Value, Patience and Remembering Why We Bought It in the First Place
For serious collectors, wine occupies an unusual place.
It can be an agricultural product, an expression of place, a luxury good, a passion, a centerpiece of hospitality - and, under the right circumstances, an appreciating asset. A bottle of great Burgundy or Bordeaux can provide an experience that lasts an evening. The same bottle, left untouched in a properly managed cellar, can sometimes increase substantially in value.
That tension is part of what makes collecting wine interesting.
At DonFam Cellars, we believe the objective should rarely be to transform a cellar into a miniature investment fund. The better goal is to build a collection intelligently enough that enjoyment and financial stewardship can coexist.
Some wines should be opened. Some should be held. And a relatively small number may deserve to be treated as genuine investment-grade assets.
What Makes a Wine Investment Grade?
Price alone does not make a wine investable. An expensive bottle without an active secondary market is simply an expensive bottle.
Investment-grade wines generally share several characteristics: an internationally recognized producer, demonstrated longevity, limited production, strong critical reputation, multiple years of auction or secondary-market activity, dependable provenance and enough global demand that a buyer is likely to exist when the owner eventually wants to sell.
This is why the investable universe remains relatively concentrated. Bordeaux First Growths and selected Right Bank properties, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and other elite Burgundy producers, highly collectible Champagne, certain Tuscan and Piedmontese estates and a comparatively narrow group of California producers dominate serious secondary-market activity.
Liv-ex's California 50, for example, tracks only five California wines - Screaming Eagle, Opus One, Dominus, Harlan Estate and Ridge Monte Bello - illustrating just how selective the market can be.
The lesson is important: great wine and investment-grade wine are not necessarily the same thing. There are thousands of extraordinary wines worth cellaring and drinking. Only a fraction should be purchased because you expect someone else to pay substantially more for them later.
What Has the Last Decade Actually Looked Like?
Fine wine's investment history is more complicated than some marketing presentations suggest.
The decade included a powerful recovery beginning around 2016, a significant acceleration during the pandemic-era luxury-asset boom, extraordinary appreciation in certain Burgundy and Champagne wines, and then a substantial correction beginning after the 2022 market peak.
In 2016 alone, the broader Liv-ex Fine Wine 1000 rose 22.3%, while the Bordeaux 500 gained 23.1%. The recovery followed several difficult years for Bordeaux and was helped by currency movements and renewed international buying.
The next several years ultimately produced one of fine wine's strongest modern bull markets. But anyone evaluating returns today must include what happened afterward.
As of August 2026, the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 stands at approximately 321. It is up about 3.3% over the most recent year, yet remains down approximately 6.8% over two years and 7.4% over five. The broader Fine Wine 1000 is similarly down about 7.9% over five years.
Individual regions have behaved very differently. Over the same five-year period, Burgundy remains slightly positive, Champagne is up approximately 9%, Italy approximately 5%, while Bordeaux, Rhône and several other categories remain considerably below earlier levels.
Taken across roughly the past decade rather than selectively measuring from market lows to market highs, the broad fine-wine market has produced a much more modest result than the extraordinary returns sometimes associated with a handful of famous bottles.
A reasonable way to think about the last ten years is that a diversified collection of established investment-grade wines could have generated low- to mid-single-digit annualized appreciation across the full cycle, with materially better results for collectors who selected the right Burgundy, Champagne, Italian or individual producer positions - and considerably worse outcomes for those who bought fashionable wines near the 2021-2022 peak.
Those are gross asset-price movements, not necessarily the collector's realized return. Storage, insurance, transportation, auction or merchant commissions, bid-offer spreads and taxes can all reduce the final result. Wine therefore rewards selectivity and patience considerably more than frequent trading.
The Auction Market Tells Us Something Different
There is another piece of the market that deserves attention. Wine prices have corrected significantly, yet auction participation remains remarkably healthy.
Sotheby's reported $127.5 million of Wine & Spirits auction sales in 2025, an increase of 12% from 2024 and more than double its $47 million total in 2015. Burgundy represented 39% of Sotheby's sales, while Bordeaux rebounded sharply to 28%.
Perhaps more important for the future of collecting, one-third of Sotheby's buyers in 2025 were new clients. Half were under age 50, and half of that group was under 40. Bidders participated from 63 countries.
Christie's has also continued to demonstrate strong demand for exceptional provenance. Its December 2025 sale of the Jürgen Schwarz cellar achieved $4.25 million and was 98% sold by lot. A May 2026 sale from Andrew Lloyd Webber's cellar was 100% sold and achieved 134% of its presale value estimate.
That does not mean wine prices broadly are rising again. It means something more nuanced.
Collectors still want extraordinary wine. They are simply becoming more discriminating about what they will pay for it.
That distinction may define the next decade.
A Market Moving From Speculation Back Toward Collecting
The 2020-2022 market was unusually forgiving. Rising asset prices, inexpensive capital, pandemic-era collecting behavior and scarcity allowed many wines to appreciate simultaneously.
The current environment looks different.
Liv-ex now describes a much more selective market in which buyers concentrate increasingly on established producers, compelling vintages and perceived value. Current trading data also shows shifting preferences. Since 2010, for example, the value of white wine traded through Liv-ex has increased approximately 650%, while sparkling-wine trade has increased dramatically. Red-wine trade value in 2025, by contrast, was 15% below its 2010 level.
Consumer behavior presents another complication. The OIV estimates worldwide wine consumption fell another 2.7% in 2025 to approximately 208 million hectoliters, reflecting economic pressure, changing consumer preferences and structural declines in mature wine markets.
At first glance, falling wine consumption sounds threatening to collectible wine. For ordinary wine, it certainly presents a challenge. For the rarest wines, however, the relationship is less direct. Sotheby's buyer demographics suggest that younger collectors continue entering the luxury wine market even while overall global consumption falls.
This creates a marketplace increasingly divided between wine as a beverage and wine as a scarce collectible experience. That may ultimately favor truly exceptional producers while making mediocre ‘investment wines’ increasingly difficult to sell.
What Might the Next Ten Years Produce?
Forecasting wine prices ten years forward with precision would be misleading. But planning ranges can still be useful.
For a carefully constructed portfolio of highly liquid, blue-chip wines purchased at sensible valuations today, we believe a reasonable base-case planning assumption might be approximately 3%-6% annual gross appreciation over a ten-year holding period.
That should not be interpreted as a guaranteed return. Rather, it is a reasonable target against which an acquisition can be evaluated.
Under a weaker scenario - continued declines in consumption, limited Asian demand, trade disruption, excessive release pricing and changing luxury preferences - returns could be approximately 0% - 2% annually, with some individual wines losing value.
A stronger scenario - involving renewed global wealth creation, increased Asian and American collector participation, disciplined producer supply, greater scarcity and continued demand for established luxury brands - could potentially produce approximately 6% - 8% annualized appreciation for a well-selected portfolio.
Individual wines could perform substantially better or worse. The more important point is that the next decade probably will not reward indiscriminate buying.
Producer selection, acquisition price, provenance and liquidity will matter more than simply owning expensive wine.
The Advantages of Wine as an Asset
Fine wine possesses several characteristics that make it appealing within a collector's broader balance sheet.
Supply naturally declines over time because bottles are consumed. The world's best vineyards cannot simply expand production to satisfy demand. Great producers have global recognition. Fine wine's value is not directly tied to corporate earnings or interest payments, giving it characteristics distinct from traditional financial markets.
And unlike nearly every conventional investment, wine offers an unusual form of downside utility.
If a stock disappoints, one owns a disappointing stock. If a case of excellent Bordeaux fails to appreciate as expected, one still owns a case of excellent Bordeaux.
That distinction matters. The ability to consume the asset provides an emotional return that traditional investment analysis cannot easily measure.
The Disadvantages Are Equally Real
Wine produces no dividends, interest or cash flow. It requires physical storage. Its condition deteriorates if improperly handled. It is considerably less liquid than publicly traded securities. Pricing is imperfect. Transaction costs can be meaningful. Authentication and provenance matter enormously. Changing critics, consumer tastes and regional preferences can alter demand.
And perhaps most importantly, wine has the dangerous tendency to make collectors believe that because something is rare and expensive, it must eventually become more valuable.
It does not.
Plenty of expensive wines have substantially underperformed conventional investments - or even their original release prices.
Drink, Hold or Invest?
This is where DonFam's philosophy becomes especially important.
A cellar should not become a museum filled with bottles its owner is afraid to open because every dinner represents a potential financial transaction.
The collection should support a life.
One practical approach is to classify cellar holdings into three categories.
Drink wines are purchased primarily for enjoyment and should be opened within their appropriate drinking windows without concern about their secondary-market value.
Hold wines are bottles that are improving with age and may appreciate, but their ultimate purpose remains consumption.
Investment wines are positions intentionally acquired with possible resale in mind. These should have strong provenance, demonstrable secondary-market liquidity and enough quantity that selling some bottles does not eliminate the collector's opportunity to experience the wine.
For many collectors, buying six or twelve bottles rather than one is what makes this possible.
Drink some. Hold some. And, when the market warrants it, sell some.
That is a healthier approach than staring at a cellar full of theoretically valuable wine that never reaches the table.
What We Would Buy Differently Today
The current market favors discipline.
We would generally emphasize globally recognized producers with long auction histories rather than newly fashionable labels; strong vintages acquired after meaningful market corrections; wines with demonstrated trading liquidity; Champagne and selected white Burgundy where consumption trends and secondary-market participation continue evolving; carefully chosen Italy, particularly producers with established international demand; select California estates with genuine global recognition rather than expensive Napa Cabernet broadly; Bordeaux where current pricing has returned to compelling historical levels rather than simply purchasing every new release; and original wooden cases, documented professional storage and impeccable provenance whenever investment value is important.
Most importantly, we would buy wines we would still be pleased to drink if our investment thesis proved wrong.
That single rule prevents many bad wine-investment decisions.
A Better Definition of Return
When evaluating a cellar, financial appreciation is only one type of return.
There is also the return from opening a perfectly mature bottle with family. The return from introducing a friend to a wine they remember years later. The return from building a collection that reflects places visited, producers known and experiences shared.
And there is the quiet satisfaction of knowing that part of the cellar has also been managed intelligently enough to preserve or increase its financial value.
The best collections accomplish both.
They contain wines worth owning. Wines worth holding. And, most importantly, wines worth opening.
Wine Insights. Navigation. Enjoyment.
DonFam Cellars provides collector guidance, cellar planning, acquisition analysis, provenance assessment and auction-market navigation. Wine should not be treated as a substitute for a diversified financial portfolio, and future wine-market returns cannot be guaranteed. To learn more or book a private consultation, email us at info@donfamcellars.com or call 914.586.2288.