(Bloomberg) - What is wine?

Is it a luxury product, or a staple good? A bottle of 1946 Petruscan cost more money, gram for gram, than gold. At the other end of the spectrum, you can get a bottle of Spanish red for less than the price of the same volume of water. To Benjamin Franklin, wine was proof of divine love for humanity; to others, it's just grape juice that's gone off.

It's a question that equity investors rarely get the chance to answer. Regardless of the debate about whether wine belongs in the gutter or the stars, there's long been a near-consensus on the markets that the companies making the stuff are poor investments.

Thanks to deep fragmentation among producers, massive market power among retailers, and a business model that's at the mercy of seasonal weather, there's just a handful of publicly traded winemakers worldwide