We started buying and selling fine wine in Sussex in 1999, though John Morgan had already been trading wine for twenty years by then. Long enough ago that pricing came by fax, allocations came by phone call, and a customer who wanted to see what a case of 1961 Léoville Las Cases was trading for had to ring three merchants and trust the answer.
Below is what has changed in the secondary fine wine market since the company opened its doors, across almost half a century of John in the trade, and what has stayed the same about how we do business.
The market we started in
In 1999 the secondary market for fine wine was a network of phones, fax machines and trust. The big merchants (Berry Bros., Justerini & Brooks, Corney & Barrow) sat at the centre of it and traders like us at the edges. Pricing was opaque by design. A bottle of 1982 Mouton might be £180 with one merchant and £260 with another, and unless you knew both numbers, you were paying whichever you got quoted.
The Bordeaux En Primeur campaigns of the late 1990s were already a fixture, but the futures market was modest, the allocations were genuine, and the prices on release were demonstrably below the eventual market clearing price. Buyers could reasonably believe the campaign rhetoric.
Burgundy was Burgundy. The same families farmed the same hectares, prices crept up annually, and most collectors had a single merchant who looked after them.
Champagne was for drinking. The major houses released vintages without much fanfare, and Krug, Salon, Cristal and Dom Pérignon were occasional collector wines, not the speculative instruments they later became.
What changed, in three eras
1999 to 2008: price transparency arrives
Wine-Searcher launched in 1999, the same year as MCW. Liv-ex launched in 2000. Both were small for years and then suddenly weren’t. By 2007 a buyer with a laptop could see in seconds what we had spent years learning by phone. We adjusted, set our prices to be competitive on Wine-Searcher, and got on with the job of finding wine that other merchants didn’t have. The opacity premium was over. Good. It made the trade more honest.
2008 to 2014: the Asian boom and the first big correction
Lafite went from a serious wine to a status object. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 doubled and then halved. A generation of wine investment funds appeared, marketed wine as a recession-proof asset, and largely went bust. We watched several houses fold and quietly took on parts of their orphaned client cellars. The lesson from that era stuck: the wines that hold value are the wines people actually want to drink.
2014 to 2026: the mature secondary market
Bordeaux’s role as a default has narrowed; Burgundy has overtaken it for prestige and for trouble. Champagne has become a serious collecting category. The 2016 to 2022 bull run carried almost everything up, and the correction since October 2022 has carried most of it back down. By late 2025 the indices had stabilised, and 2026 finds the secondary market sitting at prices that buyers from the 2017 to 2019 EP campaigns paid on release. The wheel turns.
What we’ve kept the same
Since the Bordeaux 2005 campaign we have traded only the secondary market. We haven’t sold an En Primeur case since. We don’t run an investment fund (though we’ll advise informally if asked), and we don’t represent wineries or ship from source. We follow the market. We don’t try to make it.
We buy from private cellars and trade stock, and occasionally from auctions back when the auctions were still a trade venue rather than retailers in their own right. We sell to drinkers, collectors and merchants in the UK and beyond, and that’s the whole business.
We’ve never sought scale for its own sake. John founded the company, runs it, and still personally handles the wines that need a careful eye. The rest of the team is two people. There is no sales team. No one is on commission. No one has a target to push you a case of something you didn’t ask for.
We quote in GBP ex-VAT. We accept bank transfer because that’s how the trade still works, and occasionally credit card. We’ve never sent a brochure with a celebrity wine writer endorsement on the front, because we have never wanted to be that kind of merchant.
What’s harder now
Genuine provenance is harder to verify than it was, because the wine has moved more times. A case of 2005 Latour might have been in five bond accounts by now. We spend more time on provenance checks than we used to and we walk away from cases more often. We buy at meaningful scale, around £500,000 a month at current run-rate, and being able to walk away matters more when you’re buying that volume.
Bonded warehousing has consolidated. Some excellent old names have been absorbed; some less excellent have grown. We’ve stayed loyal to the warehouses that have stayed loyal to standards, and London City Bond has been one of those constants for us.
The number of wines that move at meaningful volume on the secondary market has actually shrunk. The list of “everyday fine wines” (Bordeaux 2nd Growths, mid-tier Burgundy, vintage Champagne) is still healthy. The middle has thinned.
What hasn’t changed
The wine still tastes the same. A 1996 Château Gruaud Larose is still a 1996 Château Gruaud Larose, regardless of what the index has done in the meantime.
The reasons people buy fine wine are still the reasons people bought fine wine in 1999. To drink something properly aged. To put a case away for a child’s birth year. To quietly sell a parcel that was bought too enthusiastically a decade ago. To hold a few cases as a long-term store of value. None of those are speculative. All of them are reasons we are happy to help.
The relationships still take years. Our oldest active accounts have been with us since the early 2000s, and a handful from even earlier than that. We know their cellars, their preferences, what they’re drinking now and what they’re putting away. That is the core of what a fine wine merchant is for, and no algorithm has changed it.
What’s next
We don’t have ambitions to grow into something we aren’t. The trade rewards merchants who are easy to deal with, knowledgeable, and reliable on provenance. That’s the niche we picked in 1999 and it has aged better than half the wine on our list.
If you’ve never bought from us and want to take a look, the list is online. If you’ve got a cellar to sell or a parcel to value, the same offer holds as it has since 1999. Pick up the phone or send an email. We answer both.
Thanks to every customer who has bought from us, sold to us, sent us a wine to taste, asked us a question, or pointed a friend in our direction over twenty-seven years. We’re still here because of you.
John, Alick and Mel