Liv-ex 100: what the fine wine index tracks and misses
Updated
The Liv-ex 100 is the number the trade quotes when it says "the market", and it is a monthly reading of bids and offers rather than a record of what anyone actually paid.
Liv-ex describes the Fine Wine 100 as "the industry's leading benchmark" and as tracking "the price movement of 100 of the most sought-after fine wines for which there is a strong secondary market", calculated monthly. A wine qualifies on three tests: it must have "attracted critical acclaim from a leading critic (a 95-point score or above)", "attract a regular market on Liv-ex", and be "physically available in the UK market". Liv-ex specifies that wines still trading En Primeur are ineligible. Each component's Liv-ex Mid Price, "the mid point between the current highest bid price and lowest offer price", is checked by a valuation committee and then multiplied by the wine's average production level, a figure Liv-ex reduces as the wine ages. At 25 years from vintage a wine leaves the index.
Liv-ex lists the majority of components as Bordeaux, with Burgundy, the Rhône, Champagne and Italy also represented.
How is the Liv-ex 100 calculated?
From quotes, not from trades, and once a month.
The input is the Liv-ex Mid Price. Liv-ex describes it as "the mid point between the current highest bid price and lowest offer price" on its trading platform. Liv-ex says each price is then "verified by our valuation committee to ensure that the number is robust after taking into account all data at our disposal, including merchant offer prices and historical Liv-ex transaction prices". So a human check sits between the order book and the published level.
The weighting is unusual and worth understanding. Liv-ex multiplies each wine's Mid Price by "the wine's average production level", giving the example of "20,000 nine litre cases". Liv-ex says that figure is "gradually reduced as the wine ages". The index therefore leans towards wines that were made in volume, and each wine's influence shrinks as bottles are drunk. That is closer to a free-float adjustment on an equity index than to a simple average, and it is the reason a rare Burgundy and a large-production First Growth do not count equally.
Liv-ex itself is a business-to-business exchange founded in 2000 by stockbrokers James Miles and Justin Gibbs, with "over 500 members across 42 countries" and offices in London and Bordeaux. It states plainly that it "does not hold stock, does not trade, and does not allow advertising on the Exchange", which is the strongest argument for using its numbers at all.
Which wines qualify, and when do they drop out?
Three entry rules, one committee and one hard exit.
The entry rules are the 95-point critic score, a regular market on the exchange, and physical availability in the UK. The En Primeur exclusion matters more than it looks: a Bordeaux vintage does not enter the index at release, so the index cannot show you the campaign that sets the price everyone argues about. Liv-ex reports that it reviews the component list quarterly. The exit is the part most explainers skip. Liv-ex states that "when the wine reaches 25-years from vintage it is removed from the index as available volumes are too low to attract a strong secondary market". The Liv-ex 100 is structurally a young-wine index. Anything older than a quarter century is out, which means the deep mature market, the 1982 Bordeaux tier and everything behind it, sits outside the benchmark by design. Liv-ex covers that ground with a separate Bordeaux Legends index instead.
Liv-ex 100, Liv-ex 50 or Liv-ex 1000: which one answers your question?
Pick by what you own.
| Index | What it holds | Calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Fine Wine 50 | The last ten physical vintages of the five Bordeaux First Growths: Haut-Brion, Lafite Rothschild, Latour, Margaux and Mouton Rothschild. A vintage joins each July as it becomes physical and is removed after ten years | Daily |
| Fine Wine 100 | 100 wines meeting the 95-point, liquidity and physical-availability tests. Majority Bordeaux, plus Burgundy, Rhône, Champagne and Italy | Monthly |
| Fine Wine 1000 | Seven sub-indices, price weighted at launch: Bordeaux 500 at 46%, Bordeaux Legends at 22%, Burgundy 150 at 14%, Italy 100 at 7%, Rhône 100 at 4%, Rest of the World at 4% and Champagne 50 at 3% | Monthly |
One trap when you compare charts across years: Liv-ex's current index board lists a Bordeaux Legends 40 and a Rest of the World 60, where its older description of the 1000 had 50 wines in each. Component counts move. Check the count before you treat two lines as the same series.
The practical point is the one Cult Wines notes in its own guide to reading these numbers: "Burgundy-heavy holdings will not track the 50 closely." If your cellar is Côte d'Or, the Fine Wine 50 is a chart about someone else's wine.
Where the Liv-ex 100 stands, and against what
On the levels Liv-ex publishes, the headline benchmark is up 3.3% over one year and down 7.4% over five.
| Index | Level | YTD | 1 year | 2 years | 5 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 | 289.7 | -0.1% | 1.2% | -10% | -22.4% |
| Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 | 320.8 | 0.4% | 3.3% | -6.8% | -7.4% |
| Liv-ex Fine Wine 1000 | 350.7 | 0.3% | 1.2% | -9% | -7.9% |
| Bordeaux 500 | 275.2 | -0.3% | -0.4% | -12.3% | -18.3% |
| Bordeaux Legends 40 | 359.4 | -0.9% | 0.1% | -8.2% | -12.1% |
| Burgundy 150 | 611.6 | 0.8% | 1.9% | -9.1% | 3.1% |
| Champagne 50 | 500.7 | 1.6% | 2.6% | -8.4% | 8.7% |
| Rhône 100 | 174.6 | -0.4% | 4.6% | -2.7% | -18.3% |
| Italy 100 | 350.3 | 1.5% | 2.9% | -4.2% | 4.6% |
| California 50 | 299.7 | 1.7% | 2.1% | -9.6% | -7% |
| Port 50 | 151.4 | 0.2% | 1.7% | -2.1% | -7.7% |
| Rest of the World 60 | 272 | 0.7% | 0.4% | -9.7% | -11.7% |
Read the five-year column across, not down. Champagne 50 is up 8.7% and the Fine Wine 50 is down 22.4%, a spread of roughly 31 percentage points between two indices built by the same house off the same Mid Prices. The Liv-ex 100's -7.4% sits in the middle of that range describing neither.
Where the top of the cycle sits is its own argument. Liv-ex launched the index in December 2003 with data backdated to July 2001, and Harpers reported it closing at 372.44 in October 2021, a record at the time. The market kept going after that. Knight Frank's Luxury Investment Index dates the high to 2022 and puts the Fine Wine 100 down 2.5% across 2025, "with total losses at almost 25% since the 2022 peak". Measure from the October 2021 print to today's 320.8 and the fall looks like 14%. Measure from the 2022 high and it is closer to a quarter. Before you accept any Liv-ex 100 return figure, ask what its start date is.
Why does the index look calmer than the market?
Because illiquidity smooths it, and the effect is measurable.
Philippe Masset and Jean-Philippe Weisskopf tested exactly this in Economic Modelling in 2018, in a paper whose abstract states: "We especially analyze the impact illiquidity has on the different indices and validate our findings using a simulation which allows us to define the biases induced by illiquidity on the statistical properties of the indices." Their finding is that "both the volatility and the beta of fine wine is understated when estimated with existing wine index data". They put the corrected figures bluntly: "The true volatility and beta of the First Growths from Bordeaux appear to be close to 20%, respectively 0.45–0.60, suggesting that the diversification potential of fine wine is more limited than commonly believed."
The consequence is specific, and it is not that the index is wrong. It is that the diversification case built on a smooth wine index is weaker than the chart implies. A thinly quoted asset priced monthly off a bid-offer midpoint will always look less volatile than a share priced by the second, and anyone sizing a wine allocation off the index's apparent standard deviation is sizing off an artefact of the measurement.
Does the index price match what you would pay or get?
No, in both directions, and the gap is structural rather than occasional.
The Mid Price is a wholesale midpoint between professional bids and offers. Cult Wines, which builds portfolios off this data, puts the distinction cleanly: the Mid Price "reflects executable trading intent" and "answers where the market is trading", while Liv-ex's second number, the Market Price, is "the best listed selling price for a standard case in the secondary market" and "answers what you would likely pay to buy the wine today". Two different questions. Liv-ex indices are calculated from Mid Prices only.
Selling is the harsher side. On valuing a portfolio at Market Price, Cult Wines notes: "Expect realised sale proceeds to differ once market conditions and speed of sale are accounted for." A midpoint assumes a willing counterparty at the touch. Liquidating a case in a fortnight does not.
Then there is everything the index does not carry at all. It is a merchant-to-merchant, in-bond, twelve-bottle-case reading. A private buyer adds buyer's premium or merchant margin, duty, VAT, shipping, storage and insurance before the wine is theirs, and pays a spread again on the way out. Run those against a real lot in the landed-cost calculator and the distance between an index level and a delivered price stops being abstract. The fine wine investment guide prices the holding costs over a five-year hold.
Currency is the quiet one. Liv-ex is a London exchange that quotes and classifies in sterling: its 2025 Classification sorts wines into tiers by average trade price per case, from £284 at the bottom to £2,839 and above at the top. If you buy and sell in dollars or euros, an exchange rate sits between the index line and your return, and it appears on no chart Liv-ex publishes.
The index is majority Bordeaux. The market is not.
This is the largest gap, and Liv-ex's own data is what exposes it.
The Fine Wine 100's components are, in Liv-ex's words, mostly Bordeaux. Its weekly trade summaries in 2026 tell a different story about where money is going. One week put Burgundy at "31.4% of trade value" against a Bordeaux share of 25.9%, below Bordeaux's own 2026 average of 31.6%. Another reported Burgundy "accounting for 29.3% of the market", Bordeaux at "26.4% of traded value" and Champagne "rising to 16.7% of traded value, well above its recent averages". A third had Burgundy at "32.5% of traded value", with Leroy, Comtes Georges de Vogüé and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti alone at "around 10% of total market turnover".
Liv-ex's 2025 Classification, which ranks purely on average trade price between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025, sharpens it further. As Vino Joy News reports, of 332 qualifying wines Burgundy took 33 of the 48 First Tier places, a 68.75% share. Bordeaux contributed 106 wines overall, about a third of the list, and reached the First Tier ten times.
So Bordeaux still supplies the most names and the Bordeaux atlas still covers the deepest secondary market by count. But the value has rotated towards Burgundy, and an index whose majority is Bordeaux and whose 25-year rule excludes the oldest stock will register that rotation late and partially. Look again at the five-year column above: Burgundy 150 up 3.1%, Bordeaux 500 down 18.3%, headline down 7.4%.
So what is the Liv-ex 100 actually good for?
Direction, comparison and argument. Not valuation.
Use it to answer three questions and no others. Is the professional market broadly rising or falling this quarter. How does fine wine's drawdown compare with the equity or gold drawdown over the same window. And is the wine you are being sold priced against a benchmark that has anything to do with it. That last one is the useful defensive move: when a broker quotes the Liv-ex 100 to justify a Burgundy or Napa allocation, the mismatch between the index's composition and the pitch is the thing to ask about.
What it will not do is tell you the value of your case, what you would net selling it, or whether this vintage of this wine is cheap. For that you need the wine, not the benchmark, and a realised price rather than a midpoint. Our methodology page sets out which of our numbers is an ask and which is a clear.
Track your wines, not the benchmark
You do not own the Liv-ex 100. You own specific bottles, in specific vintages, in a currency and a tax position that no monthly wholesale midpoint reflects.
Our market index is built for the comparison the benchmark cannot make. It is free, indexed to 100 so regions sit on one axis honestly, and it plots retail asks and auction clears as separate lines rather than blending them into a single number. Every series downloads as CSV with its sources labelled, so you can put your own holdings against it instead of reading someone else's Bordeaux.
Members get the same treatment per wine: the 40/60 score, condition-adjusted history, and the price ladder for the exact vintage in your cellar. Start with the index, then check whether your wines have followed it. Most of the time they have not, and that gap is the whole reason to look.