London International Vintners Exchange

London International Vintners Exchange (Liv-ex) is an exchange for investment-grade wine based in London. Liv-ex, which was founded in 1999, provides a marketplace where wine merchants are able to trade wine, and also publishes two wine price indices based on these transactions which are widely used to gauge general price developments for the "fine wine" market in general.

The wines typically traded on Liv-ex are collectible or investment grade "fine wine" that have a significant trading volume on the second-hand market, and these wines are traded by the case. This largely means a number of high-end French wines of highly rated vintages, mainly recent vintages and vintages in early maturity. In difference from wine auctions, private collectors can not trade directly on Liv-ex, and older vintages or otherwise very rare collectible wines are not traded.

In 2010, trading on Liv-ex received attention and some criticism for allowing actors to short sell en primeur Bordeaux wines before they had been released by the producers and given an initial ex-château price. Château Lafite-Rothschild 2009 was the first wine where such trades were made. Liv-ex defended the practice by mentioning that this type of trade is standard on other asset markets.

Liv-ex publishes five different wine indices. The prices that are used to compute the index are wines in bond in London, priced in Pound sterling. In their construction these indices are similar to a . The composition of the index is regularly updated as wines are added and removed from the index, and their index weight revised.

The Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 Index tracks the daily price movement of the most heavily traded commodities in the fine wine market - the Bordeaux First Growths. It includes only the ten most recent vintages (excluding futures, currently 2004-2013), with no other qualifying criteria applied.

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