🧯Problems We Solve
Wine investing is broken. Here's how we're fixing it.
As wine enthusiasts and investors ourselves, we launched WineFi to solve the endemic issues that we saw as plaguing the industry. In our view, these are the factors that have prevented fine wine from becoming a mainstream asset class.
Expensive
Investing in wine is a costly endeavour. As well as the purchase price of the assets, market incumbents often charge annual (~2 to 3.5%) and performance fees (10-20%) based on the value of a portfolio at a point in time.
In many cases, they will also mark-up the assets prior to selling them on to their customers. This effectively starts the investor "underwater" prior to any additional fees being charged.
At WineFi, we charge a flat sourcing fee of 10%. This covers the storage, insurance and management of the assets for five years.
Investors in our shared ownership "collections" will gain exposure to a variety of wines at a far lower cost of entry than owning the individual bottles outright. More information is available below:
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When you buy wine from a merchant, you have no sense of what the merchant has actually paid for them. This has led to a common practice of "marking up" to what they deem to be fair market value prior to selling them on to their investors. We see this as very unfair.
At WineFi, we use the Liv-ex Market Price as our benchmark. This is the best-listed price for a wine in the secondary market for trade-only buyers (e.g. what wine trade insiders can acquire them for). Where we can find discounts to this price, we pass those straight onto our members. We also use this price as a benchmark for performance.
Private Clients will receive receipts of purchase with your investment, proving both your ownership and the price at which we acquired the assets.
Complex
It is no secret that wine investment is a specialist topic. Many investors who are otherwise knowledgeable about mainstream asset classes may know very little about wine. Unhelpfully, there is also a culture of "take our word for it" that permeates the wine investment landscape.
As a result, less knowledgeable investors sometimes end up with portfolios filled with wines that are unlikely to appreciate or for which there is no secondary market at all.
Our job is to simplify the experience of investing in wine. Our Investment Committee selects and sources assets based on their anticipated return profile, and we provide a full write-up on why certain wines were chosen.
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The wine industry is very much an "old boy's club" and the experience of investing in wine has often reflected that attitude. It can be difficult to independently assess what a portfolio is really worth with a lack of data to back it up.
Since the launch of our platform in Q4 2023, our members have been able to track the performance of their collections in real time. We also have a marketplace, community and educational resources under construction.
You can pick up the phone and talk to us at any time.
Illiquid
Wine is, ironically, an illiquid asset class. Whilst there are advantages to this (see "Volatility"), it means that wine is a long term investment.
Our relationship with Jera, a Coterie Holdings company, allows you to borrow against the value of your wine collection. This allows you to monetise an otherwise non-yielding portfolio, for the very first time.
We are currently exploring mechanisms that will allow our investors to trade in and out of the wine markets as easy as easily as placing a trade on Robin Hood or eToro.
🏄VolatilityLast updated