Cult Wines: Selective wine market recovery takes hold

By Oliver Catchpole

Published: 06 August, 2026

Fine wine ‘has stopped behaving as one market’, as it recovers from two years of decline, according to a new report from Cult Wines.

The investment platform’s H1 2026 release suggests that in the first half of this year, the fine wine market finally stopped falling – reaching its low point in February and rising in each of the four months since.

There are also signs of liquidity recovering across the market, with trading volumes up 14% on last year’s (or 20% on a like-for-like basis with wines traded in both years) and the gap between asking and traded prices shrinking from 6.5% to 4.5%.

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While price moves overall are small – the index closed the half up only 0.05% – and the typical wine remains flat, the report stressed that this incremental rise is not ‘just a bounce’, but instead represents the early stages of a recovery, with the movement of pricing, trading activity and execution of trades all suggesting the beginnings of a turnaround.

Cult Wines also emphasised that what is significant is the divergence in behaviour of different regions, price segments and individual wines in the market.

Commenting on the report, CEO Tom Gearing said: “We expected the highest rated wines to lead the recovery, and the data shows the opposite. Wines rated 98 to 100 points fell 0.4% in the first half, while wines under 90 points gained 0.6%. Meanwhile wines over fifty years old rose nearly 3%. The market is paying for maturity and scarcity, not points, and that caught us off guard.”

Interestingly, the expensive end of the market has recovered faster, with wines above £500 a bottle rising 0.61%, climbing every month since January.

The weakest area was between £100-250, which fell by 0.26%. Cult Wines suggested that this is due to the behaviour of collectors, rather than investors.

Price rises were often selective, with many regions (such as the USA, down 0.4% and Piedmont, down 0.3%) remaining weak, while Tuscany and the rest of Italy rose 1.5% and 1.9% respectively.

Burgundy also stopped its correction, falling only 0.2% and remaining flat since February, with 45% of wines that climbed in at least five months of H1 actually originating in that region.

Gearing added that these diverging segments show that treating fine wine as one market is a misconception.

“We track more than 52,000 wines and they are behaving completely differently by region, age and liquidity. Italy rose while the USA fell. Fifty-year-old wines gained while young releases drifted. Lafite rose 2.7% while Latour fell 1.4%, same family, same half. Anyone describing ‘the fine wine market’ in a single sentence is averaging away everything that matters.”

The report’s analysis covers 52,147 investment-grade wines across the major fine wine regions, with pricing data combining Cult Wine’s dataset with data from Liv-ex and Wine-Searcher.

Transaction data came from both Liv-ex and CultX trades, with the platform deliberately excluding client-to-client transactions within Cult Wines to avoid weighting the analysis towards wines the company owns or manages.

The full Cult Wines H1 2026 Market Report will be released on Friday 7 August.

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