Wine Basics
Wine Investing
Apr 24, 2025
Introduction to Wine Investing: How To Understand The State of the Overall Wine Market.
To invest in anything, the very very very bare minimum knowledge threshold required is the value of what you’re buying, and how it has performed in the past.
In this edition of The Wine Investing Newsletter, I will be addressing the second point. How do we understand how wine has performed as an asset?
How do I measure how wine markets have performed?
The Liv-ex
The industry benchmarks are typically the Liv-ex indices – in the same way traditional equities have the S&P500 and the FTSE100 etc..
The Liv-ex describe themselves as “the global exchange for the wine trade” – which is pretty much fair enough if you’re looking at ‘trade only’ exchanges. There are some other notable exchanges which are accessible by the general public.
If you’re thinking of investing in wine, then it’s likely that these indices will be one of the first places you go to understand what the market is doing.
For the uninitiated, the Liv-ex effectively act as a ‘stock market for wine’. Only trade members are allowed access and users can place bids and offers on different wines.
The Liv-ex publish a number of indices, the exact weighting / construction of which is not publicly available, but we can infer that they use the ‘mid price’ (more on that in a future newsletter), of the most traded (also one to dig into, value or volume?) wines on the market for each given bracket.
The Liv-ex 100 and 1000 are the ‘most traded’ 100 and 1000 wines on the market. The Bordeaux 500 are the 500 most traded wines from Bordeaux on the market and so on and so forth.
The Liv-ex 1000 “comprises seven sub-indices which represent the most traded wines from regions around the world: the Bordeaux 500, the Bordeaux Legends 40, the Burgundy 150, the Champagne 50, the Rhone 100, the Italy 100 and the Rest of the World 60.”
The Liv-ex 1000, taken from
The Liv-ex are rightly incentivised to provide the most efficient measure of the market. They want to provide investors price changes for the wines that are traded the most, because the prices of those wines are the most accurate.
The most highly traded wines however, are not necessarily the highest returning. The Liv-ex 100 and Liv-ex 1000 are both heavily weighted towards Bordeaux which has underperformed since 2011. For example, there are 540 Bordeaux vintages in the Liv-ex 1000
WineFi
At WineFi we are incentivised to identify the wines with the most potential to appreciate, and we want to include those wines in any market measuring that we do.
This translates to a broader approach when measuring the market.
We want to include every wine price that we can confirm is accurate. This means that we input as much data as possible, clean it (sorry Aaran Daniel) to make sure the prices are an accurate reflection, and translate it.
The WineFi Index therefore does not set an upper bounds on the number of wines that can be included. We instead set criteria that must be met for a wine to be included.
10 Year WineFi Index Performance
A wine qualifies if it:
Meets our minimum liquidity criteria; the label has sufficient current market depth based on visible offer depth at a trusted stock-holding merchant.
Is priced above £80/bottle or equivalent inflation-adjusted historical price.
is vintage 1968 or later
Regional weightings are based on Market Share by Trade Value according to the Liv-ex. The highest-priced wines are prioritised for selection in the index first. The indices are calculated on a price-weighted basis.
This means that wines with lower trade volume are included, and so we can capture a greater number of investment grade wines when measuring, and analysing market performance.
The idea is that the index will include wines that are less traded, but perform in a different manner to the Liv-ex indices. This allows us to identify regions, sub-regions, labels, and vintages that out(and under)-perform the markets.
On a wine by wine level
At WineFi, we have tools to understand the characteristics of a specific vintage of a specific label over the last X period. See below for a behind the scenes look at AskAaran (named that way because Aaran, our Head of Data wanted us to stop bothering him for wine performance charts).
Ask Aaran – DRC Romanée Conti Vintage Performance
To someone getting started, WineSearcher is a good place to start. If you want to know how the 2009 DRC Romanée Conti has performed recently then the analytics page is a good place to go.
Credit to WineSearcher
There are a whole host of other metrics to look at when analysing on a wine by wine level, which will be the focus of a future newsletter.
Conclusion
All of the measures stated will give you a sense of how the wine markets are performing, and they will (likely) paint a similar picture.
The key distinction is that the Liv-ex indices will provide the most accurate snapshot of the most traded wines in the market. If you only plan to invest in the most traded wines then these will accurately reflect how your portfolio may have acted over the past year.
The WineFi indices provide a broader picture of how the markets are doing as a whole, but will include wines with less secondary market activity, and potentially less liquidity.
As a very basic piece of analysis – if the WineFi Index outperforms the Liv-ex 1000 (which it has over the past 10 years), then it is likely that the most-traded wines are not the ones that are outperforming the market, and vice versa.
If you’re thinking about investing in wine and you want to understand how the market is doing, both measures are important to get a proper grasp on market performance and to have the best idea you will likely want to take a look at both, and much more!
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Wine Investing
Oct 15, 2025
How To Spot a Wine Investment Scam
Written by Callum Woodcock, WineFi's CEO
In August 2025, three people were convicted of fraudulent trading relating to a complex wine fraud run by Imperial Wines and Spirits Merchants Ltd.
The scam involved extortionate mark-ups, sometimes as high as 400%, on what appear to have been legitimately investment-grade wines like Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. At the same time, the company falsely led prospective clients to believe that Imperial did not make any money at all until the wines were sold for a profit.
Whilst most clients did actually own the wines they were told they had purchased, a number of victims had no wine at all despite paying thousands of pounds.
What is most striking is that this company was in operation for a decade — from 2008 to 2018, when their offices were finally raided by Trading Standards.
Given the esoteric nature of fine wine as an asset class, most investors choose to invest through a dedicated company — be it a merchant or a specialist fine wine investment firm.
While there are many reputable operators, the unregulated status of the market inevitably attracts its share of bad actors — from deliberate fraudsters to the merely incompetent.
The good news is that it is surprisingly easy to distinguish credible operators from questionable ones — provided you know what to look for.
There are three key questions to ask when investing in wine.
1. Are you being ripped off?
Fine wine is unique amongst collectibles in that it has a third-party “list price”. These are not firm bids but asking prices — a lot like residential property. These prices serve as a yardstick for what the wines are worth at the time of purchase.
There are a number of publicly-available platforms that allow you to search for a wine based on producer and vintage — for example, Wine Searcher.
Filtering the location as the United Kingdom and only choosing wines that are “In Bond” should give you a more accurate picture. GBP prices are the de facto international reference given the UK is the largest global hub for fine wine trading.
You’ll quickly be able to get a sense of whether the price you are paying is fair or inflated.
The ease with which investors can validate this makes the Imperial Wines scam sadder, as it was entirely avoidable. They appear to have intentionally targeted "confused pensioners" who were less likely to be tech-savvy.
How WineFi Does It
So, what does "good" look like?
At WineFi, we show both the Liv-ex Market Price and the lowest Wine Searcher price on our platform to provide investors with an independent benchmark of what their portfolio is worth. We also compare our syndicate performance against market indices
We do this so investors never have to "take our word" for what their wines are worth, and can judge our benchmark our performance against the broader wine market.
2. Does your wine actually exist?
Given fine wine must be stored “in bond” (meaning in a government bonded warehouse to protect its resale value — more on why here) there is a third-party custodian that should be able to verify which wines are stored under your name, and whether they are ring-fenced.
You should be able to communicate directly with the warehouse (they are your wines, after all) rather than simply your broker in order to verify that your holdings are where you believe them to be.
One well-publicised whisky investment scam was exposed when a client began calling the warehouse where he casks were supposedly stored — only to find that they weren’t there.
How WineFi does it
At WineFi, we store wines with Coterie Vaults.
Fine wines held by both our syndicates and private clients are stored under the names of the individual owners, allowing our clients to independently verify their existence and ownership by contacting the warehouse.
They are ring-fenced from our own account to ensure that even in the event WineFi was to cease trading they remain the property of our underlying investors.
Is your wine actually worth anything?
This is a personal bête noire.
In recent years, we have seen a number of “investment” portfolios containing wines that have no secondary market price.
Given wine pays no yield, the only way to make money investing in this asset class is to eventually sell the wines on the secondary market.
If that secondary market does not exist, that particular wine has no resale value and therefore cannot be considered investment-grade.
Secondary market liquidity is therefore of critical importance when considering what to invest in.
This is where the water gets murky.
If you are looking to speculate on which producers are likely to break through in the future, you may be comfortable with this. However, these wines — by default — have no independent secondary market price.
Most investors are not looking to take moonshot punts on the next breakout producer, and yet we are regularly sent portfolios for review that are comprised of dozens of non investment-grade wines which still show a “market price” — which can only have come from the broker and is therefore unverifiable.
Until there is a trade on the secondary market, the value of that particular wine is zero.
How WineFi does it
At WineFi, secondary market liquidity and brand equity are two of the key factors that we examine when selecting portfolios.
We currently offer free portfolio reviews to those who have concerns about their holdings. To try and fight this issue at scale, we are developing a free application that will allow anyone to upload a CSV of their holdings and identify the investment-worthiness of their portfolios.
Conclusion
Fine wine can be both a compelling investment. However, as an unregulated asset class with significant information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, it can also create opportunities for misconduct.
While the market is becoming more professionalised and transparent, bad behaviour persists.
The best protection is to do your own research: check Trustpilot reviews for the company you are working with, and familiarise yourself with the best-practice principles outlined above.
If you’re already a wine investor and would like WineFi to review your portfolio — with no fee, no obligation, and no upsell — we’d be happy to take a look.
For more information, get in touch with our investment team.
Wine Investing
Oct 6, 2025
WineFi Q3 2025 Quarterly Report
Introduction
We’re extremely excited to share our quarterly wine market report - delivering the most detailed view of the wine markets through Q3 2025.
This is a singularly important report, because this quarter we have seen strong signs of meaningful market stabilisation.
The WineFi Trade Price Index has increased in value for the first time since 2022, after almost 3 years of consecutive decline.
Producer
Wine Basics
Sep 25, 2025
Producer Spotlight: Domaine Paul Pillot
