To understand why the lights are on but no one is working at Oeno House is to delve into the murky world of fine wine investment, for which there is no financial protection when things turn sour. Dozens of people, possibly hundreds, fear substantial losses after Oeno House’s sister company, Oenofuture Limited, ran into trouble, amid widespread complaints of poor management and lax communication, as well as allegations of fraud (which are yet to be substantiated). Total losses could run into the millions.
An awful lot of weight on that “yet” there.
It was all so different in 2015 when, riding on the crest of a global fine wine investment wave powered by the Far East, Oeno was launched with a promise of healthy returns and a “360-degree personalised” service.
“To be in wine, you need to be in every part of wine – trade, investment, merchant, collecting advice, and understanding the retail side,” the company’s 35-year-old co-founder and former chief executive, Michael Doerr, said when Oeno House opened six years later.
Yep, yet is the important word.
No, of course I know nothing at all about this. No detailed knowledge in the slightest. But years in the Russian metals business does give a nose for, erm, interesting business propositions.
Ah, another great example of the benefits to society of the limited company……..
Can I just shock you? I like wine. I drink fucking loads of it. I buy it from Waitrose, and LidI. Sometimes, if I want really nice wine, I buy it at auction (just local auctions, its surprising what you can pick up) because it’s cheaper than Berry Bros or Majestic. Most summers my wife and I go to France and bring some claret back. I know a few wine types (I just like drinking it) and none of them has ever been able to persuade me that it’s a good investment.
I wonder if it’s like modern art – a way of funnelling money to people and causes without being caught?
Who on earth can say whether a 60 year old bottle of vinegar is worth £10,000 or not? It is if someone was willing to buy it.
Ditto on a bigger scale, Rothko paintings. Don’t tell me this isn’t a scam.
Oh, I’ll wave a flag for Rothko. Years ago the Rothko room in the Tate was an extraordinary place to experience. I felt there was something of the yawning eternal about it, a bit like gazing across the Grand Canyon. Not been back for years mind. I don’t do galleries and museums nowadays, having a severe aversion to being woke-hectored.
You might like to look at it Norman, and fair enough, none of my business, but the point is that any fucker can paint a big canvas black and blue, and it ain’t worth $75,000,000.
(I appreciate the argument that it is because someone paid that; I just suspect it is far more about moving and storing money, more even than the emperor’s new clothes that goes with all of this, than anything else.)
But most of the time any fucker can do anything, in retrospect. It’s having thought of it at first that’s the difficult bit. And I’ve tried to copy Rothko. It’s harder than it looks. Same goes for Patrick Heron.
I dispute that anyone could paint a Turner.
It’s a lot easier to paint a Turner now that Turner has done it.
Not that I could, but I’ve seen decent attempts at doing similar, even got a couple.
Yeah, but who cares about novelty of something that isn’t amazing, or, paying over the price when you can get something exactly the same for less?
I vacuum with a Shark. Shark didn’t invent the bagless vacuum cleaner. Dyson did. Shark is cheaper and is as good. If a bloke can paint a pretty good copy of a Rothko, why would you pay millions for it?
My eyes were opened to Rothko in a big way when I tagged along on a tour in the NY Modern at museum – most of it is just lines on a canvas but some (black square) is really clever abstraction of image and vision and viewer perception. Then it became lines on canvas to print and move money.
I can understand being blown away by the Grand Canyon – my wife cried when she first saw it. Art not so much, especially the modern stuff. I prefer representational art – Vermeer, Bruegel, Bosch and some of the Renaissance painters.
“woke-hectored”: that’s a good ‘un.
Oops, sorry, I meant to say you must be Literally Hitler.
An observation that I have about European luxury goods is that poor people in other parts of the world leap on them when they get some money as a way to signal they aren’t peasants.
You can go back to the early 20th century thing in America of women wanting Paris fashions to say that they were no longer on the ranch. You had a huge thing in the 1980s of the Japanese buying Bordeaux, and now, the Chinese are buying up Burgundy and Church’s brogues.
The problem is that after a time, too many people are non-peasants, and it loses its value. I reckon it’s why the luxury sector is now taking a hit in China. That Gucci purse made you proper special at one time and now, everyone with a bit of money has one so why bother?
And luxury wine prices are just absolutely mental because of this. There’s so little DRC and La Tache produced that you don’t need many more rich people fighting over them to drive the price up beyond $5000 a bottle. Which then also ripples down to other Burgundy. People who can’t afford those bid up other Vosne-Romanee. The people who can’t afford those, anything in the Cote d’Or.
All it takes is the Chinese to not want to show off their new status and that $5000 bottle is going to collapse in price. Probably fall to closer to $300-400. Burgundy in particular is due a massive correction.
That Gucci purse made you proper special at one time and now, everyone with a bit of money has one so why bother?
That’s something I’ve tried to explain someone cherishes her LV’s & Chanels. Carrying it proves she hasn’t got style & is a wannabee. Because other wannabees recognise it. Style is the desirable, hasn’t a label, so only the people with style know what it is. And game winning style is the bag the stylish desire but don’t know where to get one.
‘Rejoice, my dear,’ I said one day to Madame de Ville-Plain ‘a loom has just been shown to the Society for Encouragement on which it will be possible to manufacture superb lace for practically nothing.’ ‘Why’, the lady replied, with an air of supreme indifference, ‘if lace were cheap, do you think anyone would want to wear such rubbish?’
Physiologie du goût – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
Losses should only be unpaid storage fees and any decrease in value of the wines. Unless someone ‘mismanaged’ the money or stock.
I wonder where the fine wines sold in the shop might have come from?
I presume there was a lavish lifestyle for the boss man too…
Over-paid to begin with, probably.
One hears of dubious things in the alternative investment field; huge management fees, or even the investment fund paying over the odds for stuff from someone who turns out to be connected with the fund’s founder. But I’m sure nothing of that sort would have happened here.
“.. fine wine investment, for which there is no financial protection when things turn sour ..”
Investment has risks? Amazing insight from the MSM. I’ve always stayed away from anything like this. I suspect people invest in this so they can tell people they invest in this at dinner parties.
And poorly managed firms go bust. Who’d have thought!
There’s also just a lot of people who get caught up in looking at massive previous returns. Burgundy in particular has had some huge price rises over the past decade or so. It’s outperformed the S&P500. But that’s also high risk. Fine wine isn’t something people need, or even a small luxury. Bottles of Vosne-Romanee at £100+ a bottle are going to go before the mortgage or the car if things get tight.
This is like shares in luxury goods companies like LVMH and Burberry. Time them right and you can make huge returns, time them wrong, you make massive losses. It’s not like buying shares in tampons where revenues are going to have a steady flow (couldn’t resist).
Our first experience of a wine auction was most amusing. A bunch of young lawyers got steadily drunker and bid farcically high prices for the stock.
We’d done our homework but it was useless: they were paying more than retail prices. Much more.
Try local auction houses, especially around Christmas time when a lot of them have wine and spirits in their sales. There are very good bargains to be had. Many times I’ve bought cases of very good Bordeaux and Burgundy, individual bottle of which retail at say £75, which work out at about £12 a bottle. Of course, if someone else is in the know you’re buggered (so I’m not sure why I’m telling you).
One of our greatest shopping coups, decades ago, was in Asda. They were flogging off Franconian wines (Sylvaner and M-T) at ridiculously low prices.
My wife guessed that somebody in the company had assumed that a Bocksbeutel was a half-bottle and had then deducted a sales discount.
Yippee!
Someone else knows what a bocksbeutel is. Well done dearieme. For the extra points, why the number of ridges on the stem of the glasses.?
Well tell us BiS. What are they for?
You are always taking a punt at auctions. That case that was stored in the understairs cupboard that also housed the boiler. Boiled wine, anyone?
Not really. I mean, yes, but you are running a risk buying any old wine. It’s not like someone has done a taste test before selling you that ancient Pomerol, is it?
But people who buy good wine by the case normally store it somewhere appropriate – they must, because it’s always fine (in my experience), and often it’s amazing.
I’ve been doing it for years and have had exactly one bad experience, and that was with a case of Saffa cab sauv – Saxenburg 1994 – last Christmas.
It was just an additional punt to what I was really after, and I thought at 13.5% vol there was a possibility that some of it might be okay, but the ten bottles I opened before Christmas were distinctly average (we used them in vin chaud).
But it cost me £4 a bottle. Who cares?
Crumbling corks in elderly port are a pain – I bought 12 bottles of Delaforce 1982 the year before last for an average price of £11 each.
1982 was an excellent year for port, and it’s like nectar – but the corks are all fucked.
Obviously I decant anyway, but you have to decant twice using a very fine muslin (with an ‘n’).
Do you have one of those cork removers with two sprung metal tines you insert between the cork and the bottle? Though really old port can defeat even those (particularly if it’s been kept upright).
1982 was a pretty good year for most wine (in Europe at least), I remember working in Madrid in 1988, when the ’81 and ’82 Rioja Gran Reservas were being released and cost about £5 in a restaurant (Spain was still on Pts).
As far as investment in “fine wines” is concerned, it’s got far too much of whiff of crypto about it for me. It’s all opinion about something has value when it isn’t used. Opinions can change & even worse, people can stop holding opinions.