Investment in Wine: A market develops

As inflation soared, red bordeaux became a wine investor’s primary haven. The auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s, whose new wine departments were established in, respectively, 1966 and 1970, provided the ideal forum for acquisitions and disposals. During the same period, numerous investment schemes were established to attract corporate finance, while wine merchants such as Justerini & Brooks set up their own schemes to cater for the speculative appetites of consumers. (Such schemes were to be the precursors of the government-backed Business Expansion Schemes set up in the British economic boom of the mid 1980s in the wake of a fresh outbreak of speculation fever.)