Will your cellar mature in value as well as flavour?

Wine has been on a bull run since 2001, with the Liv-Ex 100 wine index up almost 160%. But could the credit crunch mean a bubbly end to the wine market?

Baroness Rothschild is head of one of the world's most famous wine estates. So it speaks volumes about the wine market that in June this year, the 72-year-old owner of Chteau Mouton Rothschild felt compelled to remind the world that wine is meant for drinking, not as "a speculative investment". Wine is being touted as an alternative investment as the new global elite try to find places to store their wealth. "But does the bottomless wealth spawned by globalisation promise a reassuring future for our wines or just a bubble of prosperity that could easily burst if one day those new buyers look elsewhere for the symbols of their success?"

Fears of a painful ending to the bull run in wine are nothing new. The Liv-Ex 100, a London-based international wine index that tracks the prices of around 70 big wine brands, is up almost 160% since July 2001, and more than 50% in the past 12 months alone. So who is buying all this wine? There are two main types of buyer. The first is hardly a new phenomenon. Wine has been a status symbol for centuries at banquets, the Romans gave different qualities of wine to people depending on their social standing. But whereas 2,000 years ago it was shown off on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, today it is in Moscow and Shanghai that the best wines are displayed. There, in the cellars of the richest houses, you're far more likely to find a first-growth wine (see below), such as Chteau Margaux, than you are a bust of Mao. At a recent auction in Zachys New York, where a half-case of 1974 Roederer Cristal Rose champagne (estimated at $1,000 to $3,000) went for $23,800, more than half the buyers were Asian.

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