Chicago’s “The Cow Guy” Bullish on Wine

Scott Shellady is a trader at the Chicago Board of Trade who is a frequent contributor on CNBC, Fox Business News, Bloomberg and Sky News

Scott Shellady, familiar to financial TV fans as the “The Cow Guy” because of his distinctive bovine jackets, says now may be the time to invest in wine.  “With the Fed’s easy money policy (i.e., buying Treasury bonds and printing money) having some hard assets in your portfolio- like wine- could be a good store of value.”

Shellady says that wine investors need three to five-year time horizons.  Like fine art, certain wine labels appeal to collectors who will pay extra for scarce vintages and the perception of value that certain regions and producers convey.

For example, last month, a case of 1978 Romanee-Conti went for $476,280 at an auction in Hong Kong.  To save you the math, that’s over $39,000 a bottle.  This is reportedly the most expensive wine ever sold in the world.

(As an aside, this summer, I visited Romanee-Conti.  It’s amazing how such a small, nondescript vineyard is so famous.  In this part of Burgundy, they still till the soil with horses and toss copper sulfate by hand from cloth sacks.  That’s me in the top picture standing in from of the Romanee-Conti vineyard.)

Using grand cru horsepower in the Vosne-Romanee

Does Shellady think Midwest wine has investment potential?  “Some regional wine is surprisingly competitive,” says Shellady who once lived on his family’s dairy farm near Galena, Illinois, and has visited local wineries in Northwest Illinois.  “My advice is ‘don’t turn up your nose at local wine,’ the relationship between price and palate is appealing.”