If you have read anything about wine this year you will have read that the industry is in a bad way, that consumption is down again, sales are poor and producers are selling at a loss or not selling at all. Most of it is true and none of it is much fun.
But that story is about wine in general, and we do not sell wine in general. Up at our end of the trade something rather more interesting is going on, because the market has quietly split in two and hardly anyone is talking about it.
Up at one end, down at the other
After three years of falling, the headline indices have started to tick up again, and while the gains are modest they are at least green, which is a colour that has been in short supply since 2022. When we looked at the market in May the best that could be said was that the decline had stopped, so this is a genuine step forward, if only a small one.
Look underneath the headline, though, and the picture divides very neatly, with mature vintages edging upwards while the younger end, the wines released in volume over the past decade, carries on drifting down. The same split shows up well beyond Bordeaux, and the better performances of recent months have come from older, ready-to-drink Champagne, Burgundy and other established icons rather than from anything recent.
Where the buyers are
Across the market there are now comfortably more buyers than sellers for wines from the middle of the last decade and earlier, and rather more sellers than buyers for anything from 2020 onwards. Buyers have been sitting on their hands since the pandemic, and while nobody is exactly rushing, they are at least flexing their fingers in a way they were not three years ago.
None of which is much of a mystery. Years of large En Primeur releases, from virtually every region and at prices that were never realistic, poured a great deal of young wine into a world that was steadily drinking less of it, and all of that stock has to be physically consumed before the young end can recover. Drinking, unfortunately, is the slowest process in the whole business. It is the same arithmetic that kept us out of the 2025 campaign and has kept us out of every campaign since 2005.
Mature wine has the opposite problem, which is to say none at all, because it has been drunk, broken up, badly stored or simply lost along the way. What survives is genuinely scarce, so any meaningful uptick in demand ought to feed through into higher prices, in theory at least.
It is scarcer still than the screen suggests, because many merchants now list wine they do not own, taken straight off the exchanges or from another trader’s offer sheet, which is a perfectly legitimate way to do business but does rather distort the picture. Six offers of the same wine and vintage on Wine-Searcher can quite easily be one physical case, and mature wine, where the quantities are smallest, is where this happens most. As we said when we started this journal, not every list is what it looks like, so if you want to know whether a wine is truly available, ask the merchant whether they own it and how quickly they can ship it.
Looking further out, Colin Hay, Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po in Paris, editor-in-chief of New Political Economy and Bordeaux correspondent for the drinks business, argues that falling yields and shrinking vineyard area could leave us short of fine wine by 2028 or 2029. We would not buy on the strength of any forecast, but it does sit awkwardly alongside the idea that wine is a dying asset.
If you are buying
Fine wine has not been this cheap in real terms for more than a decade, and yet trading volumes are running well ahead of last year, which to our eye is what a market finding its floor looks like rather than a market dying.
Claret from the 1990s and early 2000s is one obvious place to start, though the same logic applies to trophies from every major region, and the wines worth having are those that are properly stored, correctly documented and priced at levels last seen ten years ago. Whatever you buy, fine provenance and a long drinking window ahead of it should underpin the decision.
If you are selling
The instinct is to wait, and we would gently push back on that.
Waiting is not free, since storage, insurance and idle capital all cost something, and the recovery we expect will be a slow one, spread over years rather than months and uneven between regions and vintages. If what you hold is mature and correctly stored then you are holding the one part of the market where demand outstrips supply, which is a considerably better position than sitting tight in the hope that 2022 prices come back. We have set out the various routes to selling a cellar elsewhere, and the choice between them matters more in a market like this one than it does in a rising one.
It is worth knowing too that buyers have become noticeably fussy, so immaculate cases with a clean bond history sell perfectly well at sensible money while tired stock with a vague past does not sell at any money at all. That gap has widened and it will stay wide until demand properly returns.
No bell rings
We are not going to tell you the bottom is in, because nobody knows that and anyone who claims otherwise is guessing. What we will say is that prices have stopped falling, demand has shifted to older wine, and the wines changing hands are the ones people actually want to open, which makes this a far more workable market for buyer and seller alike than the one we had eighteen months ago.