Burgundy Pricing Risk Explained
Scarcity is usually presented as Burgundy's protection, the reason its prices can only move in one direction. The last three years have shown that scarcity protects supply rather than price, and that the real risk in a Burgundy holding lies less in the region itself than in exactly which wines you own and what you paid for them.
What the Correction Revealed
Burgundy fell further than any other part of the fine wine market. Liv-ex's Burgundy 150 index lost about 30% in the two years to February 2025, the largest fall of any of its regional indices, while remaining nearly 17% higher over five years (Decanter, March 2025). By the end of May the two-year fall stood at 28%, although the same index had roughly doubled over ten years (Decanter, July 2025), and it closed 2025 down a further 4.8% (WineNews, January 2026).
The long-term record and the recent fall describe the same market. Prices ran well ahead of themselves in 2021 and 2022, and the correction since has given back part of that rise. Neither figure says anything about where prices go next, but together they show how far Burgundy can move in a short period, which is the first thing any investor holding it needs to accept.
Scarcity Protects Supply, Not Price
Small production means few bottles reach the secondary market, and it also means few trades. A market with little depth can move sharply when buyers step back, and that is what happened. Liv-ex described confidence in Burgundy as being at historically low levels in early 2025, with buyers purchasing fewer cases per transaction and paying lower prices (Decanter, March 2025).
For an investor this is the heart of Burgundy's pricing risk. The quoted price for a rare wine may rest on a handful of transactions, and the price you can actually achieve depends on who is buying in the month you choose to sell. Our article on how investors read fine wine market volatility looks at why averages can mislead in thinly traded markets.
Not All Burgundy Has Fallen Equally
The correction has been uneven. Liv-ex data showed red Burgundy prices 21.4% below their January 2022 levels while whites were 4.4% above theirs, and the average cost per litre of regional Burgundy down 36% since 2022 (The Drinks Business, March 2025). One leading merchant argued that the resilience was concentrated among perhaps the top ten to fifteen producers, with wines in the lower tiers still looking expensive (Decanter, July 2025).
The market's view of the very top is clear in the 2025 Liv-ex Classification, where Burgundy took 33 of the 48 places in the highest price tier (Vino Joy News, September 2025). The practical lesson is that the risk in Burgundy is less about the region than about the tier. A grand cru from a domaine with a deep following and a regional wine from a fashionable name can both carry a Burgundy label and behave entirely differently when it comes to selling.
Release Prices and the Cost of Getting In
Release prices have been slow to follow the market down. The 2023 releases came out broadly flat on 2022 and still above 2020 levels (Decanter, March 2025), while the average offer for 2023s already on the market was 11.4% below the ex-London release price (The Drinks Business, March 2025). An investor paying full release price in a falling market starts behind the wines already trading around them.
The very small 2024 crop may bring some stability in the longer term, as Liv-ex has suggested, but a small vintage also gives the domaines every reason to hold their prices, and neither outcome guarantees value. That is why access matters so much in Burgundy, and why our guide to accessing fine wine allocations focuses as much on the price paid as on securing the wine at all.
How Pricing Risk Shows Up in a Portfolio
The most common problem is concentration. A holding built mostly in 2021 and 2022, when Burgundy was at its most expensive, may now be worth considerably less on paper and may take longer to sell than its owner expects, particularly where the producers have shallow secondary markets. The risk is not that Burgundy is a poor investment, but that a portfolio leaning heavily on one region and one buying period has very little room to wait.
Provenance adds a second layer. Small lots of Burgundy often change hands privately, and buyers pay a clear premium for wines with an unbroken record of professional storage, which our guide to fine wine storage explains. A third is the price itself. Before recommending any Burgundy we compare it with the wine's own trading history and with comparable wines from other producers, the approach set out in our article on how to recognise an overpriced fine wine.
Managing the Risk Rather Than Avoiding the Region
Burgundy still belongs in many serious portfolios, because its scarcity and its collector base behave differently from Bordeaux and add genuine diversification. The discipline lies in how it is held. That means favouring the producers whose wines trade most often, comparing every price with what the wine and its peers have done before, declining release prices that sit above comparable wines already in bottle, spreading purchases across vintages rather than buying a single year heavily, and sizing the Burgundy allocation so that the wider portfolio could hold it through a further fall.
None of that removes the risk, but it changes where it sits. Our page on Burgundy wine investment sets out the producers that matter to an investor, and our guides to portfolio diversification and the wine investment holding period explain how a Burgundy position fits a longer plan.
Looking at Your Burgundy Exposure
If your holdings lean heavily towards Burgundy, or were mostly bought during 2021 and 2022, it is worth looking at them through a pricing lens before adding more. An independent portfolio review is a sensible place to start, and a private conversation about your Burgundy exposure can follow from there.
