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Water is just water — until you are stuck in an airport and it becomes a scarce resource.
Wine is arguably just fermented grape juice — until you put lots of wealthy collectors in the same room and give them a game to play. The game is who-gets-to-take-home-the-bottle-of-wine-for-the-highest-price?
And the name of that game is auction.
In this episode, I wanted to challenge how we think about wine by looking at it through the very specific lens of the auction house. I speak with Nick Pegna, Global Head of Wine & Spirits at Sotheby’s, who brings a more nuanced view to that caricature. He talks about what happens when wine sits alongside watches, jewellery and art — and how that changes the way we value it.
What fascinated me in this conversation is that auction houses such as Sotheby’s, says Nick, are seeing positive growth at a challenging time for the world of wine.
Why is that?
Nick argues that the auction world is still driven first and foremost by people who want to drink the bottles they buy. Rarity, provenance and maturity all matter enormously, but the endgame is still pleasure.
At the same time, those same factors – rarity, provenance, maturity – are exactly what make wine behave like an asset: they drive pricing, trust and liquidity in the secondary market.
One key difference between wine merchants and auction houses is the source of their offerings. Auction houses like Sotheby’s rely on private collections rather than producers, which positions them uniquely in the market — not tied to new releases or even to the conventional secondary market, but to what surfaces at auction.
If nothing else, this shows that there are pockets of the market that still excite wine lovers — even if what, exactly, that is can be hard to pin down.
Over the course of the discussion, we move from “wine as something you trade” to “wine as something you drink” and back again. We talk about how auction estimates are set, how provenance and storage history now command a very real premium, why some regions fall in and out of fashion, and why trust and transparency are at the core of any credible view of wine as an asset class. The result, I hope, is a nuanced perspective: wine as an asset only really works if we remember that it is a drink first.
