Fine wine
A market of a few thousand serious participants, priced in cases of twelve, settled in bonded warehouses, and quoted almost entirely gross of cost. It has had a boom and a twenty-four percent correction inside four years and almost nobody outside the trade noticed either.
Every wine fund publishes a chart showing wine beating equities. Here is the same window, using Liv-ex's own published numbers, with nothing selected for flattery. Liv-ex themselves conceded in the H1 2025 report that the Fine Wine 100 had underperformed every major asset class bar crude oil.
| Asset | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 YTD | Cumulative | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 gross of storage, insurance and commission | -14.1% | -9.5% | -2.5% | +0.6% | -23.7% | WineNews (reporting Liv-ex) |
Liv-ex Fine Wine 1000 the broad fine wine market | — | — | -4.5% | +0.4% | -4.1% | The Drinks Business (reporting Liv-ex) |
S&P 500 total return, dividends reinvested | +26.2% | +24.9% | +17.7% | +12.7% | +109.1% | ChartRow |
Gold annual change in the spot price | +13.2% | +27.2% | — | — | +44.0% | Visual Capitalist |
A dash is a figure we could not cite, not a zero. Windows are not identical: the S&P and gold figures run to whatever their cited source's latest print covers, later in the year than the Liv-ex 2026 YTD figure, which is to the end of February. That flatters the other rows by several months of a rising market. It does not come close to closing the gap.
Two ways to the same number
Chaining the four published annual returns gives -23.7%. Dividing the latest index level by the peak gives -23.8%. They agree to a rounding error, which is the only check available when a data series has six points, and it is worth doing precisely because it is cheap.
How much of your return was just sterling?
Fine wine is quoted in pounds on Liv-ex and sold in dollars, euros and Hong Kong dollars. For an American, a meaningful share of any wine “return” since 2022 is the currency, not the wine, and no wine broker has ever volunteered that decomposition. Put your own rates in.
The wine did
+15.0%
in sterling, its own currency
Sterling did
+10.7%
against the dollar
You got
+27.4%
in dollars, which is what you spend
Rates are yours to supply: we do not carry an FX series we can cite on this page, and inventing one to save you a lookup would break the rule the rest of the page runs on. The Bank of England publishes daily GBP/USD reference rates back to 1975.
Sentiment, and whether it is worth anything
The trade's own indicator is the bid:offer ratio: live bids against live offers across every wine on the exchange. It is behaviour, not opinion, and Liv-ex's own research puts it two to five months ahead of the index. It fell sharply before the 2022 peak and began climbing from historic lows in mid-summer 2025, before the recovery showed up in prices.
Liv-ex also runs an opinion survey, and this is the part that belongs on a site built around forecasting. A year ago the trade consensus was that the Fine Wine 100 would fall 1.9% in 2025. It fell 2.5%. The trade was directionally right and 0.6 points too optimistic, which is a better showing than most sell-side equity forecasts manage. The current consensus is +2.1% over the next year, with the UK trade at +2.5%.
We do not publish a bid:offer level here. Liv-ex describes the series and its behaviour publicly but does not print the numbers outside its own charts, so there is nothing citable to plot.
Nobody can buy the Liv-ex 100. You can buy the companies that make and sell the stuff, and the gap between how those trade and how the bottles trade is its own series: the listed names move with the Chinese luxury consumer, the bottles move with the collector.
| Company | Symbol | Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| LVMH | MC.PA | Moet Hennessy: Dom Perignon, Krug, Cheval Blanc, Yquem |
| Pernod Ricard | RI.PA | Perrier-Jouet, Mumm, scotch and Irish whiskey |
| Constellation Brands | STZ | Robert Mondavi, Schrader, The Prisoner |
| Treasury Wine Estates | TWE.AX | Penfolds Grange, Beaulieu, Stags Leap |
US-listed symbols open in the FatNarwhal chart at /data/stock. Paris, Milan and Sydney listings need a non-US quote source, which is plan-13 phase 1.