Is wine a better investment than stocks? Read to find out

You have stocks, shares and even an occasional NFT in your investment portfolio. Now, learn how buying Bordeaux could potentially be profitable. (Provided you don’t drink it all.)

The idea that wine can be an investment was almost a running joke for the longest time. In fact, the only reason our ancestors held onto wine was that it was practically undrinkable for the first 10 years of its life. . Today, while technology and experience have allowed us to harness the variables governing a wine’s flavour profile better, there is still a certain unmatched charm in uncorking wines that have aged for decades. 

But with each old bottle opened, there are fewer left to be enjoyed and shared. And this growing paucity, in-keeping with the dynamics of supply and demand, can drive prices up.

So, hypothetically speaking, if I had bought bottles aplenty from the 1982 vintage when they were launched and stashed them away in a controlled space for all these decades, today I would have been in a position to plan an early retirement by simply selling them selectively. Alternatively and equally hypothetically, if I had made the same investment in 1983 (or worse encore, from 1992), just a few years apart but significantly poorer in terms of weather, which badly affected the quality of wine produced and consequently their potential to age, I would be a working man with a huge debt to pay off and plenty of dead bottles of wine!

Which is why we now have wine investment specialists. These are usually financial experts, who work in the financial space with more traditional investment products, who further have a specialised team that understands the world of wines in depth and know what to pick up and when to let it go.

For better insight, I got in touch with Hedonova, an AIF firm that invests in alternative assets like wines, NFTs, crypto, and P2P lending. Suman Bannerjee, the CIO at Hedonova, sat me down and took me through the main aspects of wine investments — how they handle it, how I can get on board and what kind of returns can I look at.