Everything you need to know about investing in wine: the top ten investment brands, top ten traded wines and much more…
Penfolds Grange and St Henri illustrate two facets of both grape and winemaking technique, best illustrated when you taste them side by side. Steven Spurrier reports on a tasting of 11 wines from the past three decades
Troubled French online wine merchant Heracles, formerly 1855.com, has been forced into liquidation after a major investor withdrew support for its recovery plan.
Fine wine market analysts are increasingly confident that prices for recent vintages of top Bordeaux have bottomed out after a three-year slide.
New trading platforms are, for the first time, allowing fine wine collectors to deal directly rather than via third parties. But are they a good bet? John Stimpfig surveys the scene...
What lies behind Cristal's status as one of the most sought-after and collectible Champagnes? Giles Fallowfield explains how it's made and tastes eight recent vintages...
Auction News by Howard G Goldberg, from Decanter Magazine July 2012 issue, as Mel Brooks’ famous creation looks back on 2,000 years of wine.
Burgundy bacchanal
Bordeaux 'embarrassed' by 2010
Like the trio of most recent Bordeaux vintages, two decades ago all the talk was of the ’88s, ’89s and ’90s. John Stimpfig looks at how their fortunes have fared as investments
Sign language In Asia, it’s often not the wine that matters, it’s the meaning – and money – behind it
Mouton 2008 price rockets
Significantly higher levels of trading on the Liv-ex platform in recent months might suggest a broader fine wine recovery beyond Lafite (see p117). So far, much of that activity has focused on the resurgence of the 2000 and 2005 vintages.
There was little doubt about the enthusiasm of US critics, notably Robert Parker, for the 2007 Southern Rhônes. In the Wine Advocate, Parker awarded 10 100-point scores, beating the previous record of 2000 Bordeaux with nine and 2001 California with eight.
A new player in Bordeaux will provide a ‘five-star’ provenance certification on every case of wine it sells. Bordeaux Provenance guarantees that all wines sold via its online portal
Just months after Vinfolio created the world’s largest fine wine consumer trading platform, Vinfolio MarketPlace, the firm has been forced to seek protection from bankruptcy.
Reports from Bordeaux about the quality of 2009 continue to up the ante. With some châteaux owners claiming that their wines are the greatest they have ever produced, the first trade tasting of the vintage was held in London last month,
UK merchants and commentators have come out in an unusual show of agreement with Robert Parker’s assessment of Bordeaux 2009, which appeared in the Wine Advocate at the end of April.
Fine wine merchants and wine fund managers are expecting an influx of UK wine investors following the Government’s proposals to amend Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on non-business assets.
London merchant Bordeaux Index has launched the first fine wine price index to monitor the movement of fine wine prices on a daily rather than monthly basis. Eponymously titled, ‘The Bordeaux Index’, it will track the live changes in the prices of 80–100 of the most liquidly traded wines on its LiveTrade market making screen, launched in May last year.
One of the first reactions of the trade following the ultra-high release prices of the 2009s was to laser in on the best value back vintages. For many, that was the not-yet-bottled 2008.
The late summer and early autumn saw dramatic rises in the price of the second wines of Bordeaux’s first growths. Carruades de Lafite, Les Forts de Latour, Pavillon de Margaux and Le Petit Mouton easily outperformed a static market which continued to consolidate strong gains made in the first half of the year.
