Recession-proof wines

What wine should we be buying in the months to come - to drink, to lay down and to invest in? Wine tends to be relatively recession proof as ultimately we all need to drown our sorrows. As an investment fine wine has outperformed just about every asset class except oil, certainly the stock exchange. And if the world does collapse, it can always be drunk.

For wines to drink, a statement of the obvious: value for money is what we are all going to be looking for. Let me start with what does not represent value for money: very cheap wine. That £3.99 bottle in your local supermarket is terrible value - the wine content is only about 20p. Branded wines also represent poor value - you are paying for massive advertising budgets and the brand owners' profit.

Real value for everyday drinking wines is to be found in the £6-£15 range with wines from smaller producers. There the wine content comprises a substantial proportion of  your purchase price, and a usually highly-talented wine maker has put his 'all' into the product.

Moving up the scale a little, other great bargains are to be found in the second wines of the great Bordeaux chateaux and sometimes in parcels of declassified wines - by which I mean occasions when those great chateaux have exceeded their production quotas and have to sell the wines as generic appellation wines at a fraction of the price of their top wine.

As an investment fine wine has very positive dynamics: the supply is fixed (actually falling as the wine is consumed) with a demand that is ever increasing - even after shrinking bonuses. Fine wine prices are monitored by Liv-ex , the wine trade 'exchange'. There are two indices - the '100' (the top 100 wines) and the wider '500' index. The former is up by five per cent over the last year and the latter by 10 per cent. The very top wines - Petrus, Le Pin etc - have taken a bit of a knock but the really good value lesser top wines - Chateau Leoville Barton, Lynch Bages and Pontet Canet - are continuing to appreciate.

The fine wine market has always been underpinned by doctors and dentists rather than bankers, so the outlook could be said to be 'healthy'! ·