Wine Storage
Are you considering fine wine as an investment?
Are you storing your wine portfolio correctly? Is your broker storing it correctly for you? Do you know exactly where your wines are being stored? Have you in fact done any due diligence or even checked online, the warehouse where your wine is being stored?
When we look at storage of fine wine, we always think of having a temperature controlled chiller at home, but when you consider wine for investment, it must be stored in a dry place with stable temperatures. Preferably a professionally managed wine storage facility that you can rely on.
Wine storage is always a difficult subject to tackle, as wine investors we don’t want to pay too much to keep our investment portfolio. But then again we don’t want to use the cheapest and find out that a truck backed into our wine and we didn’t have any proper insurance coverage!
I have always been happy in general with the storage conditions of the professional wine warehouses that I have visited. Some could do with being a bit cleaner and definitely more organised but some have been a wonderful experience. Most professional warehouses are not very private investor friendly due to the volume of wine they store and manage on a daily basis. The real issue here is balance, balancing the cost of storing wine with the returns you expect to generate.
In reality you should not be paying more than 1-2% per annum to manage your wine portfolio. If you are then it could be time to look at changing your warehouse or broker.
We like to visit our wines and count physical bottles, if you do not reside in the same country then this may be difficult for you to do, even once a year. Therefore you need a good reliable company that is going to do it for you. Ask your broker when they last visited and checked your wine. Another tip to take on board is to ask when they last did a paper audit of their clients wines. We try to do this at least twice a year and sometimes it happens three times in a year. We also do a small audit of each individual clients portfolio every time they buy a new wine. Its these additional, yet time consuming tasks that ensure minimum loss on quality and security of your wine investment portfolio.
Take a look at our fee schedule for a list of our charges for wine storage. Sure Holdings Fee Schedule
