Taking to Drink: Nervous Investors Flock to Vintage Wine

Bad times for Wall Street. Good times for wine merchants like London’s Berry Bros. & Rudd.

Ok—this is interesting: South African wine blog Boschendal has a post citing London’s most famous wine merchant, Berry Bros. & Rudd, has one of the best weeks in its 310-year history. The reason? At a time when global markets are tumbling, investors are looking to put their money into safe havens—and for many that means vintage wines.

In fact, while BBR has sold around £60.5 million-worth (that’s about $112 million) of wine since April, it saw business surge last week by more than $9 million—a 20% jump over the same week last year.

And it wasn’t just wine merchants like BBR who saw demand soar. Auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s (BID) also saw strong sales last week. Last week, Christie’s sold £1.65 million worth of claret and Burgundy in just two days, with the 2000 vintage of Chateau Lafite-Roshchild fetching the equivalent of £910 a bottle, according to Boschendal. (Christie’s is controlled by François-Henri Pinault, the CEO of Paris-based luxury goods giant PPR (PRTP) and son of French billionaire François Pinault.)

Moreover, according to London’s Telegraph: “Live-ex, a research company that runs a fine-wine index, estimates that prices of the best vintages have increased by 50% since the start of last year – in sharp contrast to the stock market, where prices have fallen by 15%.”