Quarterly
Market Update Q1 2026 NL
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Quarterly
As we write this update, Europe is in its third heatwave of the summer, with temperatures in Bordeaux exceeding 40°C and much of Europe under weather alerts. For fine wine, the implications go beyond the season. After the smallest Bordeaux harvest since 1991 in 2025, and the second-smallest in 2024, the 2026 growing season is shaping up to deliver a third consecutive short vintage. Whatever one’s view on the underlying causes, the structural consequence is clear: the supply of top wines is contracting precisely as demand returns. For existing holders of benchmark wines, scarcity– always the foundation of fine wine as an asset – is being reinforced at the source.
Against this backdrop, Q2 2026 confirmed and extended the recovery. What began in late 2025 as stabilisation, and developed in Q1 into early recovery, is now broadening into genuine price appreciation led by the parts of the market where real consumption demand lives.
Realised transaction prices across the most liquid investment-grade wines rose approximately 4.4% in the quarter – the largest quarterly gain since early 2022, leaving trade prices roughly 9.5% above their mid-2025 trough. The gain was driven almost entirely by the auction channel (+4.5%), while exchange prices were broadly flat (+0.2%).
This divergence deserves attention rather than concern. Auctions are where end consumers, private collectors across Asia, the US and Europe, transact directly, and auction prices have historically led the broader market. A record-setting quarter at auction, including single-owner sales clearing well above estimates, signals that final demand is back. Exchange benchmarks typically follow with a lag. Since our portfolio is valued at Liv-ex market prices, our marks remain conservative relative to where wines are actually changing hands, and the convergence, as it occurs, works in our favour.
The liquidity data supports this reading
Beneath the surface, the recovery is led by older, rarer and higher-priced wines. Wines sixteen-plus years from vintage have recovered fastest across every major region: as mature wines enter their drinking windows, consumption steadily removes supply. The premium end shows the same pattern – the EUR 400-plus per bottle cohort returned approximately 9% over twelve months, against roughly 1% for lower price brackets – typical of trophy wines, which lead both corrections and recoveries.
This validates the breadth of our portfolio construction. We are deliberately diversified across the age spectrum: mature trophy positions such as Dom Pérignon P3 1990, Ausone 2000 and Pétrus 2009 sit squarely in the cohorts leading the recovery, while our younger benchmark positions – acquired consistently below market – represent the future supply of exactly these mature, scarce wines. Time converts one into the other.
Regional exchange benchmarks were mixed over the quarter, with attention partly absorbed by the En Primeur campaign. Burgundy led the regional indices (the Burgundy 150 rose 0.7% in May alone), supported by strong demand for top domaines. White Burgundy was the standout, with top premier and grand cru whites up double digits year-to-date as consumption shifts toward great whites – a trend that directly benefits our Raveneau and Leflaive parcels.
Italy continued its steady advance (the Italy 100 gained 0.5% in May), with Tignanello and Sassicaia again among the most traded wines globally by both value and volume, and Soldera extending its exceptional multi-year run.
The broad Champagne index drifted sideways, but this masks pronounced strength at the top: mature prestige cuvées gained roughly 9% over the past year, making Champagne the strongest-performing regionon a twelve-month view – performance concentrated precisely in the rare bottlings we hold.
Bordeaux and the Rhône were flat at the index level, with trade attention focused on the 2025 releases, while California softened despite active trading in cult names. Late-quarter auction data also showed early signs of a seasonal summer slowdown, with California cults and parts of the Rhône giving back recent gains. We read this as cellar adjustment ahead of the summer hiatus rather than a change in direction – but the recovery will not move in a straight line.
American buyers re-engaged meaningfully this quarter, with purchase share rising month-on-month and US wines reaching arecord 7.8% of value traded on Liv-ex year-to-date. This is constructive for overall market depth – but it is a flow that has proven sensitive to policy shifts before, and not one on which we would build a thesis.
The quarter was dominated by the Bordeaux 2025 En Primeur campaign – and for the first time since the fund’s inception, we participated.
Our scepticism toward En Primeur is well documented: for most of the past decade, release prices left no margin for the buyer, and back vintages consistently offered better value. That analysis has not changed. What changed is the vintage and, in select cases, the pricing.
2025 combines two things that rarely coincide. Quality: the leading critics place it alongside the modern greats – comparisons to 2010, 2016 and 2019 run consistently through the major reviews, with several wines rated potentially perfect from barrel. And extreme scarcity: yields fell across every appellation, with Pomerol down roughly 30% against its ten-year average, some estates losing half their crop, and icons such as Cheval Blanc and Ausone producing no second wine at all. A vintage of this quality, at these volumes, cannot simply be replaced by buying back vintages later.
The campaign as a whole received a mixed reception, and rightly so: several estates priced above comparable back vintages, and we passed. But a handful of releases were priced where the downside was limited and the upside significant – likely the lowest price at which these wines will ever be available. The clearest example is Pontet-Canet, released around EUR 60 per bottle for what critics regard as potentially one of the finest wines the estate has ever produced. At that level, the asymmetry was compelling, and we acted – applying the same discipline to a small number of further releases where price, quality and scarcity aligned. Details follow in the portfolio chapters.
This is not a change of philosophy. It is the same rule we have always applied – buy only where quality, scarcity and price converge – applied to a campaign that, for once and only in places, met the test.
Q2 2026 marks the point at which the recovery moved from stabilisation in the data to rising prices in reality – led by auctions, mature wines and the premium end of the market, where genuine collector demand resides. Liquidity has improved on every measure we track, exchange prices are converging toward realised transaction levels, and structural supply tightens with each short vintage.
There will be pauses, and the summer may prove one of them. But the direction is increasingly well established, and the conditions that reward patient, disciplined ownership of scarce, world-class wines are strengthening. Our approach is unchanged: selective acquisition below market, broad diversification across regions and maturities, and the patienceto let scarcity do its work.
