The most valuable information in fine wine is not in any database. 1275’s purchase strategy follows a rigorous structure of due diligence (sourcing, selection and safekeeping), but this is only as sound as what information we feed into it. The decisive calls are made elsewhere: in conversation, at a table, on the phone with someone we have known for years. As a friend put it this week, much of what we know, we hear through the grapevine.
Open secrets
In financial markets, trading on privileged information is a crime. Fine wine is unregulated, and the information that matters most is not hidden from insiders willing and able to seek it out. It is held by people and shared in confidence, rather than recorded or filtered through the press. How good a vintage truly is at a given estate, a château’s succession plans, a domaine’s distribution strategy and how this impacts its market depth: all this intel contributes to an estimate of intrinsic value, where the right wine, the right price, and the right timing meet. Dare we claim that, in fine wine, timing the market is possible. This is how we made our call in the Q1 Market Watch that top estates would offer access rather than lower prices throughout 2026. It came from listening, not just modelling, and it has shaped our purchase strategy for this year since.
The data that matters
No decision is made on instinct alone. We use data, but selectively, and two quantitative measures matter most. The first is a wine’s long-term price appreciation. It has shown that, with one or two exceptions, mature Bordeaux is a better purchase than En Primeur or very young vintages such as 2022: the early years are often flat, while the market waits for rarity to set in. The second is the closest thing we have to a measure of demand: the bid:offer ratio on Liv-ex, the fine wine’s largest exchange platform. When offers to sell outnumber bids to buy, someone is clearing stock, and demand is softer than asking prices suggest.
Beyond this, crunching scores or short-term price performance can be a fruitless exercise, and an easy path to misreading the data. Some Burgundy domaines make so little wine that a single event – one dinner with determined buyer and their deep pockets – can lift prices for a few weeks or months. On a chart, this might look like momentum. In reality, it is one order, with no promise of longevity. Telling a moment from a trend takes judgement, and judgement comes from being in the room.
Intelligence in confidence
Filtering data and gathering market intel take us a long way, but the final piece of the puzzle is the most important: the family or collector themselves. A portfolio built on someone else’s taste or timeline becomes a burden rather than a privilege; wines bought to drink in twenty years serve little purpose for someone who wants to open them in five. So we listen in both directions, to the market, and to our clients. Every 1275 collection begins with the collector, through conversations held in confidence, matched with broad market intelligence to build a portfolio that not only performs, but matters personally to its owner.