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Vinum Fine Wines Market Report April 2025
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Welcome to the April 2025 Fine Wine Market Report. Strictly speaking, I should be writing about events that happened in March but, given ‘Liberation Day’ happened on the 2nd April, I feel duty bound to break that constraint. As I write, conventional markets all over the world continue to fall, bounce, and then fall again, all thanks to the new-found ‘liberation’ in the U.S. And now, they have just bounced again – massively this time as Trump suspends the imposition of the dreaded tariffs, except for China. Oh no, they’ve just gone down again.
At one point Fox News felt so liberated they decided to remove the stock market’s ticker from the bottom left corner of their screens, as the S&P and the Dow etc. slumped further. I wonder why?
President Trump told the world what he would do, and he did it. The world was surprised but it shouldn’t have been. The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has told us we are now living “in a completely new world”.
The queue to negotiate with the White House is already a long one, but deals will be done. Uncertainty and volatility is the state of play, and for now it’s hard to see the positives although the 90 day suspension is definitely a step in the right direction. What next, we all wonder?
This is my favourite, and most alarming, graphic of the last few days:
[The Fed’s “Beige Book,” formally known as the “Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions,” is a report published eight times a year that summarizes anecdotal information on economic conditions across the 12 Federal Reserve Districts, providing a qualitative overview of the economy.]
Over the long term what will be more damaging for the fine wine world – the immediate effect of import tariffs on European goods into the U.S. or the wider, ripple effects of this brave new world?
My guess is that wealthy American collectors will not turn their backs completely on the (premium) wine market of the market because of the tariffs – they can, after all, buy and keep wine within the EU or the U.K. until such time there are no tariffs (as an important aside, the threat of 200% tariffs on all alcohol has now subsided, as the EU has dropped Bourbon from its reciprocal target list). The supply chain will also do what it can do to alleviate the price rises.
My concerns are more centred on the wider effects of the trade wars. Uncertainty is up, meaning confidence is down and wine enjoys confidence. The recent Trump turnaround would suggest sense will prevail but the trade war between the US and China will inevitably have economic implications.
When events like the ones we are currently witnessing unfold there is always a lot of chat in wine world about low correlation. Whilst it is agreed that wine price performance does indeed have low correlation with the major asset classes over the long term, this does not constitute a buy signal. The dust needs to settle.
March indices performance:
