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Chatau Margo 2015. One of history's greatest red wines. In a New York wine shop, it costs about $2,000 a bottle. In a bonded warehouse outside London, the identical wine trades for about $1,100. It's not a romantic place. Picture a cold shed the size of an aircraft hanger where wine waits in wooden crates untaxed until someone pays the duty to take it out.
And in one of them, Michael Bur has been quietly stacking cases of the finest Bordeaux on Earth. Not to drink. Well, not mostly. A man who checks the numbers on everything has naturally applied the same rigor to his own drinking. In his telling, every case sitting there is a bet against the American dollar.
A bet with no expiry date and no borrowing. And he has worked out how to make the bet pay for every bottle he opens for the rest of his life. The reason isn't fun. America has just spent $867 billion on interest in 8 months. Central banks are buying gold instead of dollars. And Bur thinks the world's favorite currency is losing its grip.
If he is right, the money in your account is quietly shrinking. And a seller outside London is one of the few places it cannot reach. ot advice. Wine can fall in value. It can be forged and it can on a bad night be drunk. Bur says every investment he makes needs legs to stand on. This one has three.
After those, how he shops, where people get burned, and at the very end, the score he gives his own idea. First, the dog. Bur opens by promising that if you repeat his thesis at holiday parties, you will seem fishly far-sighted and wildly worldly, and people will gaze at you the way that they gaze at a three-legged dog because he says, "Everybody loves one." And he wants at least three legs under every investment, preferably five, or the dog doesn't run.
As he put it himself, everyone loves a three-legged dog. Leg one then, fine wine is in a slump. Prices for the most sought-after wines have fallen by a quarter to nearly a third since October 2022. It is the deepest broad fall in the modern history of the market. Bordeaux, the most famous region of all, has been hit hardest and still has not bounced.
Burgundy, which the trade calls the queen of wines to Bordeaux's king, fell too. As Bur puts it, quoting Aerosmith, kings and queens and guillotines both lost their heads. Fashion has moved on too. Bordeaux once made up about 95% of the fine wine traded. Today it's about 38. Collectors have drifted to Burgundy and to Italy, which is leading what little recovery there has been.
When the crowd leaves a market that thoroughly, Bur starts paying attention. And when Bur hears that something valuable is in the doldrums, he says every hair on the back of his neck stands up. Both the doctor in him and the devil. But is wine actually an investment or just an expensive hobby with a seller?
Three academics answered that properly. They collected more than 36,000 prices for the five great first growth Bordeaux wines. The handful of Chateau ranked at the very top in an official classification drawn up in 1855 going back to the year 1900. Over 113 years, those wines beat inflation by more than 5% a year after paying for storage and insurance about four.
That beats British government bonds, stamps, and art and roughly matches the British stock market over the same century. James Bond, it is worth remembering, could name the vintage of almost anything he was handed. He never once mentioned what it would fetch at auction. Bowie has rather improved on the character.
So why wine and not something like whiskey or bourbon? Bur's answer is the best line in the whole piece in the article that he published. A bottle of very old, very expensive bourbon and a McDonald's hamburger have one thing in common. Each one is exactly the same as the next one. Spirits stop changing once they are bottled.
Wine does not. Each vintage and each vineyard produces something unique. And every bottle drunk anywhere in the world is one fewer of that exact wine in existence. The supply shrinks every Christmas, every wedding, and every good night out. No other luxury eats itself like that. Which brings us to the second part.
Free wine for life. Leg two is the bit that made me laugh out loud. Michael Bur buys wine at a discount to what the trade normally pays. His target is about 18 to 20% below the going rate in Europe. He then keeps most of it in storage as an investment and sets aside about a fifth of what he buys for drinking and giving away.
Picture how it plays out. A daughter's wedding years from now. A long table under a marquee. The speech is done. The light going amber. And somebody stands up and pours a magnum of 2009 Petrus, a wine most of the guests will never see again, let alone drink. That is the scene Bur describes. And on his numbers, it costs him nothing.
Because he bought so far below the market, the discount on the whole lot covers the cost of the bottles he drinks. So the wine he opens at weddings, at graduations, at Christmas is on his arithmetic free, paid for by the bargain on the rest. And he's not just theorizing. He says plainly that he has done this and will keep on doing it.
He describes a book of wine worth about 200,000 Swiss Franks bought at an average discount of 18%. with one Italian wine, a 2015 Sasakaya. He bought a single case to drink and left several more in storage as the investment. Remember that bottle of Margo, $2,000 in New York and $1,100 in London. That gap is what he is exploiting here.
The difference is tariffs, shipping, three layers of American middlemen, and a shop's margin. If you've ever looked at a restaurant wine list and seen a bottle at three times the price in the shop, you already understand the size of these gaps. So, a sasakaya he bought in Europe for $370 sits on an American dinner table as a $5 or $600 wine.
Take it to a restaurant and it is behaving like a far grander bottle than the one he paid for. He warns about one strange rule. Once a bottle of European fine wine has been shipped to America, it can almost never go back into the European investment market. The trade depends on an unbroken chain of custody, and a holiday in America breaks it.
So, he leaves the bulk of it in London and brings over only what he means to drink. And no, before anybody asks, you cannot fix all this by stuffing a suitcase with Bordeaux on the way home. Bur looked beyond the duty-free allowance. The only way to save money is to underdeclare it. His advice is short.
Never dodge tariffs. Which brings us to part three, the dollar. Leg three is what started him digging, and it's why this video even exists. In 2001, about 72% of the world's central bank reserves were held in dollars. By 2025, it had fallen to just under 57%, the lowest since 1995. Gold has now overtaken everything except the dollar.
as the world's second biggest reserve asset. In the first half of 2025, the dollar had its worst six months against other major currencies since 1973. And Michael Bur adds a worry that most people have not considered. IBM expects to have a large reliable quantum computer working by 2029. Michael Bur asked one of its engineers who would be allowed to use it.
The engineer said he didn't know and didn't care. Bur's point is that artificial intelligence and quantum computers may one day make it hard to trust that any digital money is safe. Your bank balance, your pension, your crypto, all of it is ultimately numbers on a computer. He also links the dollar to tariffs.
America can put a 15% tariff on European wine without much pain at home. He argues only because the dollar is strong. If the dollar weakens, imported goods get deer anyway. tariffs become politically harder to keep and the gap between European and American wine prices could narrow. Wine held in London is in effect a longdated bet on that too.
Gold is the obvious answer here, but as Bur points out, you cannot eat gold. Technically you can, but it doesn't make much of a dinner. Wine stored in London is priced by buyers all over the world in pounds, euros, Swiss franks, and Asian currencies. So if the dollar falls, an American's wine is worth more dollars even if the wine price doesn't move at all.
He worked it through. Say a case worth a hundred grows to about $220 over 20 years at the long run rate. If the dollar has fallen by about a third in that time, that same case is worth around $340. The extra 120 comes purely from where the wine is sitting. He also checked whether this actually happens.
Month to month, wine prices and the dollar have got nothing to do with each other. But over five year long stretches, they move clearly in opposite directions. When the dollar weakens, fine wine tends to rise. He tested it with some proper statistics and found it was very unlikely to be chance. While admitting his method was, in his words, more boy scout than Army Ranger.
And there's a bonus he found almost by accident. Over 25 years, the best wines have done roughly as well as the American stock market has, but with almost no connection to it. When shares fall, wine does its own thing. That's what investors mean by a diversifier, and it's rarer than you would think.
My own view, for what it's worth, Bitcoin is also outside the dollar, needs no warehouse, and can't be forged. Bur isn't a fan, and to be fair to him, you can't open it at a wedding. Which brings us to part four. how Bur buys. So, how does one of the world's most famous investors actually go wine shopping?
Like a man doing an autopsy, which as a former doctor he points out he is qualified to do. His favorite example is a wine he was offered recently. Chatau Lefit Rothschild 2010 rated a flawless 100 points. One of the most celebrated wines ever made. And the dealer was offering it below the price it was first sold for 15 years ago.
15 years of aging, a perfect wine, and it was worth less than when it was bottled. How? Because Lefit set its price in 2011 at the height of a Chinese craze for giving top Bordeaux as gifts, around £1,000 a bottle. The Chateau took 15 years of future profit upfront. Then in 2012, China cracked down on corruption.
The gift giving stopped overnight and the buyers disappeared. Lefit also makes a lot of it. up to 20,000 cases a year and drip feeds older vintages back into the market. So, it competes with its own customers whenever they try to sell. The lesson, Bur says, is that buying a famous name, while it's fashionable, no longer pays.
The money is made later by whoever picks it up after everybody else has lost interest. The vintages that did best in recent years, 2008 and 2019, were both released into a crisis. But it's not just Lefit. Petrus 1989 and 1990, two more perfect score legendary wines, now trade below the 2009 and 2010 vintages.
Prestige, Bur warns, is the easiest thing in wine to overpay for. When he shops, he thinks of a dealer's list, like a supermarket with three shelves. The top shelf is the famous names at 30 to 65% above the market. Rare bottles, giant bottles, very urgent dealer emails. He walks straight past all that.
When a dealer pitches urgency, his instinct is to back away. And he doesn't want any wine merchant sending notifications to his phone because nothing in wine is that urgent. The middle shelf is the same great wines at fair prices. Lovely for drinking, but not for investing. The bottom shelf is what he calls the fireflies.
Great wines priced 15 to 35% under the trade. there for some temporary reason. A collector who bought 240 magnums of the same wine and needs to get out. A buyer who paid a deposit and then vanished. He gives one example. A dealer offered him Chatau Pave 2021 and claimed it was 44% below the market. Bur checked the real European trade price and reckoned it was near 15 to 20% off.
Not what the advert said, but just enough. He bought a few cases. Out of about 700 wines he looked at that year, he bought about 40. Which brings us to part five, the traps. This is the part that should stop anybody from getting carried away here. Wine fraud is very common and Bowie sorts it into three kinds.
In the first, the wine is real and sitting in the merchant's warehouse, but it was never set aside in your name, so legally it was never yours. The second is wine that never existed, sold by someone with a spreadsheet and a flight booked. The third is the oldest trick in the seller, a famous label with something else inside the bottle.
The answer to all three is the same. Buy from large, longestablished merchants, and have every case moved to an independent bonded warehouse in your own name where it is inspected, photographed, and given its own number. If a seller insists on keeping your wine on their own premises, he says that is the tell.
In Britain, wine kept in bond has not had its duty or VAT paid because it has not been released, so it stays cheaper while it sits there. Tax comes next. For Americans, Bur notes that gains on wine are taxed as collectibles at up to 28% plus a search charge. He then adds that none of this is advice because he cannot even understand his own affairs.
In Britain, there is a twist that I find rather lovely. Most wine counts as what HMRC calls a wasting asset, something with a predictable life of 50 years or less. And gains on wasting assets are usually free of capital gains tax. But HMRC says that if a wine is the kind people keep for well over 50 years, it may not count.
So the better the wine, the more likely the tax man wants a slice. But even then, there is a second safety net. Any single item sold for £6,000 or less is generally exempt as well. And if you buy and sell wine often enough, HMRC may decide that you are running a business and tax it as income instead.
American families get one more quirk that Michael Bur likes. If wine is still in the seller when its owner dies, the heirs usually inherit it at its value on that day, and the gain built up over a lifetime is never taxed. A case laid down for the grandchildren in his view is a rather elegant piece of estate planning.
There are costs that Michael Bur's free wine arithmetic has to beat. Storage and insurance run every year. Selling is slow, often weeks rather than seconds, and the dealer takes a cut on the way out. Wine is not a share that you can sell on your phone at lunchtime. He says his discount covers all of that.
A buyer paying the full price would have no such cushion. And in Britain, wine investment is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. If a wine firm takes your money and disappears, there is no compensation scheme waiting for you. Over the years, a string of so-called wine investment firms have done exactly that, usually after a very friendly phone call, which is why the advice about independent storage under your own account matters so much.
And this is not small money. Bowie says you need to be able to put at least five figures into it and that it should be less than a tenth of your total wealth. The dealers will take smaller amounts, but they won't take you seriously. Which brings us to part six. What all of this actually means for you.
Most of you watching will never buy a case of Chat Morgo. That's fine. The wine is not really what matters here. What matters is the question Michael Bur is asking. If almost everything that you own is in one currency, held in one country, recorded on computers that you have to trust, what happens if that currency slowly loses its grip?
His answer is to own some real things kept outside that currency's reach. Gold, property, and in his case, wine. Yours might be different, but it's worth one honest look. For a British earner, the same question applies to the pound. Your salary, your house, and most of your pension are all priced in pounds.
And the government that sets your tax is the one that issues the currency. That is a great deal of trust in one institution. People who move abroad often discover this the first time they try to buy a flat in euros with savings that have quietly lost a large slice of their value against them. So here is the small thing that you can do.
Add up roughly how much of what you own is in a single currency. Whether it's your savings, your pension, your house, your salary. If the answer is nearly all of it, you're not really doing anything wrong. you're just making one very big bet without having meant to. And if things go the other way, if the dollar strengthens and the wine market stays sleepy, Burie reckons the worst case is a slow, steady, real return, almost unconnected to the stock market, plus a seller's worth of very good weddings.
He describes that downside as so not bad that it seems good. So, Michael Bur is shorting the dollar with Bordeaux. He's buying it in a slump at a discount, storing it in London, priced by the whole world and drinking the profit. And in the most bur move of all, at the end of his piece, he gave his own idea a mark out of 100, 92 points.
Not perfect, he says. Mainly because you need serious money in order to start, but he thinks the downside is small. If you want to read a company the way Michael Bur . There's also free access to nine books that I've written on these topics.
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