The pricing gods are certainly having a giggle. A morning coffee in Sydney is beginning to cost what a light lunch once did; a $20 martini is coming out looking suspiciously like a sample size. Yet, one of the world’s most discerning luxuries has spent the past few years doing the unthinkable. Building a wine collection – a great wine collection – is becoming less expensive.
After a pandemic-era boom sent parts of the fine-wine market to frankly ridiculous heights, prices have started to near something closer to reality. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100, which tracks the price of 100 of the most sought-after wines on the secondary market, lost nearly a quarter of its value from its 2022 peak. In plain English, that means many of the bottles collectors trade most actively became considerably cheaper to buy.
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The market began stabilising in late 2025 and has edged back into positive territory in 2026, but prices remain well below their highs, and the recovery has been uneven, leaving plenty of overlooked value for collectors willing to look beyond the most obvious names.
Don’t get too excited: Burgundy remains beyond the reach of most normal people (despite falling almost 30% from its peak), with a case of DRC Romanée-Conti still commanding upwards of $300,000. But Bordeaux is trading well below its highs, while Champagne and other categories swept up in the frenzy have also, thankfully, returned to earth. The period when almost any prestigious bottle seemed destined to appreciate simply by sitting in a cellar appears, for now, to be over.
For anyone who has long wanted to start collecting wine, the obvious appeal is that getting through the door has become a little less punishing.
Bottles that ran away during the boom are reappearing at more rational prices, while auctions can offer something retail rarely does: mature wine, already patiently cellared by somebody else, sometimes for less than the latest release. Call it the rare pleasure of benefiting from another person’s self-restraint.
But cheaper bottles are only part of the story. While prices have been resetting, the idea of what makes a great wine collection has changed too.
Twenty years ago, a serious cellar was relatively easy to recognise. First Growth Bordeaux? Certainly. Grand Cru Burgundy? As much as the allocation allowed. Cases of the same prestigious producers stacked away for decades, waiting for the perfect moment or the right buyer. These wines have not become any less worthy, but they no longer provide the only model of a great collection.
Today’s most interesting cellars can be far more eclectic: aged Rioja beside Barolo, Australian icons alongside German Riesling, grower Champagne sharing space with Etna Rosso. What connects them is not a hierarchy inherited from the market, but the curiosity of the person assembling them.
It reflects, in my opinion, a broader change in luxury. Money can still get you through most doors, of course, but acquiring the bottle everyone recognises is not quite the flex it once was. Intelligence is sexy. The real power lies in knowing why a less obvious bottle deserves its place.
When every expensive wine is rising in value, spending power can easily be mistaken for good judgement. A market correction calls your bluff, revealing who was simply buying the obvious names versus who genuinely knew what to look for.
This does not mean the old establishment has been overthrown. France still dominates LANGTONS’ inaugural Classification of International Wine, accounting for 122 of its 160 entries, with Burgundy alone claiming 57. The list, based on five years of Australian auction data, includes many of the names you would expect to find in a cellar with its own insurance policy: Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Armand Rousseau, Krug, and Château d’Yquem among them.
But auction data can only tell us what collectors already agree is valuable. For someone just starting a collection, the more useful clues may sit around its edges: the regions gaining momentum without yet attracting Burgundy prices, the great producers whose less famous wines remain overlooked, and the bottles that suffer from being unfashionable despite having done nothing wrong.
Italy is one obvious place to look. Tuscany already has an established international following, but Piedmont remains undervalued in Australia despite growing global demand for its best Nebbiolo.
Michael Anderson, Head of Auctions at LANGTONS, sees a natural progression for collectors: Tuscany offers some of the pedigree and familiarity that attracts Bordeaux drinkers, while Piedmont delivers the scarcity, site-specificity, and producer obsession that Burgundy collectors tend to find irresistible. The comparison is imperfect, obviously. But so is paying Burgundy prices for the privilege of avoiding one.
The Rhône presents a different kind of opportunity. Its leading wines have fallen considerably over the past five years, leaving one of France’s great regions trading at a marked discount to Burgundy and Bordeaux.
German Riesling, mature Rioja, Vintage Port, and the better wines of New Zealand can also offer the qualities collectors supposedly prize (pedigree, scarcity, longevity and a distinct sense of place) without requiring them to refinance anything.
Closer to home, Anderson advises new collectors to begin with Australian wines and broaden out as their tastes develop. Giaconda, Rockford, Henschke, and Bindi all have strong records on the secondary market, although none could reasonably be described as secret.
The greater advantage of starting locally is access. Buying directly from wineries can mean better provenance, lower entry prices and the chance to follow a producer over several vintages, rather than discovering them once the rest of the market has already done the maths.
There is also value in looking backwards. Auctions frequently offer mature bottles that have already spent years resting in somebody else’s cellar, removing both the wait and some of the guesswork. Less celebrated vintages can be particularly rewarding: they may lack the scores and mythology that inflate famous years, but often reach their drinking windows sooner and cost considerably less. A vintage can be wrong for speculation, and entirely right for dinner.
Cellaring 101
The temptation when beginning a collection is to behave as though you have been asked to furnish a restaurant cellar by Friday. Resist it. Tastes change, knowledge grows, and few things are more educational than discovering that the wine you enthusiastically bought by the dozen no longer interests you by bottle four.
Start slowly and pay attention to what you repeatedly enjoy. Buy a few bottles of the same wine and open them at different points in their development. Follow producers rather than isolated scores, and look for consistency across vintages rather than the excitement of a single trophy year. Give each bottle a rough purpose: some to drink, some to follow and some to mature.
It also helps to spread the risk of your own changing taste. A cellar filled entirely with young Barossa Shiraz may look like conviction at 30 and a hostage situation at 45. Different styles, regions and drinking windows make a collection more useful, but breadth should develop naturally rather than becoming another box-ticking exercise. You do not need to own Port simply because serious cellars traditionally contain it.
Where you buy matters too. Purchasing directly from wineries can provide the cleanest provenance and, in some cases, the best price. Auctions offer access to mature bottles and producers no longer available through retail, but condition reports deserve more attention than estimates. Wine merchants can be invaluable when they understand both your palate and your budget, although no relationship is improved by pretending the budget does not exist.
And there is no minimum amount required to begin. Truly. Collecting can mean putting away one carefully chosen bottle each month, buying three instead of one when something genuinely excites you, or following the same producer across several vintages. The collection becomes meaningful through attention, not volume.
For anyone interested in resale, however, romance needs to be accompanied by a little administrative competence. Condition, storage history, and provenance can matter almost as much as the wine itself. A perfect bottle kept for ten years above the kitchen fridge is no longer a perfect bottle, whatever CellarTracker says. Nor does theoretical appreciation mean much if auction commissions, insurance, transport and storage consume most of it before the hammer falls.
This is why Anderson’s most useful advice is also his least financial: buy wines you would genuinely want to drink. Every serious collector he encounters, he says, begins as a wine lover rather than an aspiring fund manager. The possibility of selling a few bottles may help finance the next purchase, but it should remain an option rather than the reason the cellar exists. If the market never confirms your genius, you should at least be left with a very good evening.
That may be the real opportunity presented by the current correction. It has not democratised the rarest bottles or transformed fine wine into an affordable asset class. DRC remains DRC, and no amount of market optimism is likely to put it beside the weeknight Chianti. What the correction has done is create a little more room: to buy mature wine at saner prices, explore regions overlooked during the rush and make decisions without feeling that the market will leave without you.
The market may recover, the clever purchase may appreciate, and that obscure producer may become considerably less obscure. Others will stubbornly refuse to validate your brilliance. But the best collection is still the one you would be happy to drink if none of that happens.