Steal the Wine This Holiday Season

Don’t drink the wine! 

That’s my message to you as we head into the holidays, when wine often flows freely at Christmas and New Year’s parties. 

Now, of course, you’re going to drink the wine.  

It will likely already be open.  

Others will already be drinking the wine themselves, and truth is there’s little reason not to drink the wine, even though the wine you come across during the holidays is not likely to be anything beyond a basic bottle of over-dressed grape juice. 

But… 

Just maybe you end up a party where the host pulls out a bottle of the good stuff. I mean, the really good stuff—a properly aged California Cabernet from one of the cult wineries, a silky Super Tuscan from Italy, or an earthy Burgundy from France. If you’re lucky, you see a high-end white Bordeaux on the table as an after-dinner tipple. 

If so…don’t drink the wine! 

Steal the wine! 

OK, that’s probably going too far. But understand my rationale for encouraging holiday thievery: Collectible fine wine is a hot market right now. 

Earlier this month, Liv-ex, which publishes various wine investment indices, released its 2022 report on the investment side of the fine wine industry. In short, this past year was a pretty good one for high-end wine. 

The benchmark Liv-ex 100, which represents price movements for 100 of the most sought-after fine wines on the secondary market, is up 7.1% so far this year. That beats stocks, bonds, and gold, and only marginally trails the dollar index. The broader Liv-ex 1000 is up nearly 14%. 

For 2023, Liv-ex’s analysts see headwinds tied to economic volatility. Though wine has proven to be a stable long-term investment, it does experience short-term gyrations tied to emotion rather than logic. 

That said, wine, like all hard assets, is an inflation hedge…a quality investment for the inflationary era we’re now in and which promises to hang around for a while. 

Better yet, wine is a diminishing asset. 

Most of the world’s wine aficionados care more about savoring than saving, and every time they pop open a bottle, the supply of that vintage shrinks. Over time, fewer and fewer bottles remain, which means wine investors are sitting on assets that are increasingly valuable. 

I learned about this firsthand because I ghost-wrote a book on wine as an asset class for one of the biggest wine distributors in America, and because I once had a 600-plus bottle collection of fine and rare wines that sold for tens of thousands of dollars at auction.  

Not everyone buys into this idea that wine is an investment-grade asset. To most people, it’s a beverage, not something to invest in like stocks. 

Nevertheless, there are fine-wine investment funds (with enviable track records that have been around for more than a decade now) and financial news service Bloomberg tracks and publishes the Liv-ex indices. Both of those give the asset class legitimacy. 

I tell you all of this only because the version of inflation that has settled in is a long-tailed beast. It’s not going away anytime soon. And with that as the case, it makes sense to pay attention to non-traditional hard assets—wine, art, coins, etc.—that have a long history of faring well in inflationary periods. 

To invest in wine, you don’t have to hold the bottles yourself at home or build a special cellar to house them properly (which is crucial to preserving value). These days, it’s easier to just rent space at one of the specialty wine-storage facilities that have popped up all over the U.S. 

So, that’s my message: As the wine flows freely at upcoming holiday parties, think about the opportunity wine represents as an investment class. 

And if you want to impress friends and family at one of those parties, well the year’s most-traded wines globally were champagnes, and you’re certain to make a splash if you show up with one of these:  

• 2008 Louis Roederer, Cristal 
• 2014 Louis Roederer, Cristal 
• 2012 Dom Perignon 

And if you see someone surreptitiously eyeballing the unopened bottle…well, you’ll know they read this dispatch and are looking for the opportune moment to steal the wine!