Liv-ex, a London-based company that tracks the prices of the world’s most traded bottles—the fine wine market’s answer to the S&P 500—is adding a Port index to their offerings.
The Port 50 index will focus specifically on the last 10 vintages of the five most actively traded Port brands: Dow’s, Fonseca, Graham’s, Taylor Fladgate and Warre’s.
“We have good data on it,” James Miles, co-founder, chairman and managing director of Liv-ex, said last week. “Both the recent declared vintages ’11 and ’16 have been well-received by the critics and have done well in the market. And it is not covered nearly enough.
“Most people assume Port is dead; we are challenging that assumption,” said Miles.
Liv-ex, which has roughly $72 million (55 million British pounds) in turnover, sees this as another way to broaden the exchange’s deep roots in the wine world.
“We have released two new indices this year, the California 50 and Port 50. Both are underrepresented in our existing indices,” Miles added.
He is not expecting the index to generate a big share of the firm’s revenues immediately.
“Port still accounts for a small share of our trade (less than 1%), and it tends to be very seasonal, for example, October, November [and] ahead of Christmas,” Miles said. “But seven or eight years ago, Burgundy was 1–2% of our trade too. It is now regularly 12–15%.”
Liv-ex likes to compare itself with the FTSE 100 and the S&P 500. As of October 15, year to date, the Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 was up 1.7%. By comparison, the FTSE 100 was down 9% and the S&P 500 was up 9% for the year.
Published: November 5, 2018
