WineCap sketches shifting fortunes of Bordeaux and Burgundy

By Andrew Catchpole

Published: 01 December, 2025

Ahead of its End of Year Report, wine investment platform WineCap has published a fascinating insight into the shifting alignment of fine wine investment rivals Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Entitled Bordeaux vs Burgundy: The two pillars of wine investment, the piece charts how these two ‘pillars of fine wine investment’ have fared since 2010, when Bordeaux held some 96% of the secondary investment market by value.

By 2012, Bordeaux’s share stood at 87.5% of market share, with Burgundy representing just 4.2%.

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Moving forward to 2025, and Bordeaux is down to 35%, with Burgundy having climbed to 24%, pointing to the latter’s “emergence as a true rival to Bordeaux’s dominance”, according to WineCap.

Several factors are cited for this remarkable fast shift in fortunes, not least the relative sizes of the Bordeaux and Burgundy vineyards.

Bordeaux, with over 110,000ha under vine, producing 500–600m bottles annually, produces the volumes – including top estates – to ensure accessibility in the secondary market.

However, Burgundy, with just 30,000ha under vine, produces around 150m bottles annually, with the top crus often producing just a few hundred cases.

WineCap notes that this scarcity makes Burgundy “both highly desirable and more volatile” than Bordeaux, though with the latter offering more stable pricing and a lower point of entry for investors.

Moreover, Burgundy’s most expensive labels outstrip Bordeaux’s top names in terms of pricing. For example, pinnacle wines Domaine de la Romanée -Conti, Romanée -Conti Grand Cru and Petrus, Pomerol are sitting at an average case price of £207,129 and £30,782 respectively.

The WineCap piece highlights how Bordeaux’s dominance began to soften after the millennial boom of Chinese buying cooled by the early 2010s, with Burgundy prices surging ahead as the 2010s ran into the early 2020s.

In response to the headline question, “Is Bordeaux or Burgundy the better investment?”, and despite what it describes as “strikingly different” market trajectories, WineCap proposes that both of these classic French regions continue to offer investors differing (and possibly complimentary) choices when it comes to a wine investment portfolio.

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