authority — specifically, limiting a president’s ability to impose tariffs on a whim simply by declaring a national emergency.

Who doesn’t love a David-and-Goliath story? This victory, however significant, brings fresh uncertainty back into global trade — and uncertainty is what tends to freeze activity.

That’s why I don’t think it’s a victory for the wine industry just yet. As of today, Monday 2nd March, Trump is imposing new tariffs of 15%.

A 15% tariff, coupled with a roughly 10% devaluation of the US dollar against the euro and sterling, plus the renewed uncertainty, suggests we could see demand for fine wine weaken again.

That may well act as a headwind to the “green shoots” many industry outlets have been reporting.

Final Thought

That is why, precisely because wine is so exposed to trade policy and geopolitical risk, I would caution against arguments that present it as a scarce store of value or a hedge against political shocks, based solely on the historical performance of Liv-ex indices.

Because of their structure, an euro asset quoted in sterling can look as though it is rallying during periods of particular sterling weakness against the euro. Taken at face value, that can be mistaken for “wine going up”, when in reality much of the move is simply currency translation.

Anyone who imports or exports wine knows this instinctively. In periods of political instability and currency stress, wine does not behave like a safe haven. It is a highly illiquid, risky asset traded in a largely unregulated environment, with wide bid-offer spreads — the exact opposite of what most investors want to be holding when markets turn frantic.

You should also read this article from one year ago:

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A small New York wine importer, VOS Selections, brought the case that helped put new limits on presidential power on tariffs. Despite what Trump administration officials may claim, the ruling is likely to deter any serious attempt to revive “emergency” tariffs in the same way. Tariffs sit with Congress. Congress can lend that authority to the President in specific circumstances — but only through clear statutes and with limits.

Victor Owen Schwartz, founder of VOS Selections, joins me to explain why he felt compelled to act — and why he sees wine as the “canary in the coal mine”, a bellwether for international trade.

It was inspiring to hear how he found himself in the eye of the storm.

I think you’ll find a bit of hope — and a lot of resilience — in his story too.

Happy listening!

Here’s the transcript of the conversation.

Thank you as always for being here!

Sara

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This article was originally published on Octavian’s website, following a conversation with its Managing Director, Vincent O’Brien (🔗How can you pay for wine and it still not be yours?) about the importance of ownership for wine held in bond. Using the Oeno scandal as a backdrop, it explores a timely issue for anyone who collects wine and holds stock in bond.

Octavian Wine Services is a leading bonded fine-wine storage facility and home to some of the world’s rarest fine-wine collections, storing around £2 billion of wine across roughly 1 million cases.

The Oeno Group scandal that unfolded a week before Christmas struck at one of the most crucial, least regarded issues in wine:

Ownership.

For all the technology and sophistication of modern financial markets, commodities remain one of the last corners of the economy where the physical reality of the asset matters most — and wine is no exception.

On December 19th, the London-based wine investment, at the request of the City of London Corporation Trading Standards Service firm, published a notice stating that “Oeno has recently ceased trading.”

While there is more than a hint of foul play, what has perhaps left most Oeno Group customers perplexed is that despite promising customers “complete peace of mind” by issuing invoices and certificates of authenticity and ownership, the City of London Trading Standards Service found that “only 20% of client wine is held in individual customer accounts that the customer will be able to access.”

Base metals, commodities traded in volumes of more than half a million tonnes a day, still rely on warehouse receipts to prove existence and ownership, and those same documents underpin trade finance, with the commodity pledged as collateral. When receipts are forged, banks and traders can end up lending against, or buying, inventory that doesn’t exist.

Commodity fraud can happen in many ways, but the most common is physical-commodity scams, substituting valuable goods for worthless. Painted rocks passed off as copper or nickel, a scheme that reportedly left commodity trader Trafigura facing around $600m in losses, or, months earlier, the London Metal Exchange discovering bags of stones instead of nickel in one of its warehouses. Wine went down a similar path in the early 2000s when fraudster Rudy Kurniawan orchestrated one of the largest wine scams in history, selling millions of dollars’ worth of fake rare wines, fooling both collectors and major auction houses. In a mocking twist, Oeno Group itself set up an anti-fraud unit in November 2020, promising clients “complete peace of mind.”

Another classic mechanism is paperwork fraud: multiple, fake receipts issued against the same (or non-existent) inventory and sold to different parties. In the Oeno case, I spoke to Mark Sutherland, CEO of Stone Ledge Spirits, who told me that clients were sold as many as 300 non-existent barrels of their whisky.

What these schemes have in common is the failure of the customer to secure and verify physical ownership.

Does the asset exist? Where is it stored, and in what condition? Who holds it? In whose name is it recorded? Can it be identified as unique?

I’m drawing parallels with banks and trading firms because this is not a niche problem confined to “wine investment”. It can happen to anyone who loses sight of the stock itself. In commodities, everything revolves around assurance of physical ownership, whether the trade is worth £5,000 or £5 million.

Oeno did not appear to be running “investment” in any meaningful sense, but a normal merchant business, buying (and sometimes selling) like many others. Which is precisely why this is not just a problem confined to wine investment firms. If you have ever bought wine through a merchant and left it in their custody, the same question applies, even without fraud. Is the wine actually there — and is it held in your name, in a way you can access and control? If the merchant becomes insolvent and the wine is not in a segregated account, your stock can be treated as part of the estate and swept into the liquidation process, potentially ranking behind secured creditors.

So the first advice to potential wine investors is make sure the wine is held in an account in your name. Vincent O’Brien, Managing Director of Octavian Wine Services, in the recent interview put it simply: “would you let your employer open a bank account on your behalf to deposit your salary? The same logic applies here.”

Investors should insist on clear stock records; photographs showing a unique identifier (such as a rotation number) linked to your name and account; and a portal that lets you verify your portfolio.

Since the start of the scandal, I’ve spoken to people who say they have lost £10,000 to £20,000, and others who claim losses in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. The total exposure remains unclear, but it is not unreasonable to suspect that tens of millions of pounds of client money may be at risk.

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It replied: “If you pay to buy it and it’s still not yours, it’s a gift.”

Not quite.

What I was referring to was a scandal in the wine world that unfolded a week before Christmas, the Oeno Group scandal, that is agitating the wine world and has struck at the roots of one of the most crucial, least regarded issues: ownership.

On 19 December 2025, London-based wine investment firm Oeno Group published a notice at the request of the City of London Corporation’s Trading Standards Service warning that “Oeno has recently ceased trading.”

While there is suspicion of foul play, what has left many customers most perplexed is this: despite receiving invoices and certificates of authenticity and ownership, the City of London Trading Standards Service wrote on Oeno’s website that “only 20% of client wine is held in individual customer accounts that the customer will be able to access.”

So, how can you pay for wine and it still not be yours?

To answer that, I sat down with Vincent O’Brien, Managing Director of Octavian Wine Services, one of the world’s leading fine-wine storage providers.

We discussed what “ownership” actually means in practice; how to verify your wine is held in your name; why unique case identifiers and customer portals matter; what documentation you need if a merchant or investment firm collapses; and how weak record-keeping can blur provenance and destroy value.

But I am still left with one question: why does the market have so much faith that the wine is actually there?

Is it blind trust, naivety, or ignorance of how custody works? A belief that an invoice equals ownership? Or simply that checking feels like too much effort until something goes wrong? Before visiting Octavian last November, I was the same.

Happy listening!

Here’s the transcript of the conversation.

Thank you as always for being here!

Sara

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The great thing about phones is that even calling them smartphones is reductive — I am completely submissive to it. I realised that when my phone’s battery blew up in December after being absolutely fine the day before. Beyond the obvious — people couldn’t call me — what I realised is that I didn’t have music for the commute. More, I didn’t even know what time it was! I couldn’t even read, as my Kindle app and news apps are on my phone. When I got to the office, I couldn’t write down my notes, and I couldn’t buy myself coffee because I only use Apple Pay. So far, my phone is a phone, a watch (and an alarm), a book and magazines, a notepad and a pen, a music player and a bank card. I could go on and on and on about all the things that are inherently attached to my phone — and there are many.

That’s why, when one reaches for it (144 times a day), it feels justified.

Oh, I almost forgot: it’s a camera and social media too.

It’s true that I used to have to carry all those things with me when I went out. Now, I just carry my phone. (Somehow, my bag is still very heavy — why?) But while that may relieve some people of the weight they used to carry on their back or shoulder, it doesn’t relieve them of stress. Watch people at the airport: with low battery, we end up tethered to charging points just so we can pull up our boarding passes.

When everything we do is connected to our phone, what happens when our phone doesn’t work? I can tell you what happens. We become a completely useless member of this society. The only thing one can do is walk oneself to the nearest shop and buy a new phone.

Another event in 2025 made me reflect on my phone use: “El Gran Apagón”, the Iberian blackout in April 2025. I couldn’t use my phone — not even as a phone — because the signal wasn’t working, not to mention that it ran out of battery sometime in the early afternoon. Not only that, but I couldn’t buy anything from the shop because my card was on my phone; and even if I’d had a physical card, supermarket card machines started running out of battery by early afternoon too. I panicked. I had no cash, and my online delivery was due the following day (if it was delivered — we didn’t know at that point), so I had little grocery left and no way to buy anything. Of course, Boomers shone, with a few emergency thousands euros stashed at home, under the mattress or wherever.

Aside from this, I spent a blissful sunny afternoon reading half a book and napping — something I haven’t done since I can’t remember when.

Reading is the other collateral damage of my addiction to my phone. I have to confront the harsh truth that I read only 13 books for pleasure in 2025 — a number so low by my standards that I can’t believe it. But it’s true. Someone told me, around 10 years ago, when the Kindle became the thing to have, that our children will look at our houses stuffed full of books and find it absurd, because all books will exist only in digital, Kindle-like formats.

That thought, though logical, is a typically purely utilitarian argument.

The benefit — the only benefit — of books is that we transfer what’s written in them into our heads. That’s it. There is no accounting for any other value. The value of having people come to your house and browse, the value of the book’s journey, where it was bought and when, and with whom, the notes on the margins, … all of that amounts to zero when compared with the benefits of space and not having to dust them.

, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, gives another example of this way of thinking: the doorman example. A hotel replaces a human doorman with automatic doors. They are cheaper and consistent. Utilitarian win. But what you lose is the point. A doorman isn’t just a mechanism for opening a door. They provide reassurance, status, social proof, and a sense of safety, they notice things and make the place feel looked after, and clients seen. Those benefits are hard to quantify, so they get treated as “zero” in the spreadsheet, even though they’re the reason people may like the hotel in the first place.

One book I failed to read is called “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation”, which supposedly argues that bubbles aren’t all that bad because large funding, poor accountability and a unified vision are, in fact, the engine that allows breakthrough technologies to thrive. A topical book, arriving at a moment when a nervous investment community kept asking itself: “Is the AI bubble bursting yet?” “And now?” “Now?!” Everyone looked at OpenAI pulling in a total of $58bn, and then looked at the Fed and other central bankers. Powell famously said no; the BoE said yes. The Bank of England claimed that yes, there are signs of a bubble, while Powell suggested that we’re talking about profitable companies — which is different from the late 1990s landscape.

All that seems to attract investors’ attention is technology, AI or other buzzwords — a digital world that is outpacing the real one.

As a case in point, the S&P 500 is a US-based index comprised of the 500 (the number flactuates) largest American businesses. The top 10 — all tech companies except Berkshire Hathaway (though it owns 238 million shares of Apple) — represent 40% of the total index. The top 10 names returned 26% in 2025, while the remaining returned 12.5% — a staggering gap of 13% in one year.

If all the money in the world is set to go to giant tech firms, who then invest billions in keeping people addicted to their phones, and in turning basic communication tools into intelligent companions that learn from user behaviour and perform complex tasks autonomously, making them more interesting every day — what’s the point of anything else? And where will it end?

Of course, I wrote this piece to talk about wine, not AI.

We’ll get to wine. But first, I want you to understand that the phone is at the centre of this point — and that everything is useless except for it. If you wanted to live a minimalist life, all you need is a phone.

Everything leads to the phone.

The digital life we live in makes our analogue lives redundant.

“We all know that what we do is totally pointless,” says Swiss watchmaker Max Büsser, founder of MB&F. “A mechanical watch is totally pointless today.” He’s referring to the simple fact that mechanical watches became technologically obsolete once more accurate quartz watches, powered by a battery and a vibrating crystal, arrived.

That shift triggered the so-called Quartz Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, when cheaper quartz watches flooded the market and the traditional Swiss industry went into steep decline. By 1984, the market for mechanical watches had shrunk to roughly a third of its size a decade earlier. However, over the four decades that followed, Swiss makers pulled off a remarkable repositioning and mechanical watches moved from functional, daily tools to luxury objects, closer to art than utility.

Büsser argues that the point of a mechanical watch is “emotional art and artisanship.” And that change in framing is precisely what has allowed the category to expand again — with forecasts projecting growth from $45.52 billion in 2025 to $101.16 billion by 2032.

If all the investment in the world goes to AI, tech… our analogue life will slowly become redundant. The digital is seamless and frictionless; our analogue life is clunky and, ultimately… useless.

, one of the most interesting Gen Z economists, explained this point so well on the occasion of the protests against ICE’s actions in June 2025:

We are increasingly caught between a future promised and the present we’re living through. We have apps that can summon autonomous vehicles in minutes while we have ICE raids escalating across the country. AI evangelists talk about dancing in fields of daisies now that robots will do all the work while National Guard troops sleep on concrete floors without water (and their service members boo state governors).

If you wanted a perfect image of this contradictions (we are a visual first society after all), I think the burning Waymos in LA are pretty searing. People used the frictionless Waymo app and the seamless user experience that the company spent billions perfecting to summon an autonomous vehicle to their exact location, and burnt it.

In this world, the reality people live in is, ultimately, the hallucination.

It’s a hallucination to think that Ozempic will give you the perfect body without creating other problems. It’s a hallucination to think that the US and its allies export democracy purely for the good of the people, or that watching people workout on YouTube will make you fit and healthy. It’s a hallucination to think that pouring all the money — and all the faith — in the world into AI and technology, whatever that means, will fix our labour market and, with it, poverty and everything else promised in Sam Altman’s “The Gentle Singularity” essay. It’s a hallucination to think that carbs and wine are the enemy, and it’s a hallucination to think that the perfect eight-hour-sleep is within reach. It isn’t. It’s a hallucination to think that trains or planes can run without infrastructure investment. They can’t. It’s a hallucination to think that movie stars are interesting. It’s a hallucination to think we can live a happy, lonely life as a unit of one — perfectly optimised beings. It’s a hallucination to think that what social media feeds us is anything but opium for the masses. It is opium. We are the masses.

There will come a point when this perfect digital life we are living — eating perfectly placed Michelin-starred food on perfectly white tablecloths, served by perfectly smiling waiters; our perfect smile, perfect Ozempic body, the perfect picture we can take with perfect cameras and instantly publish on our perfect social media feed — will crack. This mirror of perfection, this black mirror, will break into thousands of pieces, and we will need to stop the hallucination.

I’d hate for you to take away from this piece that I am anti-AI or anti-technology. Merely, I am of the opinion that, to put in the words of Henry David Thoreau in Walden we should stop becoming the tools of our tools. In such a world, the need of humanity comes first, the solution or tool second, and not the other way around.

So what is the need of humanity? Wine? Watches?

It would be absurd to suggest that humanity needs wine. Of course it doesn’t, does it?

“The wine does most of my writing,” Charles Bukowski once said, a line that sits in stark contrast to today’s “ChatGPT does most of my writing!” Am I arguing that all investment should simply flow into the pockets of wine producers instead? Of course not — though I know which kind of writing I’d rather read.

Humanity doesn’t need wine, but in my view, it stands for everything that is real, and everything that refuses to be justified by a purely utilitarian argument. It is poisonous, fattening, addictive, and shortens our days; we know what it means to battle with it, and sometimes lose. And yet, it is life-enhancing, it brings us closer to the earth, brings people together, and sits at the centre of great conversations. Wine is at once wonderful and problematic, two polar opposites, and it obeys the first rule of toxicology, as Paracelsus wrote in 1538:

“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”

In the real life we actually live, there is room for these contradictions. Our digital life, by contrast, is increasingly intolerant of them, and the range of human expression is narrowing as a result, much as the adoption of political parties have narrowed our ability to think critically about social, economic and political issues.

We’ve reached a moment where, I think, the pendulum has swung too far towards investing in a world that isn’t our reality. Or, as Scanlon notes it in her essay:

There is something relatively poignant about using the infrastructure of the promised future to reject that future and to also the refusal to keep pretending that this future arriving through our screens has anything to do with the reality people are living in.

Even Bret Taylor, co-founder of the AI start-up Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, said that AI “probably” is a bubble, drawing both “smart money” and “dumb money” into funding competitors at every layer of the tech stack. Maybe I’m early with this call, but this black mirror may be already breaking.

Australia’s social media ban for under-16s is one timid sign of institutional and government action. Many people, like me, have started their own individual battle. While Luddites were a movement in 19th-century England of those who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery, modern day Luddite teens instead profess a lifestyle of self-liberation from social media and technology.

It would certainly be unwise to sell your shares in companies that profit from addictive substances, whether tobacco or social media, especially given that, as of today, 20th January, I’ve already failed at quitting my phone.

But you know what they say: if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again…

As recently as six months ago, Yahoo! Finance marked the 10-year anniversary of a company called Oeno Group, describing it as “the London-based fine wine and whisky investment firm [which] specialises in sourcing, managing, and curating exceptional bottles for private and institutional clients.” The article (which seem to be a PR piece? A paid article?) highlighted Oeno’s services including acquisition, valuation, portfolio management, and secure storage, delivered by a team of seasoned experts.

Around the same time, Globe Newswire reported Oeno’s intention to launch a €20m fund in Portugal.

These announcements coincided with a period of corporate change. According to public records, ownership of the group transitioned from Doerr Group Limited (owned by Michael Doerr) to American investor Marshall Willis Deutsch. No conclusions can be drawn from timing alone, but it is notable that public expansion plans and a change in ownership were unfolding in parallel.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, a thread that began two years ago — and has remained active — documents repeated attempts by customers to withdraw funds, and the difficulties encountered in doing so. (Note that there are many other threads, like this one, …)

Today, what we know is this:

Oeno Group — operating through entities including Oenofuture Ltd, Oeno House Ltd, and Oeno Trade Ltd — has published a notice, at the request of the City of London Corporation Trading Standards Service, warning that:

“Oeno consumers who have invested funds through the purchase of wine from Oeno over the past decade are advised that there is a risk that some or all of their investment may be lost.”

According to the notice, Trading Standards believes that only around 20% of the wine is held in individual customer accounts. The remaining wine is understood to be held in an account controlled by Oeno Future Limited.

What does this mean?

It means that only a minority of assets appear to be held in customers’ own names. The majority are held in company-controlled accounts. In practical terms, this suggests that assets were not fully segregated from the company.

This matters because Trading Standards state that the “most important next step” is administration. Once a company enters administration, control passes to an independent insolvency practitioner. At that point, outcomes are determined by legal ownership.

Where assets are not clearly held on trust for clients, and where ownership cannot be readily traced, investors risk being treated as unsecured creditors. In such cases, recovery is often partial, delayed, or — likely — nil.

This issue is not unique to wine. If client assets are not segregated from a firm’s own accounts, it makes little difference whether client funds were used appropriately or to support business operations. In an insolvency, the lack of segregation is what matters.

There are also indications that employees may have been affected. Reviews on Glassdoor suggest that some staff may have lost out, though details remain limited at this stage.

(Note that all the reviews are prior to the company’s change of ownership.)

This Oeno scandal underlines a practical point for anyone investing in wine—you should ask the firm to provide clear assurance that the wine is held in your name (or on trust for you), and that it is properly segregated. Segregation and traceable ownership records are what determine whether assets are likely to be directly accessible to you if a firm fails.

This story is ongoing. As more verified details emerge, I will update this piece.

If you would like to share your experience with Oeno, please hit reply if you received this email, or write to me at sara@inthemoodforwine.com

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At , they are building a “Digital Cork”— a blockchain-based title and tracking system for fine wine that follows each bottle from winery to end drinker. Each bottle is given a provenance tier (blue for ex-château, green for vetted trade partners, white for private cellars) and linked to a unique identifier such as an NFC chip or QR code. Custody changes and any storage or condition data are added when users in the chain actively update the record, and when a bottle is opened, the owner manually marks it as such in the app, which cancels the Digital Cork.

Since recording this episode, I’ve been mulling over whether blockchain is really the right “Solution” to the problem David describes. In other words: is a digital deed of ownership what’s been missing from the world of wine?

Hear the case David makes and let me know what you think in the comments or via the survey. I’ve shared my own view in the comments as well.

Happy listening! If you prefer reading instead, here is the transcript.

Thank you as always for being here!

Sara

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Wine is arguably just fermented grape juice — until you put lots of wealthy collectors in the same room and give them a game to play. The game is who-gets-to-take-home-the-bottle-of-wine-for-the-highest-price?

And the name of that game is auction.

In this episode, I wanted to challenge how we think about wine by looking at it through the very specific lens of the auction house. I speak with Nick Pegna, Global Head of Wine & Spirits at Sotheby’s, who brings a more nuanced view to that caricature. He talks about what happens when wine sits alongside watches, jewellery and art — and how that changes the way we value it.

What fascinated me in this conversation is that auction houses such as Sotheby’s, says Nick, are seeing positive growth at a challenging time for the world of wine.

Why is that?

Nick argues that the auction world is still driven first and foremost by people who want to drink the bottles they buy. Rarity, provenance and maturity all matter enormously, but the endgame is still pleasure.

At the same time, those same factors – rarity, provenance, maturity – are exactly what make wine behave like an asset: they drive pricing, trust and liquidity in the secondary market.

One key difference between wine merchants and auction houses is the source of their offerings. Auction houses like Sotheby’s rely on private collections rather than producers, which positions them uniquely in the market — not tied to new releases or even to the conventional secondary market, but to what surfaces at auction.

If nothing else, this shows that there are pockets of the market that still excite wine lovers — even if what, exactly, that is can be hard to pin down.

Over the course of the discussion, we move from “wine as something you trade” to “wine as something you drink” and back again. We talk about how auction estimates are set, how provenance and storage history now command a very real premium, why some regions fall in and out of fashion, and why trust and transparency are at the core of any credible view of wine as an asset class. The result, I hope, is a nuanced perspective: wine as an asset only really works if we remember that it is a drink first.

Happy listening. If you prefer reading instead, here is the transcript.

Thank you for being here.

Sara

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Their core business is selling fine-wine-as-investment to people (Gen Z mostly) who want “exposure to the asset class of wine”.

This is the first of three episodes that explore the concept of wine as an asset class, something I strongly believe in (you can read: Wine Is An Asset, Whether You Like It Or Not)—but this may be the most controversial episode, because it treats wine least as a beverage and most as a financial instrument.

But what if this is what it takes to turn the head of Gen Z when it comes to wine? That — and radical transparency. That’s what WineFi is betting on with its “build in public” motto and its data-backed tools for investing in wine — still a rarity in this industry.

In this interview, Aaran and I discuss all things data: from what counts as an investment-grade wine, to fair-value models, backtesting and market inefficiencies — and what all of this means for the legitimacy of wine as an asset class.

Happy listening! (If you prefer reading you can access the transcript here📝)

And let me know in the comments what you think of WineFi’s approach!!!

Thank you for being here.

Sara

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That uncertainty can be about the what, when, or how much of US tariffs — in other words, about their details.

But that came and went quickly.

In just six months, we’ve shifted from a world built on free trade to one where protectionism is rampant. Whether tariffs may or may not be the right answer to reshoring lost jobs, or simply the latest political tool in President Trump’s agenda, this economic experiment will shape the future in profound ways.

As Mario Draghi, former President of the ECB, put it:

“When you start acting unilaterally in trade negotiations, with tariffs and subsudies, it’s very difficult to hamper someone that wants to do the same in two, three years’ time… Everything becomes more arbitrary…”

Beyond geopolitics, trade wars have concrete economic consequences: lower margins across supply chains (including for US businesses), higher consumer prices, and weaker demand. Of course, that’s the point—to reduce demand for foreign goods and boost local production.

But when it comes to wine, will American producers really benefit? A protected border often means less access to affordable labour—the largest cost input for many Californian and other US wineries.

Meanwhile, the dollar has weakened by around 8% year-to-date, according to the DXY. Against the pound and the euro, that translates into roughly an additional 10% increase in the price of a French wine sold via London. Tariffs are complex, but one effect is clear: uncertainty cools demand for dollar assets and, by extension, weakens the currency’s purchasing power.

And there’s one thing President Trump might not know—or care about—but it’s arguably the worst possible time to introduce tariffs. The wine industry is already struggling.

So the question is: can you really raise wine prices when demand is already weak?

To help us answer that, I spoke with David Smydo, CEO of Sokolin, one of the oldest wine merchants in the United States, who offered a characteristically optimistic take on what lies ahead.

Happy listening!

If you prefer reading, you can do so here.

Join the conversation in the comments!

Sara

P.S. I took a short break — thank you to all of you, especially the paid subscribers, for your patience. I’ve extended your membership by three months in appreciation.

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Why does it matter? I’ve written about Bolgheri before — One for the Cellar, A Tuscan Estate to Watch — but this time I wanted to take the long view on a Tuscan appellation built on international grape varieties, at a moment when the wine world seems more interested than ever in autochthonous grapes.

I can’t predict the future — no one can — but this is my take on Bolgheri. (Don’t worry, a numbers piece is coming next.)

Read this piece on timatkin.com

I started writing this as a piece about Bolgheri, and ended up writing about myself, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. As in, we talk about wine, but really, we just talk about ourselves, our taste, our palate and our stories.

And this piece, the piece about Bolgheri, wasn’t even supposed to be about Bolgheri, but that doesn’t matter now. This piece is about Bolgheri and its place in the world of wine.

Its place in Italy is in Tuscany, in the northern Maremma, a land that stretches, in the words of Dante Alighieri, from Cecina to Tarquinia, now a beautiful bucolic seaside forest which was once home to Etruscan and Roman settlements, key to coin and arms metalwork, and later an abandoned malaria-riddled swamp until very recently.

Its place in the world of wine is more recent still, long after Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany started its reclamation in the early 1800s, later completed by Mussolini. I skip over thousands of years of history, which I am sure would be interesting to some, to get to when the Maremma was ultimately ready to be cropped. Grain was the chosen crop in the self-sufficiency attempt of every dictator, until the Marquis Mario Incisa della Rocchetta decided to plant Cabernet Sauvignon in 1944 on his wife’s Tenuta San Guido estate. While wine had been produced for the family since then, the 1968 vintage was the first to be released to the public under the name Sassicaia as a vino da tavola, and by the mid-1970s it was already a cult wine.

Whether the Marquis really saw the potential in the Bolgheri terroir to craft a great wine that could age, or merely wanted to make wines that he liked, not those light and pale Sangioveses (an objective I could perfectly understand), it doesn’t really matter, as one’s experiment led to a flurry of other foreigners (the Marquis himself was from Piemonte) joining in the quest. Piermario Meletti Cavallari, a former restaurateur from Bergamo, founded Grattamacco. Michele Satta arrived in Bolgheri around 1982 from Varese. Ludovico Antinori of Florence founded Tenuta dell’Ornellaia (and then Masseto) and his elder brother Piero Antinori, Tenuta Guado al Tasso. The only exception was Le Macchiole, founded by Eugenio Campolmi, a rare Bolgheri native, and his wife Cinzia Merli. Later, big names of the Italian wine world also flocked to Bolgheri — Piemonte’s Gaja (with Ca’ Marcanda) and Veneto’s Allegrini (Poggio al Tesoro).

Read more

So, how should we behave when everything’s on sale?

To explore this, I spoke with Greg Davies, an applied behavioural scientist who set up the first behavioural finance team in banking at Barclays. He now leads behavioural finance at Oxford Risk, where he helps investors make better decisions. Greg has also been a Visiting Professor of Behavioural Finance at both the University of Oxford and Imperial College — which is where we met, when I chose his course as one of my electives. He’s since distilled that material into an online course, The Art of Behavioural Investing, for 42courses. Alongside Master of Wine John Downes, Greg also co-hosts Pour Better Decisions — live events that blend wine tasting with behavioural science to explore how we make choices under uncertainty.

We talk about what really happens when markets fall, why wine is such an emotionally charged asset, and how investors can start to separate emotional satisfaction from financial return. We also look at the idea of optionality in wine, the mismatch between emotional and financial time horizons, and how that can lead to poor decision-making. This is just a conversation about bubbles and booms and it’s a clear-eyed look at what it means to treat wine as an asset, and what sets it apart from other passion investments.

The transcript is available in this Google Doc.

If you enjoyed it, tap the heart and let me know who I should speak to next — either in the comments or by replying to this email.

Thank you,

– Sara

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In this episode, I speak with Dr Gertjan Verdickt, finance professor at the University of Auckland and co-author of The Passion Portfolio, about what really drives returns in the wine market.

We cover:

• Why fine wine behaves more like a corporate bond than a luxury good

• How most investors misread volatility, risk, and pricing

• What’s behind the current downturn in wine markets—and why it may be an opportunity

• And how cognitive bias, liquidity constraints, and misplaced trust shape investor decisions

This conversation is for anyone who wants to understand the fine wine market more clearly—whether you're investing, collecting, or simply trying to cut through the noise of this downturn. I’ve written about some of these topics before (links below), but it was refreshing to go deeper in this new format.

If you enjoyed it, hit the heart button and let me know who I should speak to next—either in the comments or just reply to this email.

Thank you,

– Sara

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