Bordeaux wine producers used to release their stock en masses In the past,
“Price,” he [Chris Smith, a wine investor] says, “is a function of supply and demand, and the traditional story of wine investment is that supply of any particular wine can only reduce over time as bottles are opened and drunk.”
With prices going up over time,
the decision made by Bordeaux châteaux, more or less from the 2006 vintage onwards, to hang on to much more stock than was the case in the past (from almost nothing to a full two-thirds of a particular harvest) has changed the game…..
If all of the stock of a particular vintage, though, is either held by private investors or retained by the châteaux, the traditional narrative falls apart, and top Bordeaux ceases to be what The Wine Investment Fund calls “the only asset class with a perfect inverse supply curve”…
The ‘lower risk approach’, Smith insists, is to continue to invest in pre-2005/6 vintages within his fund’s ‘universe’ of 35 châteaux. Those are the wines which are being guzzled. Guzzling is essential.
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