Our Cellars in 50 Years

I’ve been trying like a mad person to find, to no avail, Berry Bros. & Rudd’s Berrys’ Future of Wine Report: A Glimpse into the World of Wine in 2058, written in 2008 by four of their top wine buyers at the time: Alun Griffiths MW, Jasper Morris MW, Simon Field MW and David Berry Green. If anyone has a copy, please send it my way.

The idea of predicting what wine will look like 50 years from now might seem far-fetched but I did find a direct quote from it on an old blog post by the late Simon Staples, a stalwart of Berry Bros and Rudd : “If values increase by 15% per annum, as they have been doing recently, a case of 2005 Ch. Lafite-Rothschild, currently available for £9,200, could be worth just shy of £10 million by 2050”.
Using that same calculation, the case should be worth £113,854 in today’s terms. Instead, it is worth £6,500.

A few years ago, in a dusty second-hand bookshop in south-east London, I came across an old copy of Alexis Lichine’s New Encyclopaedia of Wines & Spirits. Originally written in 1967, my edition was corrected and reprinted in 1978. In a section titled “Value and Wine”, Lichine writes: “Wine is bought either to be drunk within the next month or two, or to be laid down for future use.” He then argues that modern life—living in apartments, having less storage and generally being more inclined to “live in the present”—means people lay down less wine. This could have been written yesterday. And, in many ways, something like it has.

If you’re receiving this newsletter, it’s safe to say that an “inferior” cellar isn’t one of your problems. So, if we analyse how Octavian’s customers have changed their storing habits over the last ten years, can we really blame changing living circumstances? Or are changing tastes and prices more important?

Compared with ten years ago, people are storing less Bordeaux—8.5% less, to be exact. Bordeaux’s share of the cellar has fallen from 42.5% to 34%. The beneficiaries have been Burgundy, followed by Champagne and Italy, and, to a lesser extent, non-European wines. Burgundy has risen from 21% to 25.8%, Champagne from 8% to 11%, and Italy from 8.4% to 10.7%.

I don’t think this means collectors have fallen out of love with Bordeaux. Rather, other regions have simply “got so good”. Bordeaux still accounts for over a third of the wine stored with Octavian.

The section I love most in Lichine’s book is “Starting a Cellar”, where he conjures up a 36-bottle cellar for the “modern two-and-a-half-room apartment”. Of those only 11 are not French.

When I look at that starter cellar and think, “Oh, that’s a very French cellar,” and compare it with Octavian’s customers, what I see is this: French wine still accounts for 70% of collectors’ cellars. Interestingly, the shift towards more Burgundy also brings the modern cellar closer to Lichine’s original model. Fifty years on, I wonder if we have been following Lichine’s advice all along?
The journalist and wine critic, Harry Eyres, whose father was a local wine merchant in England in the 1960s, had this to say, writing on Tim Atkin’s website: “Looking at the catalogue for 1964–5, Lafite 1953 is listed at 53 shillings a bottle.” That means Lafite 1953 was listed at £2.65 a bottle, or around £46 in 2026 terms. The 2025 En Primeur was released at £347 a bottle, excluding duties—a 7.5-fold difference.

As Bordeaux’s iconic wines climbed in price, other regions improved both their wines and their reputations. Perhaps our tastes shifted, too. A more diversified cellar than Lichine’s is not only welcome but desirable.
So why this obsession with monogamy? In wine, that is.

Bordeaux still enjoys a reputation for longevity. Wine delivered to private addresses, presumably to be drunk, suggests that vintages around 20 years old account for roughly 12% of Bordeaux deliveries, versus about 3% for Burgundy.

The contrast between white and red is even more striking. 78% of white wines shipped came from the previous six vintages, compared with only 40% of reds. Just 2.5% of whites delivered were more than 20 years old, versus 10% of reds.

The Berry’s report is a reminder that if top buyers and wine experts can’t predict what will happen to wine, why would we assume we know which wines we’ll want to drink? Perhaps the future of collecting is less about hoarding a handful of famous names and more about buying smaller cases, from a wider range of growers, at intelligent prices.

After all, we might be very bad at predicting the future—but we can at least diversify our wines.

Sara Danese covers fine wine with an investor’s eye. She’s worked as an investment analyst at Russell Investments and AXA Investment Managers, and later built a wine trading business focused on China, powered by social media. She now curates In the Mood for Wine, a weekly publication for modern collectors exploring wine investment.