More people are spending up to £1m on wine

Fine+Rare, a specialist Fine Wine broker established in 1994 by Mark Bedini and Bob Cuchet has published statistics on the buying habits of its customers, revealing a 400% increase in the number of individual buyers spending between £500,000 and £1million on fine wines in 2010.

The statistics also reveal significant growth in the number of individual buyers spending between £250,000 and £500,000 with an increase of 71% and also in those spending between £100,000 and £250,000 with an increase of 105%.

Fine+Rare launched the first European website dedicated to wine in 1996 and went on to develop its ‘Wine Desk’  - a proprietary trading platform that is constantly updating prices and availability on over 34,000 wines which can be bought and sold through a team of 20 wine brokers based at its headquarters in London.

In 2010, the company executed over 17,000 transactions for its customers buying and selling over 50,000 cases of fine wines for customers all over the world. The average price of a bottle of wine sold by Fine+Rare has increased from £36 in 2004 to in excess of £94 in 2010.

Mark Bedini, group CEO comments: “ We have seen tremendous growth both in the volume and in the price that our customers are paying for fine wines, and this has risen steadily over the last few years and we see no reason for it to slow down.

“With China expected to be the worlds seventh largest consumer by 2013 with an expected consumption of 1.26 billion bottles and India also following in its footsteps our company is very well positioned to capitalise on this enormous growth”

1 March 2011 - Felicity Murray