Wine Versus Stocks During the 2000s
July 4, 2012 - Aesthetic Investments
How do fine wines fare recently against stocks as investment vehicles? In the June 2012 version of their paper entitled “A Study of the Evolution of High-End Wines in Switzerland”, Philippe Masset, Jean-Philippe Weisskopf and Vincent Deboccard construct the recent evolution of fine wine prices in the Swiss market (among the world’s largest for fine wines). They define fine wine as “wine with a secondary market value, ability to improve in a bottle, a strong track record [and] critical acclaim.” They compare performances of an index comprised of 225 fine wines (post-1969 vintages, mostly red) and a high-end (first growth) fine wine segment to those of equity market indexes. Using secondary market prices from a leading wine auction house in Switzerland during March 2002 through December 2011 (22,711 observations from 46 auctions), and contemporaneous stock index returns, they find that: Keep Reading