Liv-ex — London International Vintners Exchange

Liv-ex (London International Vintners Exchange) is a global, B2B electronic marketplace where professional wine merchants trade fine wine via a standardised, anonymous online platform. Founded in 2000 by former stockbrokers James Miles and Justin Gibbs, the business launched at the London Wine Trade Fair with 10 founding members and a straightforward ambition: to create a stock exchange for wine. The fine wine market at the time was opaque, fragmented, and conducted largely through informal phone-based relationships, making accurate pricing extremely difficult. In October 2002, Liv-ex introduced full central counterparty settlement, meaning buyers and sellers no longer interacted directly. By December 2003, Liv-ex created its first formal price indices, cementing the platform as the industry's data backbone.

• Trades are standardised and anonymous; Liv-ex acts as central counterparty, managing settlement and logistics for all transactions
• The Standard-In-Bond (SIB) contract, Liv-ex's most widely used trading contract, requires wine to be in perfect condition, held in bond, and delivered to Liv-ex's London warehouse within two weeks of a trade
• Membership is open to wine businesses only; private collectors cannot trade directly on the exchange
• All wine traded passes through Liv-ex's London warehouse, where it is inspected and authenticated before changing hands

Liv-ex produces a family of fine wine indices that have become the industry standard for tracking market performance, quoted on both Bloomberg terminals and Reuters. All indices are calculated using the Liv-ex Mid Price, which is the midpoint between the highest live bid and the lowest live offer on the exchange. These represent firm commitments to buy and sell, making them more reliable than advertised list prices. The flagship Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 is the recognised industry benchmark, tracking 100 of the most sought-after wines and calculated monthly. The broader Liv-ex Fine Wine 1000, launched in January 2014, comprises seven regional sub-indices and provides the most comprehensive measure of the global fine wine market.

• The Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 tracks the daily price movement of the Bordeaux First Growths (Lafite Rothschild, Mouton Rothschild, Margaux, Haut-Brion, and Latour), covering only the ten most recent physical vintages
• The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100, the industry benchmark, represents 100 of the most sought-after fine wines on the secondary market and is available on Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters
• The Liv-ex Fine Wine 1000's seven sub-indices are: Bordeaux 500, Bordeaux Legends 40, Burgundy 150, Champagne 50, Rhone 100, Italy 100, and Rest of the World 60
• The Bordeaux 500 itself breaks into six sub-indices including the Fine Wine 50, Left Bank 200, Right Bank 100, Right Bank 50, Second Wine 50, and Sauternes 50

Liv-ex's core value proposition is the independence and accuracy of its pricing data. Because Liv-ex itself does not trade, hold stock, or compete with its members, the price data it publishes is entirely neutral. Transactions, bids, and offers are standardised, verified, and published as tens of millions of historic data lines spanning over 25 years, with thousands of daily updates. This makes Liv-ex the only source of truly independent, transaction-based fine wine pricing, as distinct from advertised list prices, which may reflect wines that sellers do not actually have in stock. The data is trusted by wine businesses in 47 countries and is regularly cited by Reuters and Bloomberg.

• The Liv-ex Mid Price, used to calculate all indices, is the midpoint between the highest live bid and the lowest live offer, validated against recent transaction data
• Liv-ex publishes weekly market reports, analysis of Bordeaux En Primeur campaigns, and the annual Power 100 list of the most powerful fine wine brands, produced in conjunction with The Drinks Business
• The Liv-ex Classification, first introduced in 2009 for Bordeaux and expanded to a global scope from 2017, ranks wines by their average trade price on the exchange and is updated every two years
• Liv-ex's Wine Matcher tool, awarded Supply Chain Initiative of the Year by The Drinks Business in 2017, uses AI to standardise wine lists and attach live Liv-ex price data automatically

One of Liv-ex's most significant contributions to the fine wine trade is the LWIN (Liv-ex Wine Identification Number), introduced in 2011. The fine wine industry had long struggled with inconsistent naming conventions, where the same wine might appear under dozens of different descriptions across different merchants' systems, leading to errors, delays, and miscommunication throughout the supply chain. LWIN solves this with a unique seven-digit numerical code for each wine, functioning much like an ISBN for books. Additional digits can be appended to encode the vintage year, bottle size, and pack quantity. The full LWIN database of over 200,000 products is freely available under a Creative Commons licence.

• The base LWIN-7 code identifies the producer and wine; extended codes (LWIN-11, LWIN-16, LWIN-18) append vintage, bottle size, and pack quantity respectively
• LWIN is freely available under an open data licence and has been adopted by major fine wine warehouses, management systems, and logistics providers across the industry
• By creating a common language, LWIN enables automated data exchange between merchants' systems and Liv-ex, reducing manual re-keying and the errors that accompany it
• Liv-ex's Wine Matcher tool uses LWIN to transform messy merchant wine lists into standardised, priced inventories in minutes

Liv-ex is a strictly B2B platform, reserved exclusively for professional wine businesses. Private collectors cannot trade directly on the exchange, though many merchants use Liv-ex data to provide valuations and sourcing services to their clients. For merchants, Liv-ex provides access to a global pool of stock from over 620 vetted counterparties, all available to trade anonymously around the clock. Merchants using Liv-ex's trading APIs typically trade two to three times more by value than non-automated members, reflecting the operational efficiency gains from connecting stock systems directly to the exchange. Liv-ex also functions as a trusted settlement layer, standing behind all trades and managing payments and logistics.

• All bids and offers on Liv-ex are anonymous; members trade with Liv-ex as the central counterparty, never directly with one another
• Liv-ex's warehouse team inspects, photographs, and checks more than 65,000 cases of wine per year, with bespoke algorithms flagging potentially high-risk bottles
• Merchants who connect their stock systems to Liv-ex via API can advertise wine to 620-plus global buyers automatically, without manual intervention
• Private collectors who want exposure to Liv-ex pricing data can access it indirectly through their merchant, who can provide valuations and trade on their behalf

For WSET and CMS candidates, understanding what Liv-ex does and does not measure is essential. Liv-ex indices track only wines that trade with sufficient regularity among professional merchants, meaning small-production cult wines, natural wine producers, and emerging regions with limited secondary market liquidity will largely be absent. The exchange covers the investable secondary market only, not the primary release market or direct-to-consumer sales. Index performance reflects B2B merchant-to-merchant pricing, which will typically differ from retail prices paid by end consumers. Liv-ex also does not capture the consumption value of wine, meaning its performance data is purely financial in nature.

• Only wines with sufficient secondary market liquidity qualify for Liv-ex indices; small-production and low-volume wines are often absent regardless of their critical reputation
• Liv-ex data reflects B2B transaction prices; retail consumers purchasing from a merchant will typically pay a premium above Liv-ex index levels
• The Liv-ex Classification requires a wine to have traded in at least five vintages with a minimum of 12 transactions per vintage within the qualifying period, excluding one-off rarities
• Liv-ex indices are price-weighted benchmarks rather than return indices; they do not factor in storage costs, insurance, or the opportunity cost of capital tied up in physical wine