CITY AND SUBURBAN
Champagne takes over where ostriches left off stand clear, and wait for the pop
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
The telephone rings, and a woman encourages me to invest in champagne. With the millennium just around the cor- ner, everyone will want to drink it, thus cre- ating a shortage and driving the price through the roof. For a minimum stake of £1,500, her company, Delacroix, will let me participate in this good thing. I invite her to send me details, but I shall not be sending her a cheque. This story is going the rounds, and invest-in-champagne schemes now seem to have taken over where invest- ing in ostriches left off. Indeed, if ostriches were (as I said they were) Lloyd's of Lon- don with tail feathers, some of these cham- pagne schemes will turn out to be ostriches that go pop. To sink money in them you must first believe in the great champagne drought to come. The producers do not. I am reassured to learn that they have four years' stock — more than a billion bottles — in their cellars. Once it comes out it is ready to drink (though better, in my view, for a rest when you get it home) and does not improve in quality, so there is no inher- ent reason why it should appreciate in value. If it did, you would still have to sell it, and that can be tricky. You would find that, as Francoise Peretti of the Cham- pagne Producers Association puts it, cham- pagne is not a liquid asset: 'It's extremely precarious to invest in champagne.' It is even more precarious if you are outside the scope of the law on investor protection. A unit trust of champagne (nice thought) would be regulated, and if it came unstuck you might get compensation, but if you invest in individual bottles you are on your own. People who invested in individual ostriches, or thought they had, found that out. There may be good and bad schemes, just as there there are good and bad cham- pagnes, but if you feel tempted to invest in champagne, my advice is to drink some until you feel better.
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