Wine is different from so many other investable assets because it’s more like a work of art than a commodity. Serge Hochar, a legendary winemaker who tragically passed away in 2015, pointed this fact out to us. His family’s winery, Château Musar, produces some of the greatest wines in the world, from the unlikely location of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, near the Syrian border. His father studied grape growing and winemaking in Bordeaux in the 1930s, and he sold his first vintages to the French military officers and diplomats stationed in Beirut prior to World War II, when Lebanon was still under French control.

Serge took over the winery in the late 1950s, and then, when the civil war broke out in the 1970s and 1980s, he kept producing, even with artillery bombarding the vineyards and the roads often barricaded. The opposing sides of the fighting would stop bombing to allow him to tend to his vineyards, and his people clothed themselves in flak jackets during harvest.

We met Serge at a wine event a few years back, when he made this allusion about wine and art: “With wine, you have the land, you have the climate. God gives you these pieces, and then you need to assemble them into this perfect singular event of something that you pour into a glass. Wine is art.” This profound quote really sticks with us, even today. That’s what he taught us.

The more we thought about it, the more we agreed with what he said. With a painting, you have a canvas and paint, but the artist has to take those two pieces and put them together and create an expression that the world has never seen before and will appreciate. Making wine requires that same painstaking process, involving immense skill, practical experience, patience, creativity, talent, ingredients, and finally, a ton of chemistry. The only difference between wine and other mediums of art is that the end product is more fleeting, since it’s consumable.

We realized after listening to Serge that people invest in wine for the same reason they would invest in an expensive painting, or spend $500 to $1,000 to eat at a world-class restaurant where there’s a waiting list that’s two years long.  They’ll do it for the unique experience that’s as much emotional as it is a financial transaction. People who drink and love wine can easily transition that passion into the wine business. If they’re a professional—a Wall Street trader, a doctor, or a lawyer, for instance—and they’re earning over $75,000 per annum, investing in wine enables them to be knowledgeable about a part of their assets, even if it’s only a small amount. They can feel more in control.