If you want to use wine as an investment, the realistic amount that you should be starting with is no less than $10,000 a year. That’s the bare minimum. Most people invest more. For example, the majority of our clients at Estate Wine Brokers put $25,000 to $50,000 per year into wine.

Of those, roughly 50 percent are in it to drink for free. They just want to drink very high-end wine for free, or close to free. So, for example, they’ll buy six bottles, drink two, and sell four. They tend to spend $10,000 to $25,000 a year.

Then there are definitely people who are in essence operating wine funds (or literally operating them for family offices or groups of wealthy friends), and they will buy allocations of ten to twenty five cases at a time, multiple times per year. Those people are typically spending $50,000 (or in many instances, much, much more than that).

If you are investing $10,000 to $25,000 a year with the help of a great wine broker, over a decade, you can expect the return on that investment to be between 12 percent and 14 percent per year. That is what my clients have gotten in the past, and that ROI is common for the high-level wine brokers. If you’re just doing it yourself (and are skilled or lucky), or you’ve got a decent or okay (but not great) wine broker, then you can expect somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent per year, still a very solid ROI.

Those returns are of course only for the people who are strict investors, not the ones who are investing to drink “for free.” For those investors, the return is being able to drink expensive wine “for free.” And of course, for those people, it could be argued that the rooms they are going to be in because they are drinking those high-end wines will certainly open doors for them, and lead to other opportunities that will be useful in their lives. But that is a non-monetary return—and though it’s important to many people, only you can say if that is worth the investment to you. For many of our clients, the wine is the way into relationships and deals that are worth far, far more than the cost of the bottle.

Investing in wine means, at its core, that you buy wine and store it until the price goes up, and then you sell it. That is obvious. But what many people don’t understand is that there are two basic ways to invest in wine: use a wine broker to manage the process, or manage the process yourself.  As with any investment, we believe that expert guidance can help you realize far higher returns than approaching the market on your own.