Alternative Outlook

When it comes to investing in fine wines, investors appear to be concentrating on French produce alone and may be missing out on grapes grown in Austria, Italy and Portugal, according to research published by professors at the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Business School.

Dr Apostolos Kourtis, lead author of the report and a professor at the school, says: “The investment market deals mostly with French wines, but we found that diversification across the different varieties of French wine is not that effective.

“However, our r…

It might be tricky, when faced with a bottle of fine wine, to do anything other than open it and pour yourself a glass. But for those who can eschew instant gratification, wine can offer a fantastic investment. Through the stock market turbulence of recent years, fine wine has become a safe haven.

Over the last five years, the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100, which tracks the price of the world’s most sought-after wines, has outperformed leading benchmarks, including the FTSE 100 – rising 62% over the period, and 15% in the last two years. I…

Is the bordeaux bubble about to burst? That is the question analysts are asking after new figures showed the price of investment-quality wine had tumbled 7.5% in the three months to September.

In the aftermath of the credit crunch wealthy investors poured their money into “alternative” investments such as fine wine, a trend that has seen the top vintages sell for six-figure sums.

Gary Boom, managing director at wine merchant and trader Bordeaux Index, blamed the drop on buyers becoming more savvy. He said: “The market has definitely defla…

Surging demand for Chateau Lafite and other French trophy labels, especially from Asia, has pushed both prices at auction and wine futures to records. Not all wine dealers are happy.

The prices for some of the most expensive bottles are starting to discourage even billionaire collectors, said dealers — some of whom had warned in January of a bubble that could burst in 2011. Chinese and other buyers balked as some Bordeaux producers raised prices as much as 80 percent last month for the new vintage offered “en primeur,” when it is sti…

Fergus Fung swipes his card across a sensor and waits as his face is scanned by a computer to match his profile. A steel door opens and the Hong Kong entrepreneur enters a vault that holds his treasure of Bordeaux and Burgundy.

This is the Hong Kong Wine Vault, one of more than 15 repositories that have been set up in the past three years in the Chinese city as it overtook London and New York as the world’s biggest auction market for top wine labels like Chateau Lafite, Domaine Romanée-Conti and Krug. The temperature is a constant 13 Cels…

For most people, wine is a pleasant tipple that makes life that little bit more enjoyable at the end of the day. Some drinkers take it more seriously than others.

Some drink more of it than others. And a growing number of connoisseurs are buying wine not simply to drink but to make money.

The numbers speak for themselves. Over the past decade, fine wine has soared in value. A bottle of Chateau Lafite would have cost £130 in the summer of 2001.

Now it is worth almost £1,000. Chateau Latour, another famous name in wine, has …

At Château Latour in Pauillac, horses plough the vineyards just as they did in the 14th century, when vines were first grown on the estate. But this is a recent return to tradition at Latour, one of the five renowned “Premier Grand Crus” of Bordeaux, and it’s based on sound commercial considerations rather than sentimentality.

Prices of fine wines have surged on the back of an explosion of interest from China and other Asian countries in recent years. Unable to increase production – land is limited and there can be only one harves…

Less than six months since the announcement that the sweet wines of Bordeaux can be imported into China officially, what impact can we expect to see on the wine investment market place?

Lunzer Wine Investments, the renowned fine wine fund management specialists, predicts the change means Chateau d’Yquem will become the next big winner for the wine investment market. Wine expert Peter Lunzer, who invented the concept of the Wine Price Ratio, is tipping it could even outperform the current favourite wine in China – Chateau Lafite.

“Chateau …

It has so far been a good start to the year for investors in fine wines – with prices continuing to climb thanks to demand in both traditional and emerging markets.

Fine wine prices were up 3.7% month-on-month, according to Bordeaux Index, making it a record February for sales by the index provider and fine wine merchant.

In comparison, global equities rose 1.72% from February 1 to today, according to the MSCI World Index IMI.

The strong February comes on the back of equally good returns in January, when prices rose 3.8%, co…