A connectivist course in Fine Wine Investment

H817 MOOC Activity 19

Designing a course based on connectivist principles - I've tried to see if a course focused on something quite different from online learning could benefit from connectivist principles.

Wine investment – how to make money from investing in wine

Week 1 – the basics of wine

Tasting and evaluating wine

Week 2 – the key investment wine regions of the old world

Bordeaux – the 1855 classification system, First Growths and Super Seconds

Burgundy – Grands Crus and Premier Crus

Spanish wines – the key investment regions

Italian wines – the key investment regions

Week 3 – the key investment wine regions of the new world

Australia

New Zealand

California

Argentina

Chile

Week 4 – making connections with the wine trade

The key wine merchants

The key wine commentators and their blogs – Hugo Johnson, Andrew Jarvis, Jancis Robinson

Robert Parker and the effect of his scoring system on wine valuations

The key wine trading indices – Winex, BBX

Analysing historical data – what the indices tell us about historic values

Week 5 – building your wine investment portfolio

How to select wines

How to judge if the purchase price is fair based on historic analysis

Building a trial virtual portfolio

Implementing connectivism

The underlying knowledge here – the value of fine wine and trying to understand how it changes -  is dynamic and resides outside of any one individual. It is constantly being updated, and every year new wines for new vintages are being released – so this is a field of knowledge that is in constant flux.

There is no ‘right answer’ or ‘corpus of knowledge’ to be transferred.

The value of wine is a reality, but it is derived from thousands of individual transactions that change all the time. The prices change daily. How to make money from investing in this is a real challenge with real, tangible outcomes.

There is no ‘right or wrong’ answer as regards whether a particular wine is good or not.

So, to apply connectivist principles:

·      Learning and knowledge rests in a diversity of opinions. Absolutely – you can only get a sense of the quality of a wine and how it is viewed for investment by reading a lot of different opinions. There is no ‘one right answer’.

·      Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes – yes, in the wine trade, you can only make sense of which wines to invest in by monitoring  and connecting what information you can from key wine trading indices and the opinions of wine experts and wine writers.

·      Learning may reside in non-human appliances. The ‘value’ of each different type of fine wine can only be seen by looking at indices showing the average prices of specific wines – these change daily and are the blended average of hundreds of actual buy/sell trades – so this is dynamic knowledge (continuously updating and changing) that resides in a computerised index, not in any one person.

·      Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known. If a major commentator like Robert Parker re-tastes a historic wine vintage and changes his opinion (e.g. he re-tastes the Bordeaux 2005 vintage and decides that it is not as good as he previously thought) then we can guess that values for those wines may fall. The ‘truth’ is not currently known – no-one knows how the market will react. We need to triangulate a number of data sources to judge whether we should hold our 2005 wine investments or sell them before the price falls.

·      Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. Wine changes all the time – new wines are released onto the market, and old wines are re-rated as they mature. If we are not current with a diverse set of opinions, we cannot know when to buy or sell, so we cannot maximise the investment returns we can make.

·      Ability to see connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill. Wine as an investment is subject to many peripheral factors and sentiments. E.g. a lot of value for Bordeaux First Growths comes from Chinese consumers who have, fairly arbitrarily, deemed Ch. Lafite as the best wine historically, but who are now shifting their view and valuing other wines more – if their sentiments change as a result of other factors in the Chinese economy then valuations can be impacted. So we need to connect to areas beyond ‘wine investment’ to really understand how the market is evolving.

·      Currency – the only meaningful knowledge here is the up-to-date valuation and what it tells us. So we must have accurate, up-to-date knowledge if we are to make good returns on our wine investment.

·      Decision making is itself a learning process. The people who are open to shifting realities will profit from it. 30 years ago no-one would have countenanced the possibility of making returns from wine investment in Californian or Australian wines. Yet now, some of those wines are some of the most expensive in the world. The parallel today would be wines from, say, India – if the course were constructed to allow for forums where people sing the praises of wines they feel a passion for, then there is an opportunity for people to decide to invest in a completely new way.