Alternative Outlook

The growth of the wine investment market has been significant over the last decade and each year provides exciting opportunities for investors keen to secure their money in the commodity. But what does 2013 have in store?

It is fair to say 2012 was a mixed year for wine investors. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 finished 9.6 per cent down on the year and struggled in particular up until July, when notably Vin-x called the market and issued the statement in the trade press that they felt that the market had bottomed. The 2011 crop was not a …

Fine wine prices in 2013 could rise 14% above their 2012 year end level, a new forecast predicts.

The Wine Investment Fund, an unregulated collective investment scheme, says this is the best time to enter the wine market since 2009.

The risk profile of the market compares much more favourably to recent years, the author of the report, TWIF investment manager Chris Smith says.

‘Our realistic worst-case scenario a fall of only 5%, whereas an increase of 25% by the Liv-ex 100 Index is well within the boun…

Anyone who is concerned about the falling value of fine wines from the Bordeaux region should look at the price drop as an opportunity. That is according to Schroders senior adviser Alan Brown, who has suggested that a wine which has lost its value may well regain it over time. He said that investors should “take a long-term view,” and recommended that people should avoid buying high and selling low as “the price may recover in the long term”. Mr Brown said that wine investment is linked to what is happening on the stock markets as “p…

On the outskirts of a Wiltshire town, buried 100ft (30m) underground is more than £1bn worth of fine wine.

About 12 million bottles, some worth thousands of pounds each, are in storage – stacked floor to ceiling in the Octavian vaults beneath Corsham. The global demand for fine wine has remained “static” and it is estimated that investors have lost more than £100m over the past four years. But beneath the Wiltshire countryside the vast 30-acre subterranean complex is continuing to fill with Château Lafites, Latours, Pétrus’ and Mar…

In collecting and investing terms, whisky is rapidly becoming the new wine and, with a little research, investors in rare whisky can potentially make substantial gains.

The Dalmore recently broke its own record of £120,000 for the most expensive bottle of whisky ever retailed with the sale of its 62-year old ‘Drew Sinclair’ bottle. This is one of twelve individually named bottles originally released in 2002. One of these bottles sold at auction in 2002 for £22,000 (hammer price), another bottle sold in 2005 for £32,000 (bought…

Since 1988, when reliable data first became available, the fine wine market has generated an annualised return of 12.1 per cent.

However, investment is about risk as well as return, and on this dimension too, wine performs well. Taking every five-year period since 1988, wine has shown a negative return in just one period – with a loss of only 1.1 per cent. By comparison, the FTSE 100 has seen 72 negative periods, with the worst being a loss of 39 per cent. Historically, fine wine has proved to be a low-risk asset class. To understan…

The Wine Investment Association was officially launched yesterday promising to set up regulations and processes that protect wine investments of private individuals.

The new self-regulatory body has been set up in response to a series of high profile wine fraud cases relating to investments in fine wine.

The WIA’s initial members hope to attract some of the biggest names in fine wine investment so that it carries the authority of the entire fine wine market. It today published its first code of practice for consultation, outlining t…

A veritable feast of Burgundy wines are heading for auction at Christie’s in London next week, in what could be a vintage month for wine investment in the UK.

Scheduled to take place on Thursday November 8th, the sale, which is entitled “Fine and Rare Burgundy and Other Fine Wines” will bring a jaw-dropping 455 lots to the company’s King Street address.

The auction comes two months on from a memorable sale of wines at Christie’s that featured a number of 12-bottle collections from the Richebourg Grand Cru of 1990 and a variety o…

Folk are so hard-up for returns, an increasing number are falling for the latest hustle – whisky sold as a hot “alternative investment.” Penta decided to investigate the growing secondary market for whisky when a public relations executive sent us a breathy and alarming pitch: “Investment Grade Scotch (IGS) is rapidly becoming a hot commodity in the alternative investment market, out-performing luxury goods such as gold and diamonds.”

We got a hangover just reading that sentence, so we took some Ibuprofen and poked around to…

Investors face being ripped off buying overpriced plonk dressed up as fine wine that will grow in value. One wine fund has issued ten top tips on how to avoid losing your bottle.

The tips come hot on the heels of a claim in the Financial Times that one wine fund overvalued its stock and a proposal from the regulator, the FSA, to ban the selling of these types of investments to ordinary members of the public.

Wine funds come under a category the regulator calls Unregulated Collective Investment Schemes (UCIS). It wants to ban these f…