Forget Champagne – invest in these English wines for big returns

Telegraph

5 days ago

England's wine industry is ageing like a fine Sussex red. Tastings have proved that home-grown vintages punch well above their weight compared to established brands, and tours of English vineyards are attracting wine aficionados from across the world.
Yet while the quality of reds and whites is improving rapidly, it's sparkling wine that's catching the eye of connoisseurs, as well as courageous investors.
French Champagne houses are snapping up real estate in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire in an attempt to capitalise on the British wine boom.
Pommery, Taittinger and the Cava behemoth Henkell Freixenet have all bought vineyards in southern England – as a warming climate pushes grape-growing northwards.
As the industry has expanded, so too have the opportunities to make money from English wine as an investment. The market is still in its infancy, but with heightened risk comes opportunity.
Here, Telegraph Money explains how to boost the odds of lucrative returns.
The basics of wine investing
Which English wines to invest in
How to fit English wine into your portfolio
Storing your wine
Making investments tax-efficient
The basics of wine investing
The theory of wine investment is straightforward: you buy wine, store it and sell it later when its value has risen. The quality and scarcity of fine wine tends to appreciate over time, along with its price.
Because wine is a physical, tangible asset, like property or gold, it typically performs well against inflation. The kicker is that wine can spoil if kept under the wrong conditions.
Only some wines are good enough to make the cut. Less than 1pc of the wine produced around the world is considered 'investment grade' due to its quality, brand equity, limited supply, vintage appeal and ageing potential.
Will Hargrove, of fine wine merchant Corney & Barrow, says investing in wine should never be done with a time horizon of less than five to 10 years.
He says: 'You need to be able to weather the ups and downs of what goes on in the world.
'When you buy and store wine, you're going through a transition where the wine stops being available on the shelves to being available on the secondary market, hopefully at a higher price – although that's not always the case.
'Anyone investing in wine is relying on the consumer to be buying the wine and drinking it, because eventually the wine will go off.'
Which English wines to invest in
Because the investment market for English wines is still developing, there are no safe bets when it comes to choosing a vintage.
Hargrove says: 'The quality [of English wine] is massively on the up, especially among sparkling, but there are some good whites too, and the odd red, starting to creep in.
'The problem, from the point of view of investing, is no one knows how these wines are going to age, so it's a very tricky thing to get right.'
However, Gregory Swartberg, of wine merchant Cru Wine, says that investors shouldn't dismiss English sparkling.
He adds: 'There are English sparkling wines that are investment grade quality today and more will become investment grade over time.
'But you have to be extremely selective. You can't shoot blind in a brand or vintage you believe is good.'
Among the best investment-grade English wines, according to Matthew Small, of wine investment platform WineFi, are Nyetimber's 1086 Prestige Cuvée – at around £150 a bottle for the 2010 vintage – and Gusbourne's Fifty One Degrees North, whose 2016 vintage retails for £195.
If you compare 1086's critic score against one of the most famous Champagnes – Dom Perignon – for the same 2010 vintage, Nyetimber scores 17.5 out of 20, compared to Dom Perignon's 18.5.
While the quality may be similar, English producers are at a disadvantage for one simple reason: brand recognition.
Small says: 'Brand is one of the biggest determinants of price, as with all luxury goods. With wine the main three factors are brand, critic's score and supply.
'Dom Perignon is a globally recognised brand, and has massive distribution channels, massive history in every global market. Nyetimber is trying to build that.
'If you're going to invest in English sparkling, you're basically making the play that their brand is going to increase over time.
'Then the question is: what is the life expectancy of these wines? Or what we call the 'drinking window'. How long have we got for Nyetimber to become a globally recognised brand and for the price to go up?'
Nyetimber's 1086 is given a drinking window of around 10 years by wine ratings index Jancis Robinson.
The relatively short timescale shows why investing in English sparkling is more of a gamble, according to Small.
'For riskier investments you want a longer drinking window to give an opportunity for the brand recognition to increase.
'I'm not saying it won't happen, but a 10-year drinking window isn't a huge amount of time for a brand to become massive.'
Swartberg believes there is 'zero chance' of English still wines ever becoming investment-grade.
'There are too many regions in the world that are making very good [still] wines,' he starts. 'In the UK labour is expensive, it cannot compete with Spain or South Africa.
'It cannot compete with Prosecco or Cava as the cost is too high. But it's competing with Champagne straight away – the product is that good.
'Nyetimber is leading the pack – it's been making really good sparkling for a while. They have fantastic cuvée.
'Wiston Estate, Exton Park and Hembledon Wine Estate – we've seen some investment in these from outside the UK.
'Chapel Down and Sugrue are doing some very good stuff. The quality is there, but the investment market is waiting to ignite.'
'Champagne used to have our climate'
Growing confidence in English viticulture means even smaller producers have high hopes of producing investment-grade vintages.
In a tranquil corner of north-west Essex, pea-sized grapes hang on rows of rustling vines under the dry July sun.
The gently sloping 40-acre plot is surrounded by fields of wheat and divided by swaying alder trees which act as windbreaks to protect the precious crop.
'You've got to be a nutcase to do what I did,' says Paul Edwards, as he surveys the neat lines he first planted in 2008 – a £1.5m gamble at a time when the English wine industry was still in its hobbyist infancy.
'The farmers around us used to say 'what the hell are you doing?'. But in the end, it turned out to be viable.'
Saffron Grange is a boutique vineyard and English sparkling wine producer on the outskirts of the historic market town of Saffron Walden.
Edwards picked this spot because of its distinctive climate, topography and soil – what the French call 'terroir'.
The site sits on a chalk seam that runs all the way from the renowned wine-growing regions of northern France, up through Sussex and into East Anglia.
The same clay-loam upper layer of soil allowed crocuses to be grown and farmed for their saffron in the late Middle Ages – making the town rich and inspiring its name.
The vineyard's logo is a woolly mammoth, a creature that 200,000 years ago roamed over the land where Edwards and family now tend their vines.
'The climate we have in England is what Champagne used to have 30 years ago in its heyday,' says Nick Edwards, Paul's son. 'This is why our focus has been on sparkling – we wanted to do one thing and do it well.'
Saffron Grange is a minnow in the market, producing around 25,000 bottles a year – for around £30 each – compared to between one and two million from the established English names like Nyetimber and Chapel Down.
These in turn are dwarfed by the big Champagne houses, such as Moët & Chandon, which produces around 30 million bottles a year.
But there are perks of being a small player. Each October, some 300 volunteers pick up clippers and harvest the vineyard's crop, which is then carted to the winery's stainless steel fermentation tanks, before being rewarded with a slap-up meal.
This loyalty and pride in a small local business has kept costs down, and helped Edwards to turn a modest profit for the first time this year.
Paul and Nick believe their award-winning 2018 Classic Cuvée – a vibrant blend with notes of candied apple and stone fruit – is a candidate to become investment-grade one day.
Most of their wines are aged for two to three years, but they are holding back a small batch of the 2018 to see just how good it can get.
'We're focussing on producing the best we can on our land and building a reputation,' says Nick.
'We want to be seen as excellent quality sparkling wine that's affordable, that people want to drink and that can be relied on annually.
'But for a small volume of our wines, we want to see where we can get to in terms of quality.'
How to fit English wine into your portfolio
Because of the higher risks involved in buying English wine, the smart move is to balance out the investment with safer bets elsewhere.
Small says: 'The two key questions for an investor are: what's your time horizon and what's your risk tolerance?
'Unless you have massive risk tolerance, English wine has a small percentage to play in that portfolio.
'You would probably want under 5pc invested in English sparkling. Invest by all means, but alongside other more established regions.'
Bordeaux makes up around 40pc of the fine wine investment market, down from its near monopoly before 2012, but still the biggest share of a single region. Bordeaux traditionally has been the least volatile segment of the market –and also the most liquid.
'If someone wants low-risk wine, I would say they should go with Bordeaux. If they're more returns-focused I would say Champagne and Burgundy,' Small says.
'You can get these incredible spikes in certain regions. That's why it's important to have exposure to all the regions, including England, in a way that matches your risk tolerance.
'It's very difficult to know when a region's going to spike, but when it does, as long as you have some exposure to it you're going to take advantage.'
When considering which wines to invest in, Small says Wine-Searcher is 'a great tool'. The website offers a comprehensive database of all wines on the market and is used by merchants and investment houses to sell their bottles.
'Wine-Searcher also has critic scores and drinking windows. You can easily flick between wines to see how they rank.
'It's basically a Google search for all wines. It's got all that information on there.'
Storing your wine
If you are buying bottles of wine as an investment, you could choose to store it yourself. But be warned – maintaining optimal conditions is essential to ensure the wine remains at the highest quality possible, and doesn't undermine your investment when you eventually come to sell.
Small says: 'When you invest in wine you're effectively a custodian of the wine. You're storing it until it's in its perfect drinking window. Then someone will buy it who doesn't want to store it but just wants to drink the wine when it's at its best.'
However, if you are serious about building a portfolio, experts agree that storing your vintages 'in bond' is the best option.
Buying in bond means your wine investment is stored in a specialist warehouse approved by HMRC.
Small says: 'If you're buying these very expensive wines, a thing we call 'provenance' is essential – that's the quality of the wine and how well it's been kept.
'When you store in bond you know it's been stored in perfect humidity, light and temperature conditions.
'If you have a very rare bottle of wine but it was stored in someone's cellar you have no idea how it's been kept. Then you can struggle to sell that on. Storing in bond means there's an audit trail. You know it's been kept and stored properly.'
Wine can also be insured to its market value when stored in bond, reducing the financial risk if something goes wrong.
The tax benefit of in-bond storage is one of the biggest draws. Wine buyers are usually hit with a double-whammy of alcohol duty and then 20pc VAT on top of the duty and the price of the bottle.
But when wine is stored in bond you only have to pay tax on it when you take it out of storage, and if you decide to sell the wine while in bond, you will avoid paying duty or VAT altogether.
What's more, if you choose to have your wine delivered at a later date, the VAT is payable on the wine's original sale price rather than its current market value.
Prices typically range from between £10 to £15-a-year to store a 12-bottle case of wine. There are bonded warehouses dotted across the country. Some of the biggest names include Arc Wine Reserves in Cambridgeshire, Berry Bros & Rudd in Basingstoke, and Nexus Vinothèque in Wiltshire.
Making investments tax-efficient
If a bottle of wine has a life expectancy of under 50 years then HMRC classifies it as a 'wasting asset', which means it is exempt from capital gains tax when sold.
Capital gains tax is tax owed on the profit from selling an asset that has appreciated in value.
Small says: 'One of the main reasons to invest in fine wines in the UK is that it is capital gains tax-exempt.
'This is a massive plus, and makes wine a very good diversifier. It's not a substitute for a portfolio in equity and bonds, but it's good to have alongside as it trades on different fundamentals.'
The HMRC definition of a wasting asset is 'an asset with a predictable life not exceeding 50 years at the time when it was acquired'.
When assessing how long the wine's life expectancy is, its shelf life, the wine's provenance, condition and vintage will all be taken into account by the taxman.
While port and a few fine wines are exceptions, the vast majority of wine falls into the wasting asset category, and will be exempt.
If the wine is deemed not to be a wasting asset, a seller would still benefit from the capital gains tax allowance on profits up to £3,000.