Thinking of investing in wine?

One of our clients came to see us last week. We discussed a previous decision on his part to invest in fine wine.
He had been cold-called by a very professional firm with some very impressive brochures on the benefits of investing in fine wine and had made the decision to invest some of his savings.

What was interesting was that once the transaction had gone through, his wine was allegedly held in a bonded warehouse in Essex. Then they decided it wasn’t in Essex but somewhere in the Midlands.
Our client became nervous, wondering whether he had been duped into investing in wine and asked if he could sell his investment. He was told that the timing for selling wine was not good and they could not find a buyer.

He was then called a couple of days later to explain that I did have a buyer for his wine but the buyer did not want his mixed cases, therefore to secure the deal he would have to buy more wine so the cases were not mixed.

These extra bottles of wine would cost £5,000 but he thought better of it.
These investment opportunities are often packed very professionally with very friendly people on the telephone but our advice would be:

• Learn the warning signs
• Get impartial advice or even just speak to a trusted member of the family
• If you have invested somewhere, information on how to report it below

The FCA publish some really useful information on the website http://scamsmart.fca.org.uk/ where you are also able to report a suspected scam.