The fine wine industry is estimated to be worth nearly USD10 billion per year, but trading fine wine is mired in slow, bureaucratic processes that drive many potential investors elsewhere. WiV is going to move the industry forward.
Fine wine has been a traded commodity for over 2,000 years. It’s an industry built on nurtured soil, expertise with vines and knowledge developed over generations.
Today though, the industry faces a challenge. If it wants to protect its ways of working, it needs to attract a new generation of investors. All too often though, these potential investors look at the slow, extensive, paper-based trading processes, and take their dollars elsewhere.
The simple answer would be to follow a range of other industries and modernise existing trading processes. The problem this though is that the value of wine is contained in the expertise that went into producing it, its age and vintage and the way that it has been stored. The industry’s methodical trading processes are fundamentally intertwined with protecting the product’s value.
The conundrum is this: The industry is not built around something that is directly interchangeable like foreign exchange or equities. If we accept that every bottle of wine is unique and that its value is locked in its history, there seems to be no way to make fine wine trading more efficient without jeopardising a wine’s provenance.
The solution
Or so it seemed until recently.
The rise of blockchain as a tool to enhance a myriad of activities has been widely discussed.
Put simply, the blockchain is a tamper-resistant global ledger where information can be recorded and only accessed by people with the correct authorisation. The information on the ledger is broken up and distributed globally, a decentralised structure that makes it significantly more difficult to hack than traditional approaches.
This has been a significant boon to several industries where products or services have a specific value that can be converted into digital tokens, but it has been more difficult to see how it can help a product such as fine wine, where valuations change from valley to valley and year to year.
WiV Tokens are associated with an individual bottle or case of wine. The tokens contain a wine’s complete provenance, protecting the information that makes a wine valuable as an instrument for investment but creating an environment where
they can be traded quickly, securely and at a lower cost, much like buying an equity share through a brokerage account.
We have focused on making it possible to integrate WiV with existing platforms, so there is no need for anyone involved in the wine trade to change their current stock or distribution approach.
We are in our beta testing phase at the moment, and expect to be ready for full launch during the second quarter of 2019. If you would like to hear more or want to be kept up to date with our plans or our security token offering (STO), please get in touch over our social channels.
The WiV platform is a secure, blockchain-based fine wine valuing system that brings together producers, buyers and sellers. For further details, please follow us @WiVteam or subscribe to updates at https://www.wiv.io