A word about our independence

Data, analysis and insight content from the London International Vintners Exchange (Liv-ex) are truly independent. You can rely on this. Maintaining independence, and retaining the trust of our members and the market is fundamental to our mission.

Liv-ex’s mission:

“We aspire to make the wine market transparent, efficient, and safe for the benefit of everyone in the trade.”

The role of an exchange like The London International Vintners Exchange

An exchange is an independent meeting place where its members, bound by a common profession, can come together to find out what is happening in their market and identify opportunities for profit.

“The core function of an exchange is to ensure fair and orderly trading and the efficient dissemination of price information for any(thing) trading on that exchange.” Investopedia

Liv-ex does not hold stock, nor transact on the exchange. We are entirely independent of the market activity. We simply report it. The market determines the price (and the data we publish), Liv-ex does not. These data points reflect the real-time trading activity of Liv-ex’s 620+ members, who between them represent the largest pool of liquidity in the world – independent data, direct from the market.

Accuracy of wine pricing data

Some examples of this ‘independent data, direct from the market’ are:

• The Liv-ex last trade price – the date and price each wine traded on the global marketplace
• The Liv-ex Mid-price – the midpoint between the highest live bid and the lowest live offer on the market. These are firm commitments to buy or sell and are used to calculate the Liv-ex Indices. Our indices are quoted on Bloomberg terminals and are widely considered the benchmark indices for fine wine prices worldwide

More about Liv-ex prices

 Our relationship with critics

Our members assess the price of a wine against its quality to assess the relative value of that wine. We make available to our members the scores and tasting notes of a cross-section of critics to help them assess what represents fair value.

We ask our members which critics they value, and publish in-app only those who show a consistent commitment to tasting wines both in barrel and in bottle over time.

We do not recommend one critic’s scores over those of another. The analysis and insight posts we publish references scores and notes from a pool of renowned critics. We make their scores available in our Fair Value Tool. Read more here.

Using APIs we can now make available a growing number of critics’ scores and notes in real-time by matching their databases to LWIN. This allows merchants to keep their own systems updated automatically with the latest scores to inform their decisions and those of their customers.