“Fine wines in recovery thanks to few strong and emerging wines rather than the most known bottle”

The fine wine market reached its lowest point in February 2026, but since March it has returned to growth, recording increases in bottle prices for four consecutive months. This was confirmed by analysis of the first semester 2026 carried out by Cult Wine Investment, a UK-based wine investment company managing 200 million pounds and 1.7 million bottles of wine across 83 countries worldwide. According to the report, the monthly variation of the index declined by -0.08% in January and -0.01% in February, before rising by +0.05% in March and stabilizing in the following months at +0.02% and +0.03%. The recovery, the company explains, was largely driven by a minority of strong and emerging labels rather than by well-known and established bottles.
Among the regions recording the largest price increases, Italy and France led the way in the first 6 months of 2026, with Tuscany standing out for Italy, marking a gain of +1.52%, as also confirmed by the Liv-Ex indexes, the benchmark platform for the global secondary fine wine and collectibles market, analyzed by WineNews. Piedmont, by contrast, performed less well, declining by -0.36%. Across the Alps, Champagne recorded growth of +0.63%, the Rhône Valley +0.35%, and Bordeaux +0.29%, while Burgundy continued to struggle (-0.2%). Fine wines from the United States also saw their prices fall by -0.46%.
March 2026 also recorded the highest percentage of wines which increased in price, at 43.3%. This figure then stabilized at 43% in June, although it remained below the share of wines that experienced price declines, at 49.5%, while the remaining 7.5% saw no price change. Furthermore, the data showed that one quarter of all wines ended the first half of 2026 with prices between -1% and +1% of their starting value, and two thirds were priced above +5%, indicating that “sellers have stopped accepting lower bids and prices have stopped falling to meet them”, as observed by Cult Wine Investment.
While this describes the broader fine wine market, the picture is slightly different for the 5,393 wines that were actually traded during the first half of the year. Among traded wines, the share of those recording price increases rose from 36.7% in January to more than 44% in May, reflecting “a more pronounced shift than in the overall market”. The report also highlights that wines over 50 years old gained an average of +2.9%, and that wines priced above 500 pounds outperformed the broader market. In contrast, some of the most famous and highly rated labels failed to do so. Moreover, the higher the score of the critics, the lower the price performance: wines rated 98-100 points declined by an average of -0.43%, while those rated below 90 points increased by +0.57%.