By September last year is was clear that 2024 would not be yet another ‘vintage of the century’
02 July 2025 – 06:02
by MIchael Fridjhon
For some time now fine wine has been promoted as an instrument of investment (rather than as a consumable). Prices of the best known international wines had been increasing well ahead of inflation, prompting institutions to package them (or derivatives of them) in tradable units. For the past 25 years transactions in the underlying assets have been recorded on Liv-ex — which maintains indices across all the major classes. This supplied the trends on which brokers of these financial instruments were able to engage with potential investors.
In Britain wine is considered an investible commodity that can be included in your pension investments, and this in turn fuelled the boom: since it’s deemed to be a “wasting asset”, it’s exempt from capital gains tax. This has obviously helped to drive the growth. Over time the wine funds, ever on the lookout for different properties to add to the mix, also diversified their selection criteria beyond the blue chips of Bordeaux classed growths…