Burgundy Prices Soar

Investments in Burgundy have proven to be a safer bet than many stocks during this tumultuous year.

“We’ve seen an uptick in people who traditionally you wouldn’t think of as wine enthusiasts. So now you have producers making less and less, while demand is going up.”

ANTHONY ZHANG

Co-Founder and CEO VinoVest

burgundy has been soaring in value for many months,

showcasing one of the best investment attributes of the collectible wine market: its low correlation to publicly traded securities.

While the S&P 500 tumbled more than 16% this year through May, collectible wines were up an average of more than 3%, and Burgundy—the top tier of the market—climbed 18.6%, continuing an almost uninterrupted surge since the beginning of 2021, according to Liv-Ex, a London-based wine marketplace and creator of major wine indexes.

“Collectors with Burgundy in their portfolios have the most bragging rights these days,” said Justin Gibbs, co-founder of Liv-Ex. “Some producers literally have just a few barrels produced, so getting bottles is a feat.”

In this year’s first quarter, some Burgundy wines saw prices up by triple-digit percentage points over the same period last year. The 2018 vintage of Domaine Bernard Bonin’s Meursault Le Limozin exploded 171%, and Prieure Roch’s 2017 Vosne-Romanee Clous was up 164%, according to Liv-Ex.

The spotlight on Burgundy is the wine market’s latest act. Until 2016, Bordeaux seemed unbeatable as the most coveted wine and accounted for about 70% of the sales, due largely to its popularity in China. But after the Chinese government passed a new law prohibiting officials from receiving gifts, sales of Bordeaux plummeted.