Wine Basics
Wine Investing
Apr 24, 2025
The Southwold Group
Written whilst in Southwold!
My family and I are spending this Christmas in lovely Southwold.
Southwold is known for:
Being generally quite nice. The internet tells me it is sometimes referred to as “Hampstead-on-Sea”. I will choose to believe this is because Hampstead is also quite a nice place, and not due to the influx of Londoners wanting a seaside second home.
Adnams Brewery (recommend Kobold if you like lager and Broadside if you’re into ales)
Its relative isolation – it was historically almost an island, connected to the mainland only by a single road across the marshes.
Southwold is also an important word in the wine world.
The “Southwold Group” has tasted the top wines of Bordeaux together for over 40 years. This used to take place (no prizes for guessing) in Southwold, but it has now moved to Farr Vintners, where tasting happens in a purpose-built modern tasting room.
The tastings began when a group of prominent UK wine merchants and critics decided to create a systematic approach to evaluating Bordeaux vintages. They chose Southwold as their venue due to its removal from the commercial pressures of London and the wine trade’s usual haunts.
The Southwold Tastings are particularly important for several reasons:
First, they represent one of the most comprehensive evaluations of Bordeaux wines outside of France. The group typically tastes through 100-150 wines per session, covering all the major appellations and virtually every significant château.
Second, the collective experience of the tasters – who include leading merchants, critics, and writers – provides a unique perspective that combines commercial insight with technical expertise. This combination has proven invaluable in predicting how wines will develop and perform in the market.
Third, the timing of the tastings, several years after the vintage, offers a more measured view than the frenzied en primeur tastings that occur when the wines are still in barrel.
From an outsider’s perspective, I think the third point is the real beauty behind the Southwold tastings.
They represent something increasingly rare in today’s world: a long-standing tradition that prioritises careful, considered evaluation over immediate judgement.
We live in an era of instant opinions and rapid-fire social media reactions, an entire vintage can be discarded as meaningless, or put on a pedestal based on a few weeks of in barrel tastings.
Reasons why the above is true which may be hard for Bordeaux to admit
Bordeaux needs proponents. To caveat this, I definitely view this through more of an ‘investment lens’ than most. It cannot however be denied that the most recent En Primeur campaign(s) did not work for most Chateaux. Having a group of the most high-profile critics and merchants shining a (relatively) unbiased light on the great wines from recent vintages gives drinkers and collectors the impetus to identify, and (more importantly) buy Bordelaise wine.
Bordeaux needs wine investors. Sara Danese, CFA wrote a great article about this. It’s linked here, and I’ll post an excerpt below.
“Investors, collectors, and people who buy wine En Primeur are essentially financing the châteaux. Without the EP system, châteaux would need to go to a bank and borrow all the costs to grow and make that wine against, say, a 10% interest rate until the wine is ready to be sold.”
“Some can survive without it, but many cannot.”
For fine wine investors to be interested in Bordeaux, the wines must have two key characteristics. They need to be sold at a price which allows room for upwards movement, and there needs to be continued demand for back vintages of Bordeaux. The first point is down to the Chateaux, the second is driven by people like the Southwold Group.
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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.
