The Ultimate Guide To Wine Exchanges (2024)

Looking for the best wine exchange to trade wine online?

Wine exchanges are online platforms for you to buy and sell exceptional wines from around the world, and manage a wine collection on your own.

In this post, we’ve rounded up the four best wine exchanges, and why this is one of the best options for hassle-free, reliable wine trading.

What is a Wine Exchange?

A wine exchange is a peer‑to-peer online marketplace for members to buy and sell wine from anywhere in the world - be it from Bordeaux, the Tampa Bay area, Orange County, downtown St Charles or Napa Valley.

You can trade wines with private individuals, syndicated groups, and wine funds - without having to go through merchants, brokers, retailer groups, or auction houses.

Let’s take a look at four of the most popular wine exchanges today.

4 Best Wine Exchanges (2024)

Here are the best online platforms for wine trading:

1. Vinovest Exchange

The Vinovest Exchange is a first-of-its-kind wine trading platform that lets you buy and sell investment grade wine as easily as you’d invest in stocks - with no minimum balance and no minimum hold times. 

This is the perfect option if you want to buy, sell, or even drink the wine you choose when you want to, and at the price you wish to pay. It gives you 100% control over your fully-insured wine portfolio.

You can even buy wine by the bottle and not by the case. This means you can add greater diversity to your wine portfolio at a lower level of investment.

It lets you make deposits, manage your portfolio, check returns and get details on each wine in your portfolio - from any device. 

2. Liv-Ex

The London International Vintners Exchange (Liv-ex) was founded in 2000 and is one of the most popular wine exchanges today. It’s an online and telephone-based platform to provide prices and market data, trading, and settlement services for wine trading. 

This service is meant for approved wine merchants, and not for private collectors. Wine merchants can buy and sell everyday drinking wines to old, rare bottles from regions across the world.

3. Cavex

Cavex, launched in 2013, is another wine trading and portfolio management platform for wines stored in UK bonded warehouses. You can buy wines and have them delivered to your bonded storage, or you can sell them and arrange delivery to the buyer’s bonded storage provider.

If you’re a non-UK resident, you can trade on the exchange as a “seller” if you have a registered UK bonded account or if you’re buying only to export through a nominated shipper.

4. LiveTrade by Bordeaux Index (BI)

This online wine trading platform was launched by the fine wine and liquor merchant BI Wine and Spirits in 2009 for individuals and fine wine merchants. 

To sell your wines via LiveTrade, you need to store them with Bordeaux Index or they need to be stored under impeccable conditions in a UK or EU tax warehouse.

Now, are there any other fine wine exchanges you should know of?

Besides the above three, there are a few other wine and spirits exchanges, including Alti Wine Exchange, Wine Owners, and Berry Bros & Rudd, that you may want to try out. 

Just make sure you read up customer reviews and complaints on websites like Better Business Bureau to make an informed choice!

(Note: Any restaurant, wine bar, liquor store, or wine shop that has “winery exchange” or “wine exchange bistro” in its name, is not a wine exchange. The Boston Wine Exchange and the Brooklyn Wine Exchange for instance.

And, don’t fall prey to pyramid scheme scammers named along the lines of “Secret Wine Bottle Exchange" and so on!)

Now:

Trading great wines through these exchanges may seem as easy as picking up a bottle from your local wine store.

But, is there a flip side to it?

Let’s evaluate.

Pros and Cons of Trading Wine through a Wine Exchange

Here’s a look at the benefits and drawbacks of investing via wine exchanges:

Pros

1. Greater convenience

You can trade high quality wine bottles via a secure platform from the comfort of your desk - which is incredibly convenient and transparent. You’ll be able to manage your own portfolio, including deciding when to buy and sell. 

2. Faster transaction times.

Most wine exchange platforms offer rich, up-to-date content (prices, market news), and efficient portfolio management tools. This way, your transactions take place in minutes!

3. Lower commissions.

Some wine exchanges (e.g., Vinovest, Cavex, LiveTrade) charge lower commissions than the 10% (or more) charged by an auction house or a winery. 

The Vinovest Exchange, for instance, charges

• A buy-side trading fee of 2.5%, which includes 3 months of storage
• A sell-side trading fee of 1% (charged once your fine wine is sold to another user)
• 1.5% yearly storage fee (billed every month)

Cons

1. No trading of en primeur wines.

Most wine exchanges don’t allow en primeur wines to be sold. (En primeur investing allows you to buy "wine futures" while the fine wine is still in the barrel.)

2. Some wine exchanges don’t offer storage.

In some cases, you’ll have to set up a personal wine cellar with proper climate control or arrange storage in a bonded warehouse. But, some exchanges offer storage options as well, as we’ve seen above.

Clearly, the pros outweigh the cons!

It's now upto you to pick the right wine trade platform based on your needs.

Ready To Invest in a Bottle of Wine as Easily as Investing In Stocks?

All the four wine exchanges you saw above are great platforms to buy and sell wine. 

However, the Vinovest Exchange clearly stands out among them thanks to its modern, hands-on approach to wine investing.

You’ll be able to buy and sell investment grade wine bottles from wine producers in Champagne, Burgundy, Bordeaux, Napa Valley, and any other wine region without a minimum balance, a portfolio manager, or hold times - just like you’d invest in the stock market.

Got more questions? Get all of them answered right away and get a headstart into investing in the attractive fine wine market.