I won’t get too sentimental.

At the time, I had four subscribers—one of whom was me—and that first article attracted a grand total of eight new readers. So it’s probably safe to assume you haven’t read it.

It wasn’t my finest piece of writing, but I do think it offered a perspective that differed from the consensus.

The article asked a deceptively simple question: can wines from “poor” Bordeaux vintages still make good investments?

The very simple answer that I gave to that complicated question was that the release price should be much lower to reflect the shorter ageing window — that’s to say: if you wine can only age 15 rather than 30 years then price should really reflect that. Of course, adjusting the release price accordingly is no small feat and more recently came to the realisation that release price should probably best calibrated against the ajusted market price of similar vintages (as I explain here).

In that piece, I concluded that the 2021 En Primeur campaign would be a difficult sell. Broadly speaking, that proved to be the case. As Decanter reported, "sales decreased significantly compared with the previous year, with volume and value sales down by as much as 60% in a few cases." However, there were also notable bright spots, including the First Growths, as well as Lafleur, Calon Ségur, Les Carmes Haut-Brion and Cheval Blanc.

I wrote:

It was reported in Decanter that analyst group Wine Lister believes the Cheval Blanc 2021, with a recommended onward selling price of £395 per bottle (in bond), to be ‘an obvious buy’, noting that the release price was around 28% lower than current prices for the top vintages of 2019, 2018, 2016 and 2015. Is that a great bargain?

I don’t think so.

In fairness, I got part of the story wrong. Cheval Blanc 2021 was an obvious buy—for merchants. It sold extremely well despite my scepticism. But whether it was a good investment for the people who bought it is a different question.

Let’s look at what happened afterwards.

The chart below compares the ex-London release price (red) with today’s average retail market price in the UK (orange), using data from Wine-Searcher. The percentage shows the annualised unrealised loss for collectors who bought En Primeur and still hold the wine.

I annualise the returns because vintages have been available for different lengths of time. A 35% total loss on the 2018 has accumulated over many more years than a 13% loss on the 2023, making annualised returns a fairer comparison.

The 2021 vintage has been one of the worst-priced releases in recent history, with En Primeur buyers currently sitting on an annualised loss of around 10%. This, I think, is the more interesting point.

The campaign wasn’t a commercial failure because the wines didn’t sell—they did. The failure was that buyers substantially overpaid relative to what the wines were worth.

Whenever I mention this, someone in the trade inevitably reminds me that “people buy En Primeur for reasons other than investment. The main one is guaranteeing provenance.” Perhaps. Although I've always found that argument slightly curious. It seems to imply that buying from leading merchants on the secondary market doesn't guarantee adequate provenance—a rather surprising claim coming from someone within the industry.

In any case, provenance isn’t free.

If you bought En Primeur primarily to guarantee provenance, the chart above tells you exactly what that insurance has cost you. In the case of Cheval Blanc 2021, that premium has amounted to roughly 10% per year.

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Thanks, as always, for being here.

Sara

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Four years ago, there were four subscribers. Today, there are a few more—which is fortunate, because collecting this sort of data takes considerably longer than recycling the usual industry narratives. If you enjoy independent, evidence-based wine analysis (and the occasional dismantling of a well-worn cliché), I'd be delighted to have you as a paid subscriber. And if you think someone else would enjoy In the Mood for Wine, I'd be hugely grateful if you shared it with them too.

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Are older women white wines better than young ones? My latest piece for Everyday Drinking has the answer.

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Did Benjamin Franklin really say, “In all your amours, prefer old women to young ones”? That’s what Stephen Vizinczey suggests in the opening of In Praise of Older Women, where he argues that “modern culture—American culture—glorifies the young; on the lost continent of old Europe it was the affair of the young man and his older mistress that had the glamour of perfection.”

Substitute mistress with white wine, and you’ll have the point of this essay. And, of course, I want to pique everyone’s interest in the merits of older white wines. I suspect, however, that the more experienced among us already know the pleasures they offer, while the younger ones have yet to discover them.

It turns out that white wines would very much like us to believe they can age gracefully. Well, I say white wines, but what I really mean is the Italian wine consortiums and the like. Their job is to convince people like me, who in turn try to convince people like you, that mature white wines can offer the kind of pleasure to the discerning collector that was once thought to be the exclusive preserve of structured reds.

This charm offensive has meant that, over the past three years, I’ve been invited to a number of events designed to showcase the aging potential of Gavi, tocai friulano, sauvignon blanc and, most recently, Lugana. As a result, I’ve tasted some truly fabulous older white wines—sometimes in even more fabulous locations, lucky me!—and had the chance to reflect on why so many white wines capable of aging remain wines we almost always drink young.

The premise of every event has been the same: people usually drink Lugana/Gavi /sauvignon blanc…while they’re young. But here are some older bottles. Aren’t they great?

And the premise holds true not only for wines with a reputation for being easy-drinking whites, such as Lugana, but also for wines with an established reputation for longevity, such as top white Burgundy. Octavian Wine, one of the world’s leading bonded fine wine storage providers, with more than £2 billion worth of wine under management, shared some striking data when I asked: What is the average age of a wine when it leaves your warehouse and is delivered to a customer’s home address (presumably to be drunk)?

Of course, Octavian caters to collectors, and the wines stored there are, by definition, collectible.

Yet even in this setting, the contrast between white and red wines is striking. The overwhelming majority (78 percent) of white wines shipped to customers came from the previous six vintages, whereas only 40 percent of red wines fell into the same age bracket, with the remainder distributed much more evenly across older vintages. At the other end of the spectrum, just 2.5 percent of white wines delivered were more than 20 years old, compared with 10 percent of reds. In other words, even among serious collectors, white wines are consumed far earlier than reds.

So, can we say that white wines have a reputation problem? (Isn’t it a bit like the old belief that men get better with age, while women, well… they don’t?) Could part of it still be a legacy of the premature oxidation (“premox”) crisis that emerged in white Burgundy in the early 2000s?

The problem known as “premox”—the imperfectly understood phenomenon of white Burgundies aging far more quickly than they should, with some bottles becoming completely oxidized—began to emerge in wines from the 1995 vintage and affected many wines produced through the mid-2000s. Even great Puligny-Montrachet and Meursault, including bottles from some of Burgundy’s finest producers, were not spared. It spread through the region like the plague. Corks, sulphur dioxide, and a host of other factors were blamed. Yet, despite years of research, there is still no consensus on what caused the problem in the first place—or, perhaps more intriguingly, why it seems to have largely disappeared.

While that may well have scared collectors into favoring younger Burgundies, I’d argue that—particularly in Italy—we’re dealing with something different, something more of a chicken-and-egg problem. Italian producers tend to rush their white wines to market rather than holding back stocks for later release. As a result, consumers rarely encounter mature bottles, very few people are systematically tasting mature vintages, and there is little opportunity to build confidence in how these wines age. When invited on press trips producers pour superb older vintages, and in most cases they come from the family’s personal cellar, giving critics the chance to experience and write about just how well some of these wines can evolve, but only anecdotally rather than in any systematic way. These wines almost never reach the market, they exist as demonstrations rather than products. While critics may leave convinced, consumers remain unconvinced because without those experiences, confidence in the wines’ longevity never becomes firmly established.

This, I think, is the heart of the issue. A wine’s ability to age and its reputation for aging are two different things.

The first is determined by the wine itself—its acidity, concentration and balance. On this front, research is advancing along two complementary lines.

One seeks to establish whether a grape variety possesses intrinsic aging potential by identifying its reservoir of aroma precursors and understanding how these evolve over time—whether they generate new layers of complexity during ageing or simply fade as the wine oxidizes. For example, the team at the University of Verona, led by Professor Maurizio Ugliano, has been mapping the volatile compounds and aroma precursors of dozens of Italian grape varieties (including turbiana, the grape of Lugana) to understand how each develops its own distinctive aromatic signature with age.

The other line of research seeks to answer a more practical question: what do producers need to do in the vineyard and the winery to craft wines that age well? While Chardonnay’s capacity for aging is well established, the Burgundy Wine Board (BIVB), perhaps prompted by the lingering shadow of the premox crisis, sponsored a six-year study (VOLTA) to investigate how vineyard and winemaking practices influence the longevity of white Burgundy. The study concluded that much of a wine’s ageing potential is built during pressing and élevage, rather than being determined by the grape variety alone.

Yet aging potential alone is not enough to create a reputation for longevity. That reputation is built by the market. A region only earns a reputation for longevity when producers keep back stock, critics regularly taste mature vintages (as they do with features such as “Bordeaux 10 Years On”) merchants sell them and consumers learn what those wines become with time. Without that ecosystem, even genuinely age-worthy wines continue to be treated as wines to drink young.

Only two of the Lugana producers I visited in my recent press trip hold back stock. And even then, the quantities they retain don’t seem sufficient to create a meaningful secondary market or establish a culture of drinking mature vintages. There is, of course, an obvious reason for this. Holding back wine requires producers to sacrifice current cash flow while investing in additional storage capacity—whether barrels, tanks or bottle aging—in the hope of selling the wine later at a higher price. I recently tried to estimate what aging actually costs a producer (calculations from Credible Signals):

A good barrique costs around €1,000 and can be used new or seasoned. Assume it’s used once: after losses you get 200 liters of wine, so the barrel cost is €5 per liter. Labour and electricity add €0.40 per liter. Storage costs €6 per month per barrique — about €0.40 per liter per year. Financing adds another €0.30 per liter if you borrow at 5% on €5.80 (barrel + handling + storage). That’s roughly €6 per liter, or €4.50 per bottle. If you use the barrique three times, the additional cost drops below €2 per bottle.

Bottle aging is cheaper but still significant. Storage might cost €6 per month per pallet (600 bottles), or €0.12 per bottle per year. The real cost is the so-called opportunity cost: if a wine could sell now for €10 but doesn’t, the producer must finance that cash flow, adding roughly €0.50 per bottle in interest. The total cost for an extra year in bottle is around €0.62 per bottle.

Depending on the aging method, every extra year can cost a producer anywhere from around $0.77 to $5.14 per bottle before any additional profit is realized. Building a reputation for longevity requires producers to sacrifice that cash flow in exchange for uncertain future returns.

For collectors, however, that scarcity creates an unusual opportunity. Because relatively few mature white wines reach the market, the category remains underdeveloped. Prices often reflect how these wines are consumed rather than how well they actually perform with age.

I realize this may sound a little far-fetched, but indulge me for a moment. Imagine collecting Meursault in the 1970s or 1980s. On a recent trip to Burgundy, the president of the Comité Bourgogne told me that many Meursault producers in those days barely made ends meet because the wines simply weren’t in fashion. (I can’t help wondering whether the dominance of Robert Parker’s Bordeaux-centric era played some part in that...) Those who bought and cellared Meursault back then weren’t following trends but instead investing in something before the rest of the market caught on. Looking back today, it’s hard not to envy them. They were able to buy extraordinary wines at prices that seem unimaginable now.

I’m not predicting that Lugana, Gavi, or Soave will become the next Meursault. That’s beside the point. Every great collecting category was once obscure. The excitement of collecting lies in the possibility of discovering tomorrow’s classics before everyone else does. Mature Italian white wines feel like one of those rare corners of the wine world where there is still genuine room for exploration.

Unlike Bordeaux or Burgundy, where decades of criticism have established fairly clear hierarchies, many Italian white wines remain largely unexplored territory. We don’t yet know which producers will prove the most age-worthy, which vintages will shine brightest or which wines will ultimately define their regions. We simply don’t have enough evidence yet. And perhaps that’s precisely what makes this journey so fun. The reality is that many producers themselves are still discovering the ageing potential of their own wines.

But things are turning. From tasting a number of Lugana, I can say that some are genuinely age-worthy and compelling, while others are less convincing. In some of the less successful examples, the oak dominates, overwhelming rather than complementing the grape’s delicate aromatics. More broadly, I think Lugana—and some other emerging fine wine regions—is still searching for its signature style. By that, I mean that producers are still working out which winemaking techniques best express the region and its native grape. The balance between oak, lees aging, texture, freshness and fruit purity has yet to reach the level of consensus and refinement seen in more established fine wine regions.

That impression was echoed by Davide Slaghenaufi, an oenologist and biotechnologist at the University of Verona, where he is part of the team studying the aging potential of turbiana in Lugana. Having also trained in Bordeaux under Denis Dubourdieu, he believes that Italian producers, particularly when working with the country’s many indigenous grape varieties, still have much to learn about the use of oak from their French counterparts.

Yet the progress already made is remarkable. Some producers have demonstrated just how extraordinary mature Lugana can become. Zenato’s Lugana Riserva ‘Sergio Zenato’ 2005 was one of the finest mature white wines I tasted on these trips, offering a glimpse of what the region is capable of when terroir, viticulture and winemaking come together.

Elsewhere, there are producers trying to build a reputation for age-worthy white wines almost single-handedly. Villa Bogdano, for example, is championing the little-known Lison DOCG, investing in research, innovation and a deeper understanding of tocai friulano, despite the financial incentives that often favour uprooting old vineyards rather than preserving them. Changing perceptions of an obscure appellation is a slow and expensive undertaking.

That may sound like a limitation, but I increasingly see it as an opportunity. Collectors often dream of discovering great wines before everyone else does and that’s why mature Italian white wines are exciting.

They are not a finished story. They are a story still being written.

I recall a conversation I had with one of the new people I met when I first moved to Madrid. She’d found out that I worked in wine. “In wine?” she said in excitement. “There’s a great wine bar in Lavapiés you must try! They sell natural wines, it’s really good.” I took out my phone, pinned it on the map, noted in parenthesis that it's a natural wine bar. In the two years since, I haven't been once.

I don’t know what the rest of the wine industry thinks of the natural wine movement, and I don’t speak for anyone else, but as for me, well, what is an un-natural wine anyway? Where do we draw the line? Does the vine itself need to crush its grapes and bottle its own juice?

Perhaps my scepticism stems as much from the movement’s nebulous definition as it does from the foul wine I was served in a trendy wine bar in Shoreditch, or from the sommelier insisting that it was supposed to taste like that, that there was nothing wrong with the wine. The implication, of course, was that there was something wrong with me, my palate, that I simply didn't understand natural wine. It was ten years ago. Since then, natural wines have become cleaner, or so I'm told, and it's no longer natural wine; it's low-intervention wine.

And you'd be wrong to think this is a piece to disparage natural wine. Quite the opposite. Despite my personal prejudice, I've discovered that some of the finest wines I've tasted have been marketed as natural—Gravner being an obvious example—and there are many others I'm eager to try, among them Chris Boiling's Crazy Experimental Wines, which we'll come back to shortly.

This is an exploration of natural wine's remarkable success, and whether some of the factors behind that success can be applied to the rest of the wine world.

In fact, natural wine not only is the leading opportunity in wine according to IWSR’s Opportunity Index—which measures the strongest market opportunities for alternative wine categories, weighted by the size of each country’s wine-drinking population—but it is also one of the industry’s fastest-growing segments. Estimates from DataIntelo Consulting suggest the global natural wine market is expanding at around 13% annually, an impressive feat at a time when the broader wine market is struggling to grow.

The evidence extends beyond bottles produced. Natural wine bars continue to proliferate across major cities in Europe (Paris alone has 600, according to French app Raisin), North America and Asia, signalling that the movement has firmly entered the mainstream.

And perhaps most remarkably, natural wine has achieved what much of the wine industry has struggled to do: capture the imagination of the notoriously elusive Gen Z consumer.

As I've already hinted, what natural wine actually is remains surprisingly ill-defined. Perhaps that's part of its appeal. An idea is often more powerful when different people can project different meanings onto it. Even Georgia, one of the first countries to legislate a definition of natural wine, defines it vaguely as “wine produced through the spontaneous fermentation of organically grown grape must” without “the use of oenological practices and substances otherwise permitted under general winemaking regulations, with the exception of sulfur dioxide, which must be limited to a maximum concentration of 40 mg/l.”

Ah! Sulfur dioxide—the Enemy, with a capital E, that the natural wine movement has set out to slay. In the public imagination, mild wine intolerance is often blamed on sulfur dioxide, a belief reinforced by plenty of anecdotal evidence but very little scientific support.

In her Master of Wine research paper, What is the Relationship Between the Use of Sulphur Dioxide and Biogenic Amine Levels in Wine?, Sophie Parker-Thomson MW argues that the likely culprit behind adverse reactions in some wine drinkers is a group of compounds known as biogenic amines (BAs), which are naturally present in all fermented foods and beverages. Her findings turn the sulfur dioxide narrative on its head. Wines with no added SO₂—or with sulfur added only late in the winemaking process—were found to contain the highest levels of biogenic amines. Unsurprisingly, those conclusions caused no small amount of discomfort among supporters of natural wine, yet they did little to challenge the sulfur dioxide myth, as the research never made its way into the public consciousness.

So, sulfur aside, if there is no formal definition, how do you identify a natural wine when browsing the shelves of a wine shop or supermarket? As former United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of obscenity, "I know it when I see it"—the same could be said of natural wine.

In fact, while wine professionals continue to argue over what natural wine is and isn't—or what low-intervention wine really means—the movement has succeeded in capturing the imagination of the average wine consumer. Why is that? Is it the places where it’s sold? The people behind it? The labels? The messaging? Probably all of the above.

Orwell wrote of his job reviewing books that most of them are so bad that, in nine cases out of ten, the only honest review would be: “This book is worthless.” It made me think that in wine, the opposite is true. “This wine is good” likely describes 90% of the wines, which arguably makes the job of a wine critic even harder than that of a book critic. What is there to say when a wine is good? Good, but not great. Good, but not particularly interesting. Well-made, sound, solid, like all the rest... What is there to object to? Nothing — other than, perhaps, that in a sea of identical wines, it's just really hard to sell.

The final step in wine production is the first from the consumer's point of view: the packaging.

Natural wines have cool names like Seggs with My Eggs, Kisi me slowly, gently or Potatoland. Their labels feature geishas, riot scenes, make reference to Playboy and other bold, artistic imagery. They’re colourful, vibrant, modern, and beautifully designed. Sometimes they give you almost no information; other times, they give you every little detail. They’re often bottled in clear glass to show off the wine’s hue, sealed with crown caps or other quirky closures, or dipped in brightly coloured wax. Of course I’d pick that over Château Boring.

Maybe all the money saved in the winery is simply spent on branding instead?

I put that question to Neil Tully MW, founder of Amphora Design, a wine branding and design agency based in Bath. His answer was no, they don’t spend more, with one important caveat: the design proposals tend to be bolder, and the branding decisions are far more intentional.

(As it turns out, making natural wine isn’t necessarily cheaper.)

Tully also suggested that winemakers in more ‘serious’ wine regions may not feel they have the same freedom, especially when it comes to the judgement of their peers. Perhaps natural wine producers aren’t as burdened by the need to be taken seriously—to make a “serious” wine capable of earning high scores. Perhaps it reflects the personalities of the winemakers themselves: people who are rule-breakers. I think it’s all of the above—and more.

A beautifully plated dish from a Michelin-starred restaurant immediately looks more desirable than a rustic plate of pasta. We eat with our eyes first. But wine is different. Pour a glass of a great wine beside a glass of good wine and, in identical glasses, they will look much the same. The quality cannot be seen. That's why, before the cork is pulled, the label has already done most of the selling.

And it doesn’t even have to be a “radical” label. When I was selling wine online in China, we put this to the test. We sold exactly the same Côtes du Rhône AOC from the same domaine, the same vintage, and the same wine—only the label was different. One bottle carried the producer’s regular label; the other featured a special “Centenary” label. Guess which one sold twice as much? We ran a similar experiment with Riesling. These weren’t identical wines, but they were comparable in quality, provenance, and style—both were off-dry Rieslings, but one had a blue bottle. Our blue-bottle Riesling outsold the other by three to one. These are only small examples from a very small business, so I wouldn’t pretend they’re scientifically rigorous. But they illustrate something that anyone who has sold wine to consumers already knows: design matters more than the liquid that’s inside the bottle. Sad? Perhaps. True? Yes.

We discussed sulfites already, but there's a broader point here: the word natural does a great deal of work on its own. Type "natural wine" into Google and one of the first suggested searches is, "Is natural wine actually better for you?" Whether we like it or not, natural carries a promise—the rejection of "harsh chemicals", the halo of sustainable viticulture—that resonates with consumers. If it's natural, the logic goes, it must be good for me, or at least better for me. Well—see sulfites above. But even if consumers have been misguided (by whom is a discussion for another day), that doesn't mean the rest of the wine industry should ignore the message. Consumers are telling us what they want: wines they perceive to be more sustainable, less industrial and, above all, healthier.

Speaking to Chris Boiling — a winemaker who only makes what his labels literally call "Crazy Experimental Wines," in very small batches across Slovenia, Hungary, Georgia and Austria (soon Albania too) — told me he named one of his wines Oh, Natural! because, yes, he expected it to attract more interest from the market. Not to mention that his labels (done by the team at Amphora Design) go all out on radical transparency, letting you in on every step of the winemaking process — and even some of the viticulture — which I find refreshing, when all you're normally given is the usual boilerplate story that adds little value to the end consumer.

As we've seen, the word natural can be interpreted as a move away from ultra-processed wine, in keeping with the wider health and sustainability discourse. It can also signal a move away from large corporations in favour of smaller, more thoughtful producers. And this isn't unique to wine. We've seen the same trend in craft beer and gin. Inventive, original labels stand in stark contrast to the corporate branding of Stella Artois or Heineken, inviting consumers to choose something that feels small-batch, independent and distinctive—even if many of those brands have, in fact, been quietly hoovered up by multinationals. The lesson isn't that we should mislead consumers, but that, once again, they've spoken. They've voted against the perceived sameness of big brands and the industrialisation of food and drink, and in favour of products that feel independent, distinctive and full of personality.

The places where these beers, wines and gins are sold also tend to be younger, more welcoming and more relaxed than those where you'll typically find more traditional wines. If I were to stereotype, a classic wine bar is where you might take a date; a natural wine bar is where you'd meet your mates. Perhaps it's simply the sort of environment that's more conducive to relaxing around wine.

Another topic I discussed with Neil Tully: he feels that, even in the way labels are designed, natural wine places more emphasis on the wine itself than on the denomination. Having recently been in Burgundy, a traditional producer mentioned that on their Grand Cru wines, the appellation and the climat would be written in a larger font than the producer's logo, because much of the wine's identity is owed to the terroir , which in fact seems to support Tully's point.

The last thing I want to mention is taste and smell. This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder whether the kombucha-like flavours so often associated with natural wines reinforce their perceived healthiness through flavour associations alone. Even though, like Chris Boiling or Gravner, many natural winemakers place great emphasis on producing clean wines (sometimes using small amounts of sulfur dioxide to achieve that), those savoury, fermented aromas may subconsciously signal "natural", "alive" or "healthy" to consumers. I also wonder whether their more pungent, distinctive aromas—rather like unpasteurised cheese—give less wine-experienced drinkers the confidence that they're actually tasting something, that they're participating in the ritual of wine tasting. Faced with a more subtle wine, perhaps they wouldn't feel quite so sure?

Of course, slapping a two-finger salute on the label of a fifth-generation family estate won't translate well, if at all. But the lesson isn't to imitate natural wine; it's to understand what it has understood about consumers. They want clarity over jargon, transparency over marketing clichés, personality over corporate polish, and a clearer sense of what a wine will actually offer them before they buy it—not afterwards. Above all, they want wine to feel less intimidating and more enjoyable. If the rest of the wine industry can embrace those lessons without abandoning its own identity, it may have a better chance of persuading the next generation to drink wine at all.

Whenever I publish an article arguing that a release is expensive relative to comparable vintages, I inevitably receive comments along the lines of:

“Wine lovers don’t buy wine for financial gain.”

I couldn’t agree more.

In fact, I don’t believe wine should be bought primarily for financial gain. As a CFA charterholder, a former portfolio analyst managing institutional portfolios for pension funds, and someone trained in economics and finance, I believe financial security is best built through a diversified portfolio of equities, bonds, commodities, real estate and, depending on individual circumstances, other mainstream asset classes. That portfolio does not need wine. It does not need art, watches or Pokémon cards either.

I want to be unequivocal about this.

Over the years I have criticised wine merchants and wine investment firms for marketing wine as a “safe haven”, a “currency hedge”, an “inflation hedge”, “uncorrelated asset” or an essential portfolio diversifier. Those claims are, in my view, misleading and plain wrong. You do not need wine to diversify an investment portfolio or to protect yourself during market downturns. Too often these narratives have been used simply to sell more wine.

But if you love wine, then I believe it deserves a place in a different kind of portfolio. That is where In the mood for wine comes in.

Wine, like art, watches or classic cars, is a passion asset. It is something people buy because it enriches their lives, not because they need it. If we borrowed from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, collectibles would sit close to the top: they fulfil aspirations rather than necessities.

People buy wine for countless reasons, and those reasons are deeply personal.

• To drink and enjoy.

• To celebrate life’s milestones.

• To share memorable bottles with friends and family.

• To build a cellar that reflects their tastes.

• To collect every vintage of a favourite château.

• To follow the evolution of a great wine over decades.

• To preserve a family tradition.

• To connect with a region, producer or vintage.

• To satisfy curiosity.

• To own something rare or historically significant.

• Simply because owning beautiful wines brings them pleasure.

In behavioural finance, these benefits are often described as emotional returns.

Passion assets can therefore generate two forms of return: a financial return and an emotional return. For passion assets, the latter is often far more important, yet it is also impossible to measure objectively.

That is precisely why I spend so much time analysing the financial side.

Financial returns are one of the few aspects we can measure with reasonable confidence. They provide a benchmark that allows collectors to make more informed decisions.

Suppose I conclude that Cheval Blanc is expensive relative to previous comparable vintages. That does not automatically mean you shouldn’t buy it.

Perhaps your ambition is to own every vintage of Cheval Blanc. Perhaps it is your favourite estate. Perhaps you want to experience the evolution of an exceptional vintage over the next forty years. Perhaps production was unusually small and scarcity matters to you. All of those are perfectly valid reasons to buy the wine.

But by understanding how much of a premium you are paying, you can make that decision consciously rather than blindly. You know the financial cost of pursuing the emotional reward.

I believe that is what today’s collectors increasingly want: they make purchasing decisions differently from previous generations because they expect transparency in every other aspect of their lives. They compare prices, read reviews, analyse data and make informed choices and why should wine be different? I believe transparency and rigorous analysis ultimately help the market rather than harm it. Better-informed collectors are not less likely to buy; they are simply more likely to buy with confidence. That belief was one of the main reasons I started In the mood for wine.

There is also another audience for this analysis.

Collectors are driven primarily by emotional returns. Merchants, négociants and producers, however, are businesses. Financial returns are fundamental to their survival. Analysing release pricing can therefore help explain why one En Primeur campaign succeeds while another disappoints. It helps producers understand how collectors perceive value, merchants understand demand, and ultimately benefits everyone participating in the market.

On this topic, I wanted to re-share the interview below with Greg Davies, one of the world’s leading experts in behavioural finance. Greg founded the first behavioural finance team in banking at Barclays and now leads behavioural finance at Oxford Risk, where he helps investors make better investment decisions. He was also my Behavioural Finance professor at Imperial College London, where we first met.

Since In the mood for wine has grown by more than 50% since this interview was first published, it felt like the perfect time to revisit a conversation that perfectly captures why our emotions, biases and motivations play such a powerful role in the way we buy, collect and think about wine.

Besides, what is the fair price of the coffee I am drinking as I write this? £5.30? Really?! Yet, here it is, in my hands, and I paid for it willingly.

In Bordeaux, as in many regions producing the world’s best wines, that question has become particularly difficult to answer. (And with it, the astounding pieties of the heart!)

Wine is at once a consumer good and a luxury asset. It is food, but also something to collect, store and trade and, at times, to signal status.

For most foods and beverages, pricing is still anchored to production, which is the cost of land, labour, raw materials and distribution. Margins vary, but the link between cost and price broadly remains intact. Even my £5.30 mochaccino, reckless as it is for a daily habit, ultimately reflects the cost of coffee, milk, wages and rent in whichever part of London I happen to be buying it from.

Wine was once priced much like other agricultural products: production costs plus a reasonable margin for the producer. Simon Farr, one of the most successful figures in the wine trade, with a career spanning five decades, told me that “before the early eighties, and the modern era of en primeur with Robert Parker, release prices bore some relation to a combination of cost of production plus some adjustment for prestige. It was grounded in that fundamental and left a lot on the table for those who took the wine to maturity and took the risk for that.”

But over the past four decades, Bordeaux has steadily moved away from that model. Wine no longer wants to be seen simply as food, but as a luxury good. As a result, pricing has become increasingly detached from production costs and the fundamentals of making wine. Instead, it is now driven as much by perception (and by what the neighbours are doing) as by the wine itself.

Is my £5.30 mochaccino arguably trying to position itself as something more than the bitter black coffee served in traditional British cafés? At four times the price, one could certainly make that case. What, then, would be the “fair” release price of Lafite? £20? £50? £200? At what point does the price of a bottle of wine stop being “fair”?

Perhaps, to illustrate my point, I should use Pokémon cards instead of Lafite because I assume that, if you are reading this, you either love Lafite or are dying to drink it. Which means we probably cannot be entirely objective about it.

When I hear that a Pokémon card is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, my immediate reaction is: why? how? Surely the people obsessed with Pokémon cards are too young to own credit cards, and the people with credit cards are not obsessed with cards that have Pokémons on them? Yet, clearly, we live in a world where those two groups overlap.

But one could also speculate that, one day — perhaps not even in the unreasonably distant future — those groups (the credit cards owners and the Pokémon cards affecionados) may stop overlapping. And then what happens to the person who spent £12 million on a Pikachu Illustrator PSA Gem Mint 10 card?

The truth is that Pokémon card is only worth what somebody else is willing to pay for it. If tomorrow nobody wants it, I can tell myself it is still worth £12 million, but the market may only be willing to pay £5 for it — or whatever a pack of Pokémon cards costs these days — the market will bring the “fair” price right down to its cost of production plus a reasonable margin for Nintendo and the rest of the companies in the chain.

Isn’t that, in many ways, what happens for all consumer products? That they’re only worth what somebody is willing to pay for them? Take fur coats for example. I have recently inherited two—what am I to do with them?

Eventually, markets will determine price better than moral arguments ever will. The market will decide what Bordeaux is worth, what its “fair” price is, the market will find the price that truly reflects value.

In order to arrive at some reasonable measure of “fair price” for this Bordeaux En Primeur campaign, I took the current market prices of recent great vintages — namely 2016 and 2019 — and adjusted them to reflect the fact that those wines have already been aged for nine and six years longer than the newly released 2025s.

When you run that calculation, which I did, the results appear so low that it is almost inconceivable many châteaux would actually release at those prices. In some cases, for a new release to compare favourably with older vintages already available on the market, the implied fair release value is merely £2 per bottle.

Some people will argue that this is unreasonable, and I would understand why. But, on the other hand, that is what the market currently considers fair. If the trade and the châteaux cannot make money at these levels — which, in some cases, I doubt they can — that is a problem, but not for the buyer. The market is already assigning a value to these wines.

And if this En Primeur campaign is struggling, it is not because the wines are too bold, because people don’t love wine anymore because younger consumers are turning away from wine.

It is because the wines are too expensive.

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The analysis I refer to above is set out in The Simple Framework I Use to Judge EP Pricing and The Simple Framework I Use to Judge EP Pricing – Part 2. It is one of the approaches I use to assess whether an En Primeur release is priced fairly relative to comparable recent vintages.

A few interesting findings emerged from this analysis.

First, aside from a handful of outliers, most châteaux appear to have taken the market prices of comparable back vintages into account when setting their release prices. As the chart below shows, most 2025 releases were priced towards the lower end of the range represented by comparable 2016 and 2019 vintages currently available on the market, suggesting a growing awareness of secondary market dynamics.

However, very few châteaux went a step further and adjusted their pricing to reflect the cost of carry embedded in those older vintages—or perhaps they simply weren’t willing to price that low for reputational reasons, as the chart below shows. In fact, only Vieux Château Certan did, making it, in my view, the standout value of the 2025 En Primeur campaign.

Cheval Blanc, which produced only half its usual volume, has reportedly sold out. As for the other châteaux, were their pricing decisions enough to make the campaign a success? I’ve been told we won’t know the answer until September.

Another observation: even after adjusting for the cost of carry, the 2019 vintage remains the cheapest of the recent great Bordeaux vintages. In some cases, it is up to 66% cheaper than the current 2025 release. Go and buy some.

One final thought. Doing this analysis made me wonder whether, beyond the top châteaux, the En Primeur system still works. Or, more specifically, whether the producers that arguably need the liquidity—and the distribution network—En Primeur provides the most, because they are less well-capitalised or lack the backing of the top estates, are precisely those for whom the system has become least effective. Has La Place gradually evolved into a marketplace primarily for super-premium châteaux and wines?

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What do you think of the 2025 Bordeaux En Primeur campaign? Did you buy anything—or did you opt for older vintages instead?

Thanks, as always, for being here.

Sara

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A version of this article was originally published on Octavian Wine Magazine The Vault. Octavian is one of the world’s leading bonded fine wine storage providers, safeguarding around £2 billion worth of wine across approximately one million cases, including some of the rarest collections in existence.

“It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’s Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry within us the Jocasta who begs Oedipus, for God’s sake, not to enquire further...”

Rightly, some people might ask: what’s the point of a piece like this? A pessimistic piece, some may call it. For God’s sake, look at the signs of recovery!

The purpose is not to disparage an industry I love and work within, or its participants. On the contrary — it is to offer an argument that takes seriously the forces at play, including the ones that resist that easy optimism.

This is a nuanced topic, and reasonable people can reach different conclusions. But the first step towards solving any problem is to stare it in the face. Choosing instead to write the recovery story — and to set aside the evidence that complicates it — would, I think, be a mistake. Perhaps the surest route to deepening the industry’s problems.

My hope is that this piece sparks debate and, more importantly, encourages the kind of thinking that could lead to a genuine wine renaissance.

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There is a term in medicine called terminal lucidity, which I only know because of Mark Sloan in Grey’s Anatomy. “Terminal lucidity is a surge of energy in a person who is dying,” I read on the Cleveland Clinic website. “Although researchers are still studying what causes it, we know that it’s typically a sign that death is close.”

The wine market, according to the Liv-ex indices, has shown a feeble uptick in prices since last October. Another indicator that “things are finally turning around” is the notional ratio of bids to offers on Liv-ex. This appears to have reached an important inflection point, with bids now surpassing offers. In simple terms, there are now more buyers than sellers — a sign, they say, that demand is picking up and confidence may be returning. WineFi even report that their Trade Price Index has ticked positively for the third quarter in a row, that trade discounts are narrowing along with an improved liquidity.

And yet, I’m not convinced that things are “fine” — or that they will be any time soon.

But why not?!! I keep asking myself when I look at this more encouraging data.

Why are prices rising? Why are liquidity and demand picking up, as market participants suggest? Yes, one answer is that the wine market is slowly recovering. But it could just as easily be something else.

A more likely explanation, in my view, is inventory. Over the past three years, operators have run down stock and are now starting to buy again — cautiously, and not because they want to, but because they have to. There’s a big difference between buying because you can, and buying because you need something to sell to your customers.

This seems especially true in the US. From conversations with US importers and distributors, many stocked up ahead of tariffs, building inventories to last through the end of 2025. That implies they will have needed to return to the market and replenish around the new year.

While this hypothesis may or may not hold, other parts of the industry also tell a less-than-encouraging story.

Hospitality accounts for around 30% of total wine sales in the UK and Tom Kerridge, the Michelin-starred chef turned Whitehall campaigner, says businesses are operating at 110% of costs — in other words, they are losing money. Rising inflation, higher prices, increased business rates and higher employer National Insurance contributions are all taking their toll. Another celebrity chef, Jackson Boxer makes a related point. After Brexit, wines from lesser-known regions — obscure parts of Italy, Slovenia or Lanzarote — that once sat around £30 are now closer to £60. At a time when the cost of living is rising, consumers are far less willing to take a chance on an unfamiliar bottle.

These anecdotal examples are backed up by the data. One in five hospitality businesses is effectively in a “zombie” state, with negative balance sheets and combined shortfalls of £2.6bn, according to Opus Business Advisory Group. In the twelve months to July 2025, there were 3,822 failures of pubs, clubs and restaurants in England and Wales — accounting for 15% of all business failures.

Elsewhere in the market, the picture is no more encouraging.

Many seem to have forgotten (or chosen to discount) that in December 2025, Oeno Group went into administration, effectively wiping out an estimated £76 million of client money raised over a decade. Those clients are unlikely to return to wine any time soon. The industry largely dismissed it as “another crooked wine investment scheme”. But that overlooks the uncomfortable truth that Oeno operated with industry support during the good times, which helped reinforce the perception that it was a legitimate business. And more importantly, despite their “wine investment” label, the underlying premises were never really there. In practice, Oeno functioned much like a merchant, not unlike many others in the market.

A quick look at Companies House makes this so-called “recovery” look far less convincing.

Among the top 30 merchants in the UK, eight have filed their latest accounts late, reporting combined losses of around £22 million. Several auditors have warned that they may not be able to continue as a going concern unless conditions improve or fresh capital is injected. In plain English: some of these businesses may not be around in a year.

One example is Cult Wines, which has come under particular scrutiny. Its auditor warned that the company’s future could be in “significant doubt” without further funding, given a £4.5 million loss and an increase in net liabilities to £21.6 million. Cult Wines has also been flagged by the Advertising Standards Authority for presenting potential returns on wine investments without sufficient evidence to support those claims. More troubling still, the company providing Cult Wines with funding and storage, Coterie Holdings, has recently reported a loss of nearly £8 million. Amid all this, Cult Wines co-founder Tom Gearing is among those pointing to a “recovery,” citing signals such as “returning buyer confidence, improving portfolio performance, and two-sided market activity on CultX” as evidence.

Of course, it is not all bad news. But this is not just about a few smaller, underfunded companies struggling—we are talking about some of the largest and oldest merchants reporting losses, including Fine & Rare, Berry Bros. & Rudd, Bordeaux Index, Goedhuis, and Justerini & Brooks.

That said, some businesses are improving. Berry Bros. & Rudd has significantly reduced its losses, while others continue to perform strongly even in this environment: Corney & Barrow reported profits of around £6 million, alongside solid results from Farr Vintners, Wilkinson Vintners and Hallgarten. Even those reporting healthy profits have done so against contracting turnover of between 5% and 50% over the past three reporting years. In other words, it has been a difficult period for the wine trade—there are no two ways about it.

Taken together, the scale of this malaise in the British wine trade raises the question of systemic risk. Because most wine businesses are private rather than public, they are subject to far less scrutiny. That often means it takes longer to confront reality—and its consequences—until, of course, banks, creditors, tax authorities, and founders are no longer willing (or able) to pretend and extend. The longer that process takes, the bigger the problem becomes and the more dramatic the outcome is likely to be. And because companies don’t operate in isolation, those interdependencies are likely to ripple through the rest of the market.

Someone recently described the state of the wine industry using Herbert Stein’s words: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

So what does it mean when it stops?

In practice, it doesn’t necessarily mean a company goes into administration straight away. More often, shareholders and banks are reluctant to crystallise losses, so they extend loans and support for as long as possible. That continues until keeping the business alive becomes more expensive than letting it fail—or until things escalate quickly (cash runs out, suppliers stop cooperating, or a crisis hits) and stakeholders accept there is no way to trade out of the hole.

At that point, the most likely outcome is often what’s known in the UK as a “pre-pack” administration. In simple terms, the company enters administration (a form of insolvency), but a sale of the business has already been arranged in advance. Frequently, the “new” buyer is effectively the same owners or a related party. The result is that the good parts of the business—brand, operations, customers—survive, while the debt, liabilities, and other obligations are left behind. These are effectively controlled restructuring where losses are pushed onto creditors, while the core business continues under a cleaner structure.

It is crucial to highlight that, depending on how the merchant structures its relationship with clients, customers can get caught up in this—as happened in the Oeno Group case. This is because, in some cases, wine is stored under the merchant’s name rather than the client’s. When that happens, customers may find themselves treated as unsecured creditors—and risk losing their wine.

Beyond the trade itself, LVMH, arguably the largest luxury company in the world, has a wine portfolio spanning Champagne (accounting for over 20% of the total Champagne market), Bordeaux, Napa, Mendoza, and beyond. It is often seen as a bellwether for the luxury sector. The group reported a 9% contraction in turnover and a 25% decline in margins in its Wine & Spirits division in 2025. That downward trend continued into the first quarter of 2026, with revenues down 2%—although they insisted this would have been positive if not for the strength of the euro.

What’s more, from a geopolitical perspective, the traditional levers of growth are all under pressure.

Russia is effectively out. China—arguably the engine that drove growth until a few years ago—is now muted. The US, long a cornerstone of wine demand, has become increasingly uncertain. Tariffs may come and go, but what matters is the broader climate of instability—and uncertainty is what stops trade. And beyond that, wider geopolitical tensions are adding further strain. Rising conflict risks, including the US war in Iran, have knock-on effects on oil prices, which in turn impact key luxury markets such as Dubai. LVMH’s Bernard Arnault warned about the risk of conflict escalating into a “global catastrophe”, while his team in earnings calls remains reassuring. And finally, the UK—once the centre-stage market for wine’s secondary trade—is now in a dire state.

At a more fundamental level, businesses that make or sell wine rely on three things: inventory appreciation (wine prices rising), liquidity (constant buying and selling), and access to cheap capital (to fund inventory and, at times, operating losses). The industry keeps insisting that prices are rising and that liquidity is returning—but the third lever is clearly not turning.

In reality, access to credit—let alone cheap credit—has become more difficult. This is a sentiment I have heard repeatedly from 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.”

Many people worry that wine is going out of fashion, particularly among younger consumers—and point to that as the starting point of the problem. Luxury and consumer goods may be facing one of their most difficult periods in the past two decades—arguably even more complex than 2008.

But ultimately, I believe that, at its core, this is a pricing issue and the value chain is broken. The cost of a bottle of wine is simply too high for what the market is willing to pay right now, and the roles—and margins—of many players in that chain no longer hold. You can see this clearly in Bordeaux En Primeur. Once you account for the cost of carry, back vintages are often significantly cheaper than current releases.

Viewing the wine industry in a holistic way like this, it’s hard to see how anyone can argue that “we are going to be fine.” The early signs of recovery — the uptick in prices, the return of bids, the narrowing of spreads — may look encouraging on the surface, but a brief surge of activity does not mean the underlying condition has improved.

Once you step back, the picture is clear: structurally, the industry is under pressure from every angle. Demand is weak and uncertain. Costs are rising. Credit is tightening. Key growth markets are either weakened or unstable. And, most importantly, prices no longer align with what the market is willing — or able — to pay. This is a system under strain, and something will have to give.

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I've tried to examine the evidence and draw some of my own conclusions. I’d love to hear in the comments whether you agree or disagree with my arguments — and, more importantly, whether I’ve overlooked anything.

Thanks, as always, for being here.

Sara

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A version of this article was originally published on Octavian Wine Services’ website. Octavian is one of the world’s leading bonded fine wine storage providers, safeguarding around £2 billion worth of wine across approximately one million cases, including some of the rarest collections in existence.

Here’s yet another wine writer taking Robert Parker’s name in vain.

In my second piece for Everyday Drinking, I explore the question of taste: how much of what we like is truly our own, and how much has been shaped by critics, restaurateurs, importers, geography, taxation, and the bottles we’re offered in the first place? Along the way, we encounter Dallas steakhouses, London wine bars, Immanuel Kant, and, inevitably, Robert Parker.

Also, I would like to thank WineLabs for providing the data that made this analysis possible.

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A trendy Barolo grower who had just returned from a work trip to the US told me that “people in Dallas don’t drink what we drink.” Their tastes are different, he said, they want different wines. From what he had observed, Americans gravitated towards richer, more powerful wines with riper fruit, while the lighter, more savory expressions prized in Europe were largely absent.

Beyond the obvious observation that restaurant wine lists differ from place to place, what intrigues me is the idea that taste is somehow of a place: that people develop preferences so deeply rooted in culture that they become difficult to translate across borders. A bit like the butter-versus-olive-oil divide: you are either an olive oil person or a butter person. Or, worse still, a margarine person. We tend to speak of such preferences as though they were innate rather than acquired.

His assertion also seemed straightforward enough to test. With WineLabs, I analyzed more than 172,000 wine listings from 501 restaurants and wine bars in Dallas and 1,310 venues in London.

At first glance, comparing Dallas with London may seem unfair. But I wanted to avoid skewing the results by choosing a wine-producing capital such as Paris or Milan, where domestic wines would naturally dominate restaurant lists. London, by contrast, combines an unusually international wine trade with comparatively limited domestic production, making it a more neutral benchmark against which to assess whether tastes really do differ across cultures.

According to the data, my Barolo-producing friend isn’t wrong.

In its restaurants and wine bars, Dallas serves wines with average alcohol levels around one percentage point higher than those in London (14.9 percent versus 13.8 percent ABV). The difference is driven almost entirely by the cities’ red wine selections. Nearly 60 percent of the wines on offer in Dallas are red, compared with less than half in London. Meanwhile, London offers a greater share of sparkling and dessert wines.

London is resolutely Old World: nearly 70 percent of the wines listed originate from France, Italy, and Spain. Dallas, by contrast, looks westward, with wines from California accounting for around 23 percent of all listings. French wines alone make up 46 percent of London’s wine lists, while Dallas offers a broader mix of New World regions, including Oregon, Mendoza, Marlborough, and Washington State. The difference is equally evident at the regional level. Burgundy and the Loire Valley feature prominently in London, whereas Napa Valley occupies a much larger place on Dallas wine lists.

Interestingly, Italian wines feature prominently in both cities, although preferences diverge at the regional level. London appears to favor Piedmont, home to Barolo and Barbaresco, whereas Dallas shows a stronger preference for Tuscany and Veneto.

The average London wine list spans seven countries and 20 regions, while Dallas typically draws from just four countries and 10 regions. The two cities also diverge sharply in their red wine preferences: cabernet sauvignon and Bordeaux blends account for 35 percent of the red wines offered in Dallas, compared with just 18 percent in London, where pinot noir reigns supreme. White wines, however, reveal an unexpected point of agreement. Chardonnay dominates in both cities, accounting for roughly 30 percent of their selections. Sparkling wines once again expose the divide, with London favoring traditional-method Champagne and Dallas showing a stronger preference for Prosecco.

For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, judgments of taste rest on a paradox. Taste is subjective, grounded in feelings of pleasure or displeasure rather than objective truths. Yet judgments of taste also claim universal validity. When we describe something as beautiful, we do not simply state a preference; we imply that others ought to see it that way too.

We Europeans like to think that taste is our birthright, dismissing any departure from them as a failure of taste itself. When it comes to the creation of luxury goods, for instance, it is true that Western Europe dominates. France, Italy, and Switzerland produce more than 60 percent of the world’s personal luxury goods by value. With wine, Italy, France, and Spain account for around half of global production. This only reinforces the prejudice of European taste, though quantifying it is difficult because no universally accepted definition exists.

Yet while luxury goods are still largely produced in Europe, the market for them is global. Asia accounts for roughly a third of luxury purchases, North America for another third. Europe represents around only a quarter of consumption, although many of those purchases are made by tourists rather than local consumers.

In a recent piece for Bon Appétit, Maryam Ahmed argued that American wine drinkers are offered too many of the same wines—often ones that are rarely local. It is an observation I have made about Michelin-starred restaurants too. Ahmed exhorts consumers to take control and choose local wines instead.

But how much control do consumers actually have? If I walk into a restaurant, I can only choose from what is on the wine list. The act of choosing is constrained by the options that have already been selected for me. So, are wine lists reflecting or shaping demand?

If you’ve seen the first Devil Wears Prada, you’ll remember the scene in which Miranda Priestly—the editor-in-chief of Runway, a thinly veiled version of Anna Wintour at Vogue—scolds her new, unfashionable assistant for mocking a discussion about two belts that appeared to her almost identical. Miranda’s point is that even the assistant’s tragic choice of a blue sweater is the result of decisionsmade by a handful of influential people in fashion. Taste, she argues, is shaped by the few tastemakers in that very room.

If Anna Wintour had a counterpart in the wine world, it was Robert Parker. Perhaps the most influential wine critic in recent history, I needn’t tell you what a “Parkerized” wine tastes like. Suffice it to say that it tastes almost exactly the opposite of what we traditionally think an Old World wine should taste like. Yet, for all the complaints that European winemakers supposedly have for him, it’s hard to deny that many of them catered to his palate in pursuit of a coveted 100-point score, or something close to it, and the economic gains that came with it. Which means that one wine critic helped shape both the supply of wine and the demand for it according to his personal taste.

This is precisely what the WSET teaches students to avoid. The aim is to assess whether a wine is good or outstanding on its own terms, rather than according to whether you happen to enjoy it. It is an exercise that irritates me every time I do it. Perhaps that is because—despite, once upon a time, knowing very little about wine—I rather recklessly set up a business selling it and simply chose bottles I liked drinking. I had little interest in abstract quality assessments divorced from my own pleasure—my own idea of what made a wine good. In that sense, I empathize with Parker. He scored wines according to his conception of good taste.

The problem was not that Parker had preferences but that his preferences carried such extraordinary weight that they moved markets. Producers adapted their wines to suit his palate, while those that did not align with it were overlooked. One man’s taste became, for a time, the market’s definition of quality.

Which brings me to this question: Did Robert Parker like big, bold, jammy wines because he is American, or did Americans come to like big, bold, jammy wines because Robert Parker said they should?

When I first started exploring the Chinese wine market in 2018, there was a clear idea of what “Chinese people liked” when it came to wine: big Bordeaux reds. And that’s what was imported and sold. I once brought a Prosecco to a tasting with a group of Chinese importers in Guangzhou. They all agreed it was a good wine, but insisted that nobody would buy it. “Chinese people don’t drink sparkling wine,” they told me.

“What do you mean?!” I asked. Prosecco is the most popular wine appellation in the world, bar none (660 million bottles sold versus 500 million of Bordeaux). Were Chinese people somehow immune to its charm? I didn’t think so. So I imported it myself and sold it online and quickly became our best-selling wine. Today, Vino Joy reports that sparkling wine sales in China are growing at double-digit rates while sales for still wine are falling.

Now, I’m not telling you this because I want to take credit for the boom of sparkling wine in China. Rather, to illustrate how quickly supposedly fixed preferences can change. And if anything, what changed perceptions was a major Champagne marketing push between 2020 and 2022. I know because every influencer we worked with seemed to be invited to lavish hotel stays and caviar-and-Champagne dinners.

Again, taste isn’t fixed, it can be changed. With the right amount of marketing budget, that is.

That even Kant’s attempt to reconcile the paradox of taste remains contested is, in a way, reassuring. This piece is an argument against the idea that preferences are immutable; that people in London are fundamentally different from those in Dallas; or that today’s wine lists merely reflect what consumers have always wanted.

Perhaps people in Dallas would happily embrace lighter, lower-alcohol whites, just as Londoners might develop a taste for higher-alcohol cabernet sauvignon. But that requires people willing to challenge convention. Critics, importers, restaurateurs and retailers do more than respond to taste: they create it.

It has to be said that, while Dallas appears to have different tastes in wine, geography and price may explain much of the apparent gap.

London’s proximity to northern France means French wines reach British shores more easily than they do Dallas, where bottles must cross an ocean and navigate a complex supply chain, often at a significantly higher cost. As ever, choices ultimately come down to price—or rather, value for money. The median bottle on a Dallas wine list costs $36, compared with $86 in London.

Supporting this argument, rather than the idea that Dallas simply has a preference for warm-climate wines, is the city’s emphasis on other cool-climate regions, such as Oregon and Washington. These wines feature prominently on Dallas wine lists but are largely absent from London’s—or perhaps simply drowned out in a sea of French choices.

London’s apparent preference for lighter wines may also reflect policy rather than taste. In the UK, alcohol duties are linked to alcohol by volume (ABV), creating a financial incentive for restaurants to stock lower-alcohol wines.

The occasion on which wine is consumed may also play a role. Dallas has a strong tradition of steakhouse dining and casual upscale restaurants, where wine is expected to complement richer, meat-based dishes. The popularity of cabernet sauvignon in Dallas may therefore say less about a city’s willingness to experiment and more about the role wine is expected to play at the table.

In other words, wine lists may reflect not only what people like to drink, but also the occasions on which they drink it.

Perhaps the real lesson is that wine lists reveal less about what people inherently like and more about the choices available to them. Taste is shaped not only by culture and preference, but also geography, taxation, economics and social ritual. Which city has “better” taste depends, perhaps, on whether one believes taste correlates with price. But the more interesting question is not whether London or Dallas has better taste, but how different systems produce different expressions of it.

A version of this article is published on The Black Label, the monthly newsletter of 67 Pall Mall, the world’s first private members’ club for wine lovers.

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What’s the most common phrase you hear about wine investing? It’s this: “…and if it all goes wrong, at least you can drink the wine!!” That always gets a laugh.

Not so fast. In December 2025, self-proclaimed wine investment firm Oeno Group went bankrupt, exposing more than £71 million worth of wine that appears to have vanished into thin air. London City Bond claims there is only £5–10 million (depending on the valuation) worth of Oeno stock at its premises in Burton-Upon-Trent, before accounting for roughly £7 million in debts and, of course, liquidators’ fees.

It’s fair to say there’ll be no consolation drinking for Oeno’s unfortunate investors.

Financial wine scandals so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one.

They may or may not begin as legitimate businesses, with the genuine intention of offering investors returns while accompanying them on a journey through the world of the noble grape. The wine itself may or may not have been there from the start, but who would think to check? Then come the grand wine tastings in Venice, followed by lavish portfolio events. By the summer of 2021, they may have opened their doors at London’s Royal Exchange, beside the Bank of England. For all the hatred the wine industry supposedly harbours towards wine investment, there seemed to be little besides praise and gushing reviews. There may have been disputes between the three owners, unresolved game of thrones behind the scenes. Then came the first signs of disappointment bubbling to the surface: monthly reports sent to clients saying their wine portfolio was up 20%, only for investors to discover — once they wanted to sell — that it was actually down 30% after transaction costs and other fees. That was 2023. The wine market had just turned negative, and it still seemed plausible for investors to double down while prices were low. They would pay the familiar price for it. By 2025, Oeno Group had seemingly disappeared, and some investors were beginning to fear their wine had too.

The trouble with wine investment, as anyone trying to sell their own home will know all too well, is that it’s less about buying and more about selling it. There is no shortage of people who supposedly know what makes a good wine investment, which bottle to buy, and who the next big thing is going to be. There are far fewer people who can actually sell the wine — never mind during a crisis such as the one that has afflicted the wine market since late 2022.

And this is the origin story of many financial debacles: the inability to sell, the mounting financial pressure, and eventually, the going rogue.

I said earlier that financial wine scandals often resemble one another — not so much in their specific mechanics, which are as infinite as human creativity itself, but in the fact that they are all ultimately steeped in the wine itself: the bottle. Whether the fraud involves fake portfolios, Ponzi schemes, or counterfeiting — scammers sell “investment wines” that do not exist and it always comes back to the same thing: selling a bottle that isn’t there.

Keeping an eye on the bottle one buys should be simple, but it isn’t. Ensuring that the account at the bonded warehouse is in one’s own name rather than the merchant’s is the first step towards taking control, but collectors need to go further. They should ask for rotation numbers and photographs of the bottles with their name attached, and ideally visit the warehouse themselves to confirm the stock is actually there. But even that is not always enough. Think of En Primeur: until delivery, there is often no real way of knowing whether a merchant has actually purchased the stock on your behalf.

I do not write this to encourage paranoia around every wine purchase, but rather to highlight another grey area — one that works well for the vast majority of honest participants, yet still leaves room for those looking to take advantage. The more grey areas that exist, the greater the potential for fraud.

That said, average losses from individual wine frauds are in the region of £100 million or less — a significant figure, but still nowhere near the scale of broader financial scams such as the $65 billion Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.

My first job in the City, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, involved cold-calling clients of a trading platform to inform them about new rules. I had to collect their full names, company details, and proof of identity before they could continue trading complex financial products. “John from Dallas” was no longer sufficient as an ID if they wanted to trade credit default swaps or oil options on that or any other platform. Unsurprisingly, many of those conversations were unpleasant. Traders were used to the simplicity and anonymity of these loosely regulated markets. They liked the grey areas of finance — the parts where fewer questions were asked.

And what’s not to love? In wine investment, there seems to be almost no limit to what you can say or do.

Guaranteeing returns? Of course.
Using conveniently arbitrary timeframes to present flattering performance narratives? Absolutely.
Calling yourself a “wine investment” company while simply buying wine and selling it on at a hefty mark-up? Why not — what harm can a little conflict of interest do?
Keeping clients’ money on the company balance sheet without ring-fencing it from day-to-day operations? Perfectly normal.
Using customers’ wine as collateral for directors’ personal loans? Now that’s innovative finance.

These are not fictional examples dreamed up by a cynical imagination—mine. They are daily practices that are of the wine trade. And they tend to work, sure, until they don’t.

Bernie Madoff, arguably the most successful financial scammer in history, managed to operate his Ponzi scheme for more than forty years. Then, one day, it collapsed. What triggered it? The 2008 financial crisis, which spooked investors into asking for their money back all at once.

Interestingly, it was also a crisis — the prolonged downturn that has gripped the fine wine market since late 2022 — that unravelled Oeno Group.

Perhaps there will be more cases like this before the market turns, which makes now the time for collectors and investors to check where their wine actually is.

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*

Another grey area that came to mind after the article was published is the question of expertise of self-proclaimed “wine investors”.

Alongside guaranteeing returns, using conveniently chosen timeframes, operating as a “wine investment company” while simply buying and selling wine at a mark-up, keeping clients’ money on the company balance sheet, or even using customers’ wine as collateral for directors’ personal loans, there is another fundamental issue.

Who is actually qualified to manage wine investors’ money?

There is nothing stopping someone from investing their own money but managing other people’s money is different. It is a regulated activity designed to ensure that those making investment decisions are competent and subject to oversight, which doesn’t guarantee success, but it does raise the bar.

Yet wine investment often assumes that wine expertise translates into investment expertise. Even among well-intentioned operators, basic investment mistakes are common. That’s hardly surprising. Knowing how to assess a vintage, build a cellar or spot an up-and-coming producer is not the same as understanding portfolio construction, risk management, valuation or fiduciary responsibility.

Again, wine expertise and investment expertise are two different things. The industry often treats them as if they were the same but it shouldn’t.

In this piece, Alan Livsey explores his personal journey of discovering the difference between the price and value of his wine collection. While much of the wine trade thinks about wine in nominal terms — buy at £100, sell at £120, make £20 — collectors (especially those reading this publication!) instinctively know there is more to it than that.

As Alan highlights, three factors matter when valuing a wine collection:

• Net transaction prices, not just quoted market values
• Storage and insurance costs
• The opportunity cost of capital

My contribution focussed on the concept of cost of carry.

As I told the FT:

This is the framework I have applied throughout my analysis of Bordeaux 2025 en primeur (Part 1 & Part 2). In many cases, mature back vintages offer better value than the latest releases once carrying costs are taken into account.

The broader lesson extends beyond Bordeaux. Fine wine should not be valued solely on its latest quoted price. Like any asset, its true value depends on the costs, risks and alternatives facing the buyer.

***

Thank you to everyone who reads and supports ITMFW.

My goal has always been to shed light on what I believe is the most fascinating passion asset in the world — and the only one that improves with age.

Understanding concepts such as cost of carry doesn’t diminish the romance of wine. It helps ensure that great wines are valued appropriately, so they can continue to be produced, cellared, aged and enjoyed by future generations.

After all, wine is one of the only asset that becomes more valuable because of time, not despite it.

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Starting with the language. Much of what is said around En Primeur pricing sounds precise but is, in fact, meaningless. “Released at a 5% discount to last year.” “10% below the 2019 market price.”

These statements don’t mean anything.

They are comparing apples with pears. If you compare today’s release price with the market price of back vintages without adjusting those back vintages for the cost of carry, then you are comparing two fundamentally different things.

Today’s market for back vintages matters when evaluating current EP prices but to arrive at some reasonable measure of release value for this campaign, I took the current market prices of recent benchmark vintages — primarily 2016 and 2019 — and adjusted them to reflect the additional ageing time those wines already possess relative to the newly released 2025s. In finance terms, that’s called discounting.

Once you discount the 2016s and 2019s for the cost of carry, if those adjusted market prices look low, that is not a flaw in the framework. It is simply what the market currently believes those wines should be released at, given that buyers will then have to age them for another nine and six years, respectively.

Which brings us to the central misunderstanding. En Primeur prices are supposed to be low. Buyers pay upfront, take on risk, and wait years before they can drink the wine. Historically, Bordeaux understood this perfectly. As Simon Farr said during the interview for ITMFW, release prices once bore some relation to production costs, adjusted for prestige, while leaving meaningful upside for those willing to store the wines and assume the risk of ageing them. Increasingly, however, some châteaux appear to treat En Primeur as an opportunity to capture the full value of the wine immediately. That misses the point entirely. EP is not about maximising short-term profit but it is about sharing risk between producer, merchant, and buyer.

For collectors, the decision is ultimately quite simple. Buy a 2016 at £100: bottled, aged, proven, and ready. Or buy a young 2025 at £70: unproven and years away from drinking. Is £30 enough to justify the wait and uncertainty? That is the only question that matters within this framework.

Other arguments—provenance, access, relationships—are secondary, as buying from good merchants should offer the same assurances.

If the trade and the châteaux cannot make money at those levels, that is a serious issue — but not one the buyer is obliged to solve.

And buyers should remember that participation in En Primeur is optional. The system only works if it offers a clear advantage: lower prices in exchange for patience. If it does not, there is a very simple alternative — buy back vintages instead and drink them already mature.

None of this denies that wine is a passion asset. People buy bottles for reasons that have nothing to do with economics: birth years, collections, memories, tradition,... Those are all perfectly valid reasons to buy wine. But understanding the economics does not diminish the pleasure. It simply ensures that the decision is made knowingly.

So far, on a comparative basis against previous vintages already trading in the market, only three releases appear genuinely attractive: l’Evangile, Lafleur, and Cheval Blanc.

Thank you as always for being here!

Sara

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Exciting news! Jason Wilson invited me to write a monthly column for his very trendy Everyday Drinking, where I’ll be looking at wine through a more analytical lens — that’s to say, taking some of the emotion out of wine.

Then, if that wasn’t exciting enough, I finally get to publish the result of five months of work with start-up WineLabs and its founder, Ilias Miraoui: what is probably the largest analysis ever conducted of wine lists from 1,063 Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide.

Read what I found out.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Ernest Hemingway would say to himself, to combat his writer’s block. “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Can that be applied to data? It’s worth trying, as I’ve been stuck on this analysis for what feels like forever.

For the past six months, I’ve worked with a start-up, WineLabs, and its founder, Ilias Miraoui, to build what is the largest analysis of wine lists from 1,063 Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide. The idea was simple: if these are the best restaurants, with the best sommeliers and the deepest cellars, what do they actually serve? My hypothesis was that we would uncover niche wine markets—hidden gems known only to insiders. But that’s not what we found.

The truest sentence I know is this:

After six months of cleaning data, Ilias and I found that Krug and Dom Pérignon appear on 42 percent of all Michelin wine lists.

Among the most represented producers, beyond these two Champagne houses, the pattern is equally conventional: Château d’Yquem, Gaja, Bollinger, Louis Roederer, Sassicaia, Château Margaux, Ruinart, Domaine Leflaive, Château Mouton Rothschild, Vega Sicilia, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and Château Haut-Brion.

Hopefully, that is not where the story ends, but it is where it starts. It starts with a question: are wine choices at the top end of the market homogeneous— homogeneous to the point of being boring?

The data suggests they are. Around 60 percent of wine lists are dominated by French regions, primarily Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne, with smaller contributions from the Rhône and the Loire. Italy is a distant second, accounting for roughly 10 to 20 percent of listings.

This concentration is not entirely organic. On the topic of Champagne, Michelin-starred restaurants sometimes have exclusivity agreements with certain houses, whereby a glass is served on arrival and bottles are available at a more favourable price. “However,” a sommelier at one such restaurant told me, “it becomes difficult to sell anything else sparkling.”

Another equally predictable finding: median bottle prices increase with star level, US$197 for one-star, US$325 for two-star, and US$446 for three-star Michelin restaurants. A quarter of two-star and a third of a 3-star menus are comprised of bottles above $1,000. Meanwhile, only 6 percent of the menus consist of bottles less than $100.

For context, the median price of the most expensive tasting menus is US$165, US$256 and US$356 for one-, two- and three-star restaurants, respectively¹. Given that a tasting menu usually lasts between two and four hours, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least one bottle of wine will be consumed per person. Those bottles of wine will each be priced 18 percent to 27 percent above the most expensive tasting menu.

Having spoken to sommeliers, low- and no-alcohol pairings are becoming increasingly popular. Alternatives—low- and no-alcohol beverages, cocktails, and, not least, water—come in at way less than half the price of wine.

Does this mean that fine wine is pricing itself out of, arguably, the only establishments that can realistically sell bottles above $1,000—and where wine producers themselves want to be present—all in the pursuit of status and high prices for their own sake? Is status what’s killing fine wine?

I keep seeing statements like “alcohol is in structural decline due to changing youth culture and GLP-1s dampening consumption” presented as fact—but they are assumptions, not facts. I disagree; I think the decline is primarily driven by price, and more importantly by the availability of better value-for-money alternatives.

I can’t untangle which came first: fine wine producers raising prices to excess, or high-end restaurants treating wine as a cash cow. What starts as positioning becomes pricing. What starts as pricing becomes expectation. And what starts as expectation becomes a system that is very hard to unwind. But the outcome of this vicious cycle is clear—the lack of fine wine at reasonable prices is what puts consumers off.

One sommelier told me that when they started working at a Michelin-starred restaurant, they saw the same wine they had sold in a shop priced at eight times as much. “The ambience, the food and the scenography of a Michelin-star restaurant do a lot to elevate the wine.”

I find it infuriating myself: going to a restaurant—admittedly rarely a Michelin-starred one—where the choice is between an expensive glass of Veuve Clicquot or a non-descript “wine from Chile” at an excessive price. More often than not, I just get a beer.

In other words, consumers are not necessarily drinking less—they are substituting. And in that substitution, wine is losing.

Academic research points in the same direction. A recently published study by Riccardo Saracino, Stefano Corsi and Chiara Mazzocchi, “The STAR WARS of Michelin Guide restaurants: a wine list perspective — a case study from Italy,” analyzes the factors influencing restaurant ratings, including wine lists. “It turns out that,” they write, “wine list characteristics play a significant role in shaping customer satisfaction.”

Evidence suggests that customers appreciate wine lists offering a balance between affordable and premium-priced wines, suggesting that price diversity is a valued feature. While higher prices can increase customer satisfaction, this effect reverses beyond a certain point. In the case of wine, lower median prices are associated with higher ratings, suggesting that customers are sensitive not just to price, but to value.

At the same time, wine lists that are too narrow—whether overly local or overly conventional—tend to perform worse.

In other words, consumers are not rejecting wine; they are rejecting overpriced and predictable wine—which, incidentally, is what these menus increasingly offer.

The question is whether Michelin’s methodology, which clearly rewards a certain way of delivering excellence in food, is also painting the world of food and wine “beige.” A kind of “beigification”, technically flawless, globally consistent, but lacking distinction. And that is exactly what the data reflects: not a lack of quality, but a convergence of choices.

On YouTube, I came across an urban architect showing images of new builds and asking: “Why does this look like it could be anywhere, while these”—showing Amsterdam, Santorini and Brooklyn—“are clearly from a specific place?”

He explains it through the idea of a “sense of place,” the elements that make a location distinctive. Brooklyn’s brownstones come from locally available stone; Dutch brick architecture reflects an abundance of clay and a lack of natural stone; Santorini’s white houses are designed to reflect heat. These places are memorable because they respond to their environment.

There are faint signs of this in wine lists—South America leaning towards Mendoza, North America towards Napa Valley. But broadly, the “sense of place,” or terroir, so central to the production of wine itself, does not seem to carry through to the top end of dining. The result is carefully constructed, technically excellent—and increasingly forgettable—wine experiences. In a category built on terroir, the disappearance of place at the point of consumption is a striking contradiction.

Menu depth appears to increase with the number of stars: the median one-star restaurant lists 77 unique estates, while a three-star lists 184. But as the share of French wines rises alongside this, it raises the question: are three-star restaurants simply adding more of the same names? The data would suggest so. Depth is increasing, but differentiation is not.

This led me to ask a few questions: is there a written—or unwritten—rule about what wines are expected, either by the Michelin Guide inspector or by the restaurant-goer? Another hypothesis is that fine dining guests expect to find the rarest wines, rather than niche or good-value ones. That may well be. For all the emphasis sommeliers place on how wine can elevate food (and vice versa), it is also true that the Michelin Guide does not include the wine list in its scoring.

Some of these dynamics are reinforced structurally. For example, the Court of Master Sommeliers explicitly references “traditional” producers within regions, effectively establishing a canon. Many of those building wine lists treat these producers as the gold standard—names that must be present. The presence of these names on a list does not mean they are actually bought. Anecdotal evidence from several sommeliers suggests they account for as little as 5 percent of wine sales. More niche or interesting choices are often confined to pairing menus, which are narrower by design.

At the same time, the typical Michelin guest is a mix of price-sensitive and not particularly knowledgeable about wine, which makes recognizable brands easier to sell.

Only a handful of restaurants approach food and wine as a true pairing, where one is conceived alongside the other. In most cases, they remain separate worlds, where the business of hospitality takes precedence over more interesting, and potentially more coherent, choices.

And that may be the core issue. Not that fine wine has lost relevance—but that, in the places where it should matter most, it has become predictable, overpriced, and disconnected from the experience it is meant to elevate.

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 ageing (and 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

Support ITMFW

Consider supporting In the Mood for Wine with a paid subscription, or share this with someone who is tired of the usual industry lines such as “Lafite has been released at a 30% discount to last year”

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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

Support ITMFW

Love In the Mood for Wine? A paid subscription helps keep the free edition accessible to everyone — and unlocks exclusive perks for you. Or, you can simply share this article and the newsletter to help grow the community!

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