By
CultX Team
Investing in wine has become an increasingly popular alternative asset class over the past decade. Whether for those looking for returns and diversification, those who have an underlying passion and interest in wine, who see building a wine portfolio as a critical path in their wine journey, or savvy enthusiasts who leverage the appreciation in the value of their wine collection to fund their future drinking and vinous pleasures.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s never been easier or more enjoyable to start building a wine collection, and with increasing digitisation through platforms like CultX, which incorporate professional storage and global logistics, space at home for your collection no longer limits the size of your ambitions.
Whether you are purely financially motivated or driven by passion, it never pays to overpay. Whilst the market has become more efficient over the past decade, with platforms like Liv-ex, Wine-Searcher, and BI live trade, making spreads and data more accessible, you still often find wines being offered at quite large spreads, even 20%+ for the most liquid wines such as first growths.
It is of paramount importance when buying for investment not to overpay. If you intend to resell in the future, paying 10-20% more than you need to can eat into any potential profits and give you an uphill battle when trying to achieve your target returns.
With the increasing popularity of wine as an investment, more companies are being launched to help new investors enter the market. So, it’s as important as ever to check the price you’re paying before jumping in.
We are also seeing a growing trend of crypto-led platforms and those built on the blockchain, which attracts a whole new audience into the world of wine collecting. Despite being wrapped up in an attractive digital wrapper, the fundamental product is a physical case and bottles of wine, so regardless of the structure of how the investment is made, stored, tracked and resold, the underlying asset (i.e. the bottles in the warehouse) will determine the price more than anything else.
Just because something looks and sounds good doesn’t necessarily mean it's a good investment or a fair price.
CultX is a free-to-use platform that provides users with historical and current data on thousands of wines. As well as real-trading information, current market demand (order book), bids and offers, and market pricing information.
The easiest way to track the prices of wines you already own, are looking to buy, or might have been offered to purchase, is to track wines through the Watchlist or External Portfolio feature on CultX.
These tools enable you to track wines, check market trends, and make well-informed decisions, ensuring you always pay the right price.
The External Portfolio feature is free to use, takes seconds, provides an instant, live valuation and could help you save thousands when buying your next wine!
Simply navigate to the left-hand menu and choose Portfolio. It will, by default, take you to your CultX Portfolio, but if you toggle the menu to External Portfolio (as per the image below), you can start adding wines you’d like to search for.
From here, simply click the ‘+’ icon in the top right-hand corner of the table or the button that says ‘add wines’.
From here, you will see a pop-up that will allow you to search for and add any wine that exists in our database. Simply type in the name of the wine, choose the correct wine from the dropdown, and choose other relevant info, such as the unit size and vintage quantity. You can even add a purchase price if you’ve already bought or have been offered the wine at a certain price.
Once you’ve finished adding the wines, your External Portfolio will provide you with the relevant market price information, as per the image below.
In this example, x2 bottles of Mouton 2019, Haut-Brion 2019, and Opus One 2019 were added to the External Portfolio. The value in the top left-hand corner tells us that these wines are worth £1,679.48*, and individually, the total value of each line is detailed in the table.
If you click the name of the wine, it will take you to that specific product page, where you can find more useful information that can guide you when making a buying decision.
Firstly, as per the image below, there will be an orange tag saying, Part of Your External Portfolio, so you now know this is a wine you are tracking.
On this page, you can see the current market value, the historical price graph, as well as useful callouts underneath the graph, which show the change in price over 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10 years and Max time, if available.
If you toggle the order book, you can also see the active bids and offers for this wine across all unit sizes.
In the example below for Haut-Brion 2019, I can see that there are no live offers for this wine on the platform, but there are active bids for the 6x75cl market. I can also see that the most recent trade was £1,607* for a 6-pack on 30th January 2025. This represents ~£267* per bottle, which is below the current market value of £293* per bottle.
So, in two or three quick, easy steps, by using CultX for free, a user can add wines to their External Portfolio and immediately check the current market value, last trade, order book and active bids and offers.
If the user is using the mobile app, they can continue to track those wines from their phone and set up alerts for every time there is a bid or offer. This gives users instant access to wine price information, even when on the go!
Sign up for a free account on CultX today and unlock the insights and tools you need to make smarter decisions.
*Prices and trading data used in this article are for illustrative purposes only and may not reflect the current values for this wine. Past performance is not indicative of future success; the performance was calculated in GBP and will vary in other currencies. Any investment involves risk of partial or full loss of capital.
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