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My friend Sam posted on his Facebook page the other day, "don't look at your 401k or IRA statements, kids!" Good advice, Sam. If you're of the investing age and wondering whether Bordeaux futures are a better bet than the roiling stock market, well, it seems that no one quite has the answer to that...yet.
In the past, wine futures have been a fairly safe investment, provided you have a cellar, can spot fakes, are willing to sit on a product that could spoil (and resist drinking your retirement away, literally), and know your Haut-Brion from your Latour.
Now it seems the wine futures market, which in the past just kept going up, up, up, is starting to lag a bit, even with the almost insatiable demands of new wine collectors in Asia. At a recent fine wine auction in Hong Kong, buyers reigned it in a bit, passing up such goodies as the 2005 Romanee-Conti, arguably the world's greatest Burgundy estate.
Still, no reason to panic yet: the Liv-ex 500 fine wine index, which indexes collectible wines from around the world, showed a 12.3 percent gain from November 2007 to October 2008, which is more than I can say for my IRA.
