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Real estate, bank credit, gold, the dollar – it's a quagmire out there in what used to be called the economy. Inquiring minds with priorities in the right place may rightly ask: What does it all mean for wine?

Seems to me two happy pictures are emerging: Silly-priced luxury stuff will continue to inflate as rich people clue into the fact that terroir is a better investment than real estate. And all other wines, the stuff most of us drink, will inflate a lot less quickly as apprehensive consumers put pressure on prices by trading down to brands they feel they can better afford.

In the parlance of Wall Street, this is a good time to drink low and sell high.

Let's peek at the investment market first. If you're wealthy and already own investment-grade wine, congratulations. Your cellar is probably now worth more than the rest of your house. While alcohol has long been considered recession-proof – people drown their sorrows during bad times, the wisdom goes – a new twist has emerged. Rich people now are fleeing to wine as a financial haven, not just for the alcohol's analgesic qualities.

“I'm getting lots of phone calls from the States now from people that want to invest in wine,” says Todd Halpern, whose Toronto-based agency, Halpern Enterprises, imports an all-star portfolio from such producers as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Marchesi Antinori. “They don't want to have the money in the bank; they're scared of banks. They don't want to buy real estate; they think real estate is falling. Gold is too volatile. I've got people dying to buy wine.”

Mr. Halpern, who organizes a biennial October charity auction for the Grand Cru Culinary Wine Festival, which has raised money for Toronto General and Toronto Western hospitals, also owns a U.S. importing company and closely tracks U.S. auction activity. He expects continued robust sales of the classic European marques, particularly those that have pulled down high-90s scores from American critic Robert Parker. Not only has fine wine consistently posted double-digit gains over the past two decades, currently there's an exceptionally tight supply in the United States, Mr. Halpern says. And it's being chased by a growing number of wealthy wine aficionados.

“The Europeans, as well as the Asians, have been coming to the United States and buying up wine because the euro was so strong,” he says. “It's dried up a lot of the American market.”

As evidence of the Asian effect, he cites the paradoxical price surge of 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild, one of five esteemed “first-growth” reds from the Médoc region of Bordeaux, against its four famous counterparts from the same legendary 1982 vintage. Mr. Halpern notes that Lafite is widely considered inferior to Château Latour from 1982, yet the going price for the former is roughly double, or $45,000 (U.S.) a case. The much-whispered explanation among auction-goers is that some wealthy Asian bidders find “Lafite” trips more easily off their tongues.

Others speculate the main reason could be that Lafite was the first superluxury brand to etch itself on the imaginations of Asian millionaires eager to display their status with totems of Western hedonism.

As recently as last month, Lafite reportedly set the record, in Chicago, for a case of first-growth Bordeaux. A Chinese buyer bid $54,970 for 12 bottles of the 1982 vintage, double its pre-auction estimate that started at $20,000. “The explosion in the worldwide demand for Lafite is astounding,” said Michael Davis, vice-chairman of the auction house Hart Davis Hart Wine Co.

That weekend sell-off was also the fourth largest wine auction in history, according to organizers, taking in $11.2-million, above the presale high estimate of $10.2-million – this, despite the fact the U.S. economy was well into its subprime-mortgage-induced tailspin.

Canadian collectors should enjoy spillover from that fine wine fever as they look to sell off excess inventory this fall at numerous charity auctions around the country as well as the Vintages Auction in Toronto later this month, the only regular for-profit auction in Canada, conducted by the LCBO and Ritchies Auctioneers.

Barry O'Brien, acting director of sales and purchasing at Vintages, the LCBO's fine wine and spirits department, believes the market remains robust when it comes to “quality” bottles. One of numerous examples from the Vintages Auction catalogue: Three meticulously kept single-vineyard Guigal Côte-Rôties from the 1999 vintage, each of which garnered a perfect 100-point score from Mr. Parker.

Out in the broader, buy-and-drink market, a more sober outlook, so to speak, appears to be taking hold. Consumers, many of whom in North America now consider wine to be an essential part of life, will continue to drink but will increasingly watch what they spend, says Michael Veseth, a wine economics expert and professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.

“They will definitely feel a wealth effect” and spend less on discretionary items such as wine, says Prof. Veseth, who is working on a book entitled The Future of Wine: Two-Buck and the Revenge of the Terroirists. Even if they hang on to their current jobs and continue to earn the same money, “people will look at their [net worth] numbers and feel poor.”

He says the trading-down effect will have the most impact at the $8 level in the United States, equivalent to, roughly, the $12 level in Canada, which will see consumers flee to brands costing $6 or $7 ($9 or $10 Canadian). And that should help put a leash on the runaway wine inflation of recent years.

Another bright spot for Canadian consumers in particular is that supplies of rare wines on the retail shelf could improve. Mr. O'Brien of Vintages says some U.S. retailers, hit with credit troubles and slumping demand, have curbed or cancelled orders of expensive wines, a move that will not sit well with rare wine producers, who tend to favour loyal clients who buy when vintages are both bad and good.

Cash-rich provincial liquor boards here, rivalled in size only by the national supermarket chains in England, have been seizing the U.S. credit crunch, dangling cash in front of rare wine producers to secure higher annual allocations.

Mr. O'Brien says the strategy is already paying off. Two examples: Château de Beaucastel, a top producer of $80 Châteauneuf-du-Pape, recently agreed to boost its annual allotment to Ontario by 50 per cent, from 600 to 900 cases; and Antinori has hiked its Ontario allocation of Tignanello, a cult red from Tuscany, by 50 per cent.

“All this stuff is on allocation, and it's about how they [the producers] feel about you,” Mr. O'Brien said. “It's an opportunity, for sure.”