Fine Wine Prices Falling: Why It Happened, What Is Next
Updated
Fine wine prices fell hard, the falling stopped about a year ago on the published indices, and the headlines have not caught up.
Here is the shape of it. Knight Frank's Luxury Investment Index, published on 23 April 2026, records that the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 "posted a decline of 2.5% in 2025, with total losses at almost 25% since the 2022 peak". That is the number behind the "fine wine prices falling" story you have been reading. Now set Liv-ex's own published table against it. In early August 2026, according to Liv-ex, the Fine Wine 100 stands at 320.8, up 3.3% over twelve months and up 0.4% for the year to date, and the broader Fine Wine 1000 stands at 350.7, up 1.2% over twelve months. Over five years both are still down, by 7.4% and 7.9%. So: a quarter off the 2022 top, flat to marginally positive over the last year, and the dispersion underneath is the whole story. The correction is history. The recovery is not yet a fact.
Have fine wine prices stopped falling?
On the published indices, yes, for now. The three headline indices, the Fine Wine 50, 100 and 1000, are all positive over the trailing twelve months, according to Liv-ex, and the monthly moves are small in both directions: the Fine Wine 100 up 0.3%, the Fine Wine 1000 down 0.1%.
That is what a floor looks like while it is forming. It is not the same as a recovery, and the five-year column is the reason. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 50, which includes "the ten most recent vintages of Lafite Rothschild, Margaux, Mouton Rothschild, Haut-Brion and Latour", is down 22.4% over five years and up 1.2% over the last twelve months. A wine that lost a fifth of its value and has since gained 1% has not recovered. It has stopped bleeding.
Two traps in reading these numbers. First, the five-year window starts in 2021, before the top, so it understates the fall from the actual peak: Knight Frank's near-25% is measured from 2022 and is the honest drawdown figure. Second, an index is an average of ten recent vintages of a handful of labels. Your case is one wine, one vintage, one condition, one format, and it can sit a long way from that average in either direction.
Why did fine wine prices fall?
Four things happened at once, and only one of them was about wine.
Cash started paying. The Federal Reserve's published record of open market operations shows the federal funds target range moving from 0.25 to 0.50% in March 2022 to 5.25 to 5.50% by July 2023. A case of first growth pays no coupon and costs money to store and insure. When risk-free cash pays over 5%, every year you hold that case has a visible price, and the buyer who was in the market for a return rather than for drinking leaves. The Fed's most recent listed move, on 11 December 2025, cut the range to 3.50 to 3.75%, which removes some of that pressure without erasing it.
Trading narrowed. Liv-ex's weekly trade reports describe a secondary market carried by a short list of names. In one recent week Burgundy alone accounted for 32.5% of traded value, and Liv-ex notes that "the region's leading producers, Leroy, Comtes Georges de Vogüé and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), collectively represented around 10% of total market turnover". Three producers taking a tenth of everything traded is what a market looks like when the broad bid has gone and conviction buying is what remains.
Consumption fell. The OIV's State of the World Wine Sector, released in Dijon on 12 May 2026, puts world wine consumption at 208 million hectolitres in 2025, "down 2.7% compared with 2024", and attributes it to "long-term structural shifts in mature markets, changing consumer behavior and recent economic pressure on purchasing power".
Trade got taxed and slowed. The same OIV release records global wine exports falling to 94.8 million hectolitres in 2025, down 4.7%, with export value down 6.7% to 33.8 billion euros.
Which regions fell, and which held?
Champagne, Italy and Burgundy are all above where they were five years ago, according to the Liv-ex indices. Bordeaux and the Rhône are down roughly 18%. The gap between the best and worst regional index over five years is 27 percentage points, and that spread is more useful to you than any headline. Here is the Liv-ex table as published in early August 2026, with each index described the way Liv-ex describes it.
| Index | What it tracks | 12 months | 5 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fine Wine 50 | Bordeaux First Growths, ten most recent vintages | 1.2% | -22.4% |
| Fine Wine 100 | "100 of the most sought-after fine wines on the secondary market" | 3.3% | -7.4% |
| Fine Wine 1000 | 1,000 wines worldwide, the broadest measure | 1.2% | -7.9% |
| Bordeaux 500 | 500 leading Bordeaux wines | -0.4% | -18.3% |
| Bordeaux Legends 40 | 40 Bordeaux wines from exceptional older vintages, 1989 on | 0.1% | -12.1% |
| Burgundy 150 | 15 white and red Burgundies, six of them DRC labels | 1.9% | 3.1% |
| Champagne 50 | The 16 most actively traded Champagnes | 2.6% | 8.7% |
| Italy 100 | Five Super Tuscans and five other leading Italian producers | 2.9% | 4.6% |
| Rhone 100 | Five southern and five northern Rhône wines | 4.6% | -18.3% |
| California 50 | The five most actively traded Californian wines | 2.1% | -7% |
| Port 50 | The five most actively traded Ports | 1.7% | -7.7% |
| Rest of the World 60 | Six wines from Spain, Chile, the USA and Australia | 0.4% | -11.7% |
Read the five-year column and the story stops being "fine wine fell". Champagne is up 8.7%, Italy 4.6% and Burgundy 3.1%, according to Liv-ex, while the Bordeaux 500 and the Rhône 100 are both down 18.3% and the Bordeaux first growths are down 22.4%. Knight Frank makes the same point from the buy side: "Tuscan wines continue to prove resilient through the downturn. Many top Tuscan wines boast quality scores on par with Bordeaux and Burgundy vintages, yet trade at around half the price."
Two indices worth watching for opposite reasons. The Rhône 100 is the strongest twelve-month performer in the Liv-ex table at 4.6% and joint worst over five years. The Bordeaux 500 is the only index still negative over twelve months.
Did tariffs do this, or the demand underneath them?
Both, and the OIV data lets you separate them. US wine imports fell to 5.5 billion euros in 2025, "down 12% compared with 2024", according to the OIV, against a global export value decline of 6.7%. The US fell close to twice as fast as the world, which is what a policy shock looks like in trade data rather than a change in taste.
OIV Director General John Barker describes 2025 as a year in which "the disruption to international trade through tariff policies was yet another external impact that producers, exporters and supply chain must manage".
What matters for prices now is that the shock has been absorbed rather than resolved. Robbie Stevens, Head of Broking at Liv-ex, reporting back from the NAWR retail summit in New York, put the current state in two sentences: "Tariffs remain in place, but with a big question mark over them. Businesses have largely adapted." He also separates the fine wine end from the rest of the trade: "Several retailers reported softness in lower price points, while fine wine remains comparatively resilient." And he flags a demand-side change that has nothing to do with trade policy, noting that "changing consumer behaviours, partly influenced by GLP-1 drugs, are seemingly having an impact on demand".
Against that, the American bid has not disappeared. In one recent Liv-ex week, "US buyers accounted for 41.5% of purchase value".
What does a falling market do to en primeur?
It exposes the inventory. Sophia Gilmour, a market analyst at Liv-ex writing on the 2025 Bordeaux campaign, describes a vintage "near-unanimously declared by critics outstanding" and then the room it was sold into: "it is not easy to be entirely upbeat as one stands surrounded by leaning towers of unsold cases of wine."
The pricing behaviour is the tell. Of Lafite, Gilmour writes: "Having come down significantly in 2024, they were able to raise the price by 15% year-on-year while keeping the 2025 the cheapest of similarly rated vintages on the market." Both halves of that are true only because the earlier release fell so far. A château can raise its release price and still undercut its own back vintages when the secondary market has repriced beneath it.
The result was flat. Gilmour reports that "of UK merchants we surveyed, sales this year were flat on last year by value", and that "the majority of merchants we spoke to thought release prices were too high". For a vintage the critics called outstanding, flat is a verdict on price rather than on quality. It is also why a physical back vintage such as Bordeaux 2015 competes directly with a new release: you can taste one and only read about the other.
Will fine wine prices fall further?
Nobody publishing an index knows, and anyone quoting you a target is selling something. What you can do is watch the four conditions that produced the fall and see which have turned.
Two have. Rates have come down 175 basis points from the peak, according to the Federal Reserve's own record, and the trailing twelve-month numbers have crossed into positive territory across all three Liv-ex headline indices.
One is contained on the supply side, for uncomfortable reasons. The OIV reports the global vineyard surface area shrinking for a sixth consecutive year to 7.0 million hectares in 2025, down 0.8%, and global production at 227 million hectolitres, up 0.6% on 2024 but still "a low global vintage for the third consecutive year". Less wine gets made, so the overhang stays small: the OIV's own reading is that "production and consumption are broadly balanced".
One is unresolved: tariffs. Knight Frank puts it plainly, that "the outlook for 2026 hinges on whether a shift in US tariffs will revive demand from one of the market's most influential buyer bases". That is the swing factor, and it is a policy decision rather than a market one.
For context on where wine sits among comparable assets, Knight Frank's index of luxury investments "closed 2025 down 0.4%, marking a year of stabilisation after two years of losses" and has risen 38.6% over the past decade. Wine, down 2.5% on the Fine Wine 100, underperformed that basket in 2025.
How do you buy into a market that has already fallen?
By pricing the individual bottle, not the index. An index that is 25% off its peak contains wines that fell much further and wines that never fell at all, and the difference between those two is where the opportunity sits.
Three filters for a repriced market. Buy where the drawdown is deepest relative to quality rather than deepest outright: on the Liv-ex table that points at Bordeaux and the Rhône, and a page like Bordeaux 2022 shows what one vintage did rather than what its region did. Check the drink window before the price, because a bottle you will open in four years is a different trade from one you hold for fifteen, and drink-now scoring sorts your cellar on that basis. And run the all-in number, because a 20% fall in the hammer is not a 20% fall in what you pay once premium, duty, VAT and shipping are added, which the landed-cost calculator itemises line by line.
For the wines with the thinnest retail float, Pétrus among them, auction is most of the price discovery there is, so the index tells you less than the last five hammers do.
Get told when your wines move, not when the market does
An index is an average of somebody else's wines. What changes your decision is one bottle, one vintage, one price, on the day it moves.
Set alerts on the wines you want and we will tell you when a lot appears below the level you set, when a wine on your watchlist trades at a new low against its own peak, and when the spread between merchant asks and realised hammers opens far enough to be worth a bid. That is the difference between reading that fine wine prices are falling and knowing which of your wines just did.
Start with the fine wine market index for the drawdown series behind this page, how we calculate every number if you want to check us first, or wine investment risks for the costs a falling market makes impossible to ignore.