Michael Burry's Latest Bet Against the Dollar, AI and Debt Is a Case of Wine

Michael Burry, the "Big Short" investor best known for shorting the US housing market before 2008, spent last week putting fine wine in front of an audience that has never considered it an asset class.

In a Substack essay picked up widely across financial media, he laid out why he's been buying discounted European fine wine and holding most of it in bonded storage outside the US, framing it as a hedge against dollar weakness, US fiscal deficits, and the disruption AI and quantum computing could eventually bring to digital financial infrastructure.

It's an unusual pitch from someone with no prior track record in wine. But strip away the macro framing, and a lot of what he's actually doing lines up closely with what we have been recommending for years.

The entry point checks out

Burry's starting point is simple: fine wine is down sharply from its highs (about 25–30% since October 2022), and the drop reflects a cyclical correction rather than a structural decline in an asset whose supply only shrinks over time. That's consistent with what we've been tracking. Our most recent market analysis found buyer-initiated trades on Liv-ex running at 64% in July, well above the 2025 average of 58%, with trade value and volume both up substantially year over year that same month. Purchasing rose across every major buying geography in the second quarter, including through the usual summer slowdown, and US buyers came back in force, up 163% year over year in July, buying at or above market price rather than negotiating hard. None of that looks like a market limping along.

The regional picture supports his "buy the dip" logic too, just with a sharper edge than his own wine selection reflects (more on that below). Over the trailing twelve months, Liv-ex's indices Italy 100 leads with a gain of roughly 2.9%, Champagne 50 is up around 2.6%, and Burgundy 150 has added close to 1.9%. These are the categories where the recovery has actual legs.

Fine wine doesn't trade like a stock, and that's the whole point

This is a point we've made to investors for years, long before Burry put it in a Substack post. Fine wine's returns come from scarcity, vintage quality and producer reputation. It's a different asset behaving on a different cycle, which is exactly why it belongs in a portfolio next to equities rather than instead of them. Burry frames this as a hedge against AI and quantum disruption to digital financial systems… We'd frame it more simply: a physical asset with structurally limited supply just doesn't move with the same forces that move a stock index, and that's been true independent of whatever theory anyone attaches to it this month.

Selection over speculation

Where Burry is most convincing is on discipline. He says he looked at around 700 wines this year and bought about 40, chasing discounts of 18 to 20% below prevailing prices. That's not a wine collector building a cellar. That's someone treating entry price as the entire game, which is exactly right for this market. Broad exposure to "fine wine" as a category has never been the source of returns here. It's always been the specific wine and the specific price.

He put it about as plainly as it can be put:

"Buy low, be very patient, then sell high or enjoy it."

There's nothing clever about that sentence, and that's rather the point. Every serious buyer in this market already knows it. The hard part has never been the idea. It's sticking to it when a wine is cheaper than it was a couple of years ago and everyone else is nervous.

RareWine Invest's Opinion: Can We Disagree With Big Short?

Well, we need to – because his wine choices are not entirely backed by history and future projections.

Burry's buying is concentrated in first growth Bordeaux, DRC and top Super Tuscans, and our own data suggests that's precisely the part of the market carrying the least momentum right now. Bordeaux's share of year-to-date trade value on Liv-ex has fallen to just 31.4%, the lowest level on record, and it remains the single biggest source of declining vintages within the broader Fine Wine 1000.

Since our founding, we have been very vocal and built our whole business around a different main region: Burgundy. In July 2026, Burgundy overtook Bordeaux as the most-traded region by value for the first time since 2022, driven by exactly the kind of scarcity Burry says he's chasing: vineyards that are legally fixed in size, divided among small holdings, and incapable of expanding no matter how much demand grows. Bordeaux, by contrast, is produced at a scale that undercuts the very scarcity argument he's using to justify buying it.

There's a similar issue with his instinct to chase very high scores. The vintages that draw the most attention at release are usually the ones that arrive most expensive, which leaves the least room for a buyer to actually benefit from future appreciation. We've consistently found more value in relative pricing within a producer's range than in the score attached to any single vintage. A well-bought 96-point wine can easily outperform plenty of "perfect" ones bought at the top of the market.

None of this undoes his broader point. The entry timing is right, and the discipline he describes is the correct instinct. We'd just point that same discipline somewhere else: toward Burgundy, Champagne and the handful of Italian names where scarcity is structural rather than nominal, and away from Bordeaux, which remains a region we continue to approach with caution.