Digital Frontier: A Little Bordeaux For Your Portfolio, Madam?

The fine wine scene has long captivated collectors and speculators alike. The subject is undoubtedly glamorous and cerebral, but for those attuned to the nuances of terroir and the long-term nature of the market, one can’t help but notice its track record as a relatively stable, appreciating asset. Value is underpinned by scarcity, prestige, and centuries of tradition, not to mention the potential for sensory pleasure in drinking the world’s best bottles. In many jurisdictions, the appeal of collecting is further enhanced through tax advantage, with sales exempt from capital gains thanks to wine’s classification as a wasting chattel.

Yet for all its romance, wine investment has remained an inherently elitist and capital intensive pursuit. At the whims of fashion, vintage variation and the changing opinions of critics, building a successful portfolio also demands a solid understanding of the pitfalls associated with sourcing, provenance, storage, and market timing. Opaque brokerage fees can erode returns, while fraud is a constant risk. These complexities and expenses are daunting, especially for new investors, and often enough to deter even the most curious. For many, the barriers to entry are just too high.

WineFi, a London-based fintech startup, aims to dismantle those barriers. Founded by ex asset manager Callum Woodcock and his long term collaborator Oliver Thorpe, the business seeks to democratise wine investment by combining an intuitive, data-rich platform, a transparent ownership structure and the opportunity to spread risk through broader exposure. "WineFi makes investing in wine as seamless and cost-effective as placing a trade on Robinhood or eToro" Woodcock says. Their concept is built on the belief that fine wine can be both an elite collectible and an accessible investment - if the right tools are in place.

The platform offers two distinct entry points. The most innovative is a syndicate model, designed for accessibility and diversification: investors can start with as little as £3,000 and buy into thematic portfolios such as an Italian collection or Champagne selections. These portfolios are curated by WineFi’s investment committee and constructed off the back of market data, vintage dynamics, and long-term value potential. Although a common vehicle for pooling smaller amounts of investor capital, it is not a concept that has taken off in the wine world. In essence though, the accumulated funds can help achieve exposure to a much broader collection of wines than most people could achieve independently.

For more sophisticated investors, with the confidence and inclination to manage their own affairs, a private client route is available. Here, a bespoke portfolio can be tailored to preference. In both cases, clients retain full beneficial ownership of the underlying wines, which are held in storage under their own names. All wines are stored with Coterie Vaults, a government-bonded, climate-controlled facility in the UK. This not only preserves provenance and condition, but also ensures the wines remain outside the VAT regime until removed for delivery or sale. Assets are insured, independently audited, and never mixed with company inventory. WineFi claim these structural safeguards to be a strong point of differentiation.

The company infrastructure is built on a proprietary platform that analyses over 18 million data points, across more than 100,000 wines. This facilitates an assessment of risk-adjusted return potential based on historical price trends, critic scores, liquidity, and potentially other regional macro factors. Wines are cross-checked against data from Liv-ex and Wine-Searcher, ensuring that acquisition costs are benchmarked and transparent. Numbers alone aren’t enough though. Every portfolio is also subject to qualitative review by WineFi’s internal team and external advisors, including Peter Lunzer, who formerly managed one of the world’s largest wine funds.

On the user side, clients can view real-time valuations of their holdings, track performance, and explore new investment opportunities with the same ease they might expect from a stock trading app. Unlike traditional merchant-led systems, which can sometimes obscure margins and bury fees in the wine price, WineFi separates product, service, and storage into clear, itemised components. “In an esoteric asset class like fine wine, education is critical in helping investors understand whether it should play a part in their portfolios.” says Woodcock. “We produce detailed market reports, and produce truly best-in-class analysis that allows investors to compare wine to other asset classes. Without this ability to compare 'apples to apples', fine wine investment will always remain on the periphery.”

Collectively, this setup equates to a “zero trust” framework, a term Woodcock uses intentionally, meaning that every assumption must be supported by third-party validation. "Clients should never have to take our word for it," he says. “We solicit third-party audits for everything from asset segregation, storage conditions and conflict of interest policies.” The company conducts regular audits, uses independent pricing data, and does not hold inventory itself, removing conflicts of interest that have occasionally undermined the space.

The fee model is also straight forward: typically 12.5% upfront, which is equivalent to 2.5% per annum over a five year holding period, which covers sourcing, brokerage, insurance and the relevant amount of storage. If held longer than that, storage and insurance is taken 'at cost' from the eventual sale price of the wine. Syndicate charges are clearly front loaded, but you’re not in charge of when you sell anyway. “For our syndicates, the wines are jointly-held by syndicate members and gradually sold down when the time is deemed right to maximise returns. Proceeds are then distributed pro rata to members.” Naturally, private clients are free to instruct a sale at any time.

Launched in 2023, their vision attracted interest from both the HNW individuals and the wine trade. Following successful capital raises, the company has recently secured a further £1.5 million ($2 million) in seed funding from SFC Capital and Founders Capital in a round led by Coterie Holdings, who own fine wine merchants such as Lay & Wheeler and Hallgarten & Novum wines. Shilen Patel, the chairman of Lucky Saint and NICE, and Jonathan Keeling, the former CGO of Crowdcube sit on the board, while Coterie’s CEO, wine trade veteran Michael Saunders, will have a seat. The relationship with Coterie should ultimately provide the ability to buy and sell at a scale typically off-limits to all but the largest wine merchants.

Beyond the obvious commercial incentives, the concept of engaging a new audience is attractive for Coterie. The average WineFi investor is 38 years old - nearly two decades younger than the traditional fine wine buyer. Many are digital-native investors who enjoy wine but wouldn't dream of spending thousands on bottles just to drink. With WineFi, they can enjoy the cultural capital of owning Grand Cru Burgundy or Super Tuscans, while also pursuing long term financial returns.

These are individuals who might already hold positions in crypto, private equity, or even contemporary art collections. For them, wine is not only a tangible store of value, but also a source of narrative capital - something to talk about, share, and take pride in. “These holdings become the fun part of their portfolio,” says Woodcock. "You can talk about them at a dinner party in a way you just can't talk about your index fund."

This is of course an unregulated asset class, meaning almost anyone can set themselves up as a "wine investment business" whether or not they know anything about either investing or wine. Indeed, as with all alternative asset classes - such as art, watches and classic cars - the investment grade wine space can be illiquid. Getting your money out when you want may not be easy, and valuations can fluctuate.

Nevertheless, WineFi’s emergence aligns with a broader redefinition of what alternative investing looks like in 2025. A decade ago, fine wine sat squarely in the domain of collectors and the ultra-wealthy. Today, technology is enabling a new class of investors, and speculators, to get in on private credit, venture funds, and luxury collectibles, all as part of a modern, diversified portfolio and at relatively low expense. A recent Preqin study estimates that by 2030, there will be nearly $30 trillion allocated to alternative assets.

Although a new company with very little track record behind them, WineFi is confident in its proposition. Following a seven-figure revenue year and an average 24% month-on-month growth rate, WineFi is now focused on scaling without compromising service quality. “We need to ensure that customer service remains world class. Whilst we have designed the platform to allow investors to self-serve on both new investment opportunities and the value of their existing portfolio,” Woodcock notes, “any WineFi investor should always be able to pick up the phone and speak to us should they so choose.”

Interest is clearly growing, and the platform is actively developing new tools for investor benchmarking, asset comparison, and long-term performance tracking. It is also exploring blockchain solutions through a partnership with Lympid, with the goal of enabling fractional ownership and enhanced traceability. The team are extremely bullish on the potential for tokenization to revolutionise the fine wine markets.

“We are bringing a whole new demographic to fine wine, some of whom do not fit the classic profile of a fine wine collector or investor” says Woodcock. “This isn't something to be feared by the trade. More capital coming into the space benefits the entire ecosystem, from producers, to merchants, to storage providers and third-party logistics providers. We are not competing for a slice of the pie, we are making the pie bigger for everyone!”

So, if you’re going to chat business at the dinner party, wouldn’t you rather discuss the great wines of the world than the S&P 500?

Link to article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulcaputo/2025/06/17/how-winefi-is-shaking-up-the-wine-investment-space/?ctpv=searchpage

The pair – CEO and operations director, respectively – are the driving force behind WineFi, which they’ve enthusiastically billed as a wholly new form of wine investment vehicle, and which recently completed a £1.5m seed round of funding. The business allows, they say, a more democratically inclusive demographic to invest in this liquid asset, while also offering unrivalled transparency and traceability in terms of the true value of the stock and where it is held.

If this sounds too good to be true from entrepreneurs aged just 31 and 25 years old, then to reinforce their credentials they can flag both wine trade heritage and impressive backing from one of the bigger beasts in this world. The pair have also just won Startup of the Year from the SeedLegals Startup Awards, adding to an already lengthening list of accolades.

Woodcock’s father-in-law Mike Paul “is deep into wine”, he says, having run Western Wines for many years and now holding the deputy chairmanship at Gusbourne Wines. Meanwhile, Thorpe reveals that his father is Simon Thorpe MW, who currently sits as MD at Thorman Hunt. And, in addition to these connections, the WineFi team has attracted investment to the tune of a 10% share in the company from Coterie Holdings, further lending what Callum admits is “essential credibility” in a sector that has thrown up some less-than-ideal operators.

WineFi was born of what Woodcock describes as a perhaps inevitable growing interest as his investment-background-trained mind began to clock the possibilities with wine, but also the opportunity to approach this a little differently from the established investment routes.

“Because my father-in-law was very into wine, and also because of what Ollie’s dad does too, it didn’t take long for us to start looking at wine through an investment lens, and it has really interesting characteristics,” says Woodcock.

“Of course, there’s the diminishing supply side, but what that means as an investment is that you’ve had historically very attractive risk-adjusted returns, and it’s an interesting investment to hold, with a low correlation to other asset classes.”

Seamless Investments

Moreover, as Woodcock reminds, wine is capital gains free in the UK, along with the most important bit, he adds, that you can drink it. It’s also the “fun” part of an investment portfolio, which the investor can “happily discuss at a dinner party – unlike your S&P 500 Index fund”.

How, though, does this specific business differ from the run of the mill?

“We make it very seamless and cost effective to invest in fine wine,” says Woodcock. “So, that means two things; one is the ease of access, and then how they can trust that the organisation they are dealing with has chosen the right wines to go within a portfolio.”

Ideas and innovations that back these assertions come tumbling out at this stage of our conversation. But suffice to say that the WineFi MO primarily relies on a twin-pronged approach to investment rooted in a tech-rich approach, crunching huge amounts of data on potential investment wines, coupled with an affordably low financial bar for investment entry.

“We spend a lot of time on asset selection, we’ve consciously got a very data-driven process that is then overlaid with our investment company’s expertise,” says Thorpe, divulging an impressive breadth and depth of data sources drawn from past, recent and current market performance.

He adds: “We can put a list of 3,000 wines through our model, and then it will spit out a ranking of them within five minutes or so – is it fairly priced right now?

“And then the other side to it is we’ve got 20 years of investment data or pricing data online where basically you can look at the trends, the drawdowns, the volatilities, all of those sorts of things; then you feed those two things in on a vintage level, and it gives you this wine investment score (WIS). This is obviously then sense checked by our investment committee, just because there are sometimes anomalies.”

Unique Structure

So far, so impressive, and the WineFi systems also ensure that investors can wholly keep track of the physical wines in their portfolio and their actual location, not just names on a virtual spreadsheet assigned to some unseen bonded warehouse. But it’s the aforementioned democratising of the point of entry that really stands this company aside from its competitors.

“We also developed a unique syndicate structure, which allows investors to co-invest, so jointly own a portfolio from as little as £3,000,” says Woodcock.

“So, if you imagine, you invest £3,000 pounds and you get exposure to a Burgundy portfolio worth, say, £300,000, and suddenly that means that fine wine can feasibly form a part of pretty much any portfolio for the very first time.”

An early upshot of this, says Woodcock, is that it is changing how clients and prospective clients are approaching wine investment, with a younger generation, especially, “who are familiar with crypto and being able to place a trade online at the click of a button”, now taking an interest in the capabilities that WineFi offers.

“I think that the wine investing world has been very much based on ‘trust me, this is a good case of wine, it tastes great and it’s a great investment’,” he adds.

“But I think people today expect the kind of rigour that they get with other investments, because these are not insignificant amounts of money. I would say most of our clients are interested in wine, but they can’t imagine spending ten grand on wine to drink, [however] they can imagine spending ten grand on wine to invest in, assuming that they’re going to get that money back.”

And that last, with all the usual provisos and caveats that the market can go down as well as up, is very much WineFi’s tech-assisted aim.

Link to Article: https://harpers.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/34287/WineFi_shows_the_future_of_wine_investment_is_now.html

The wine investment company WineFi has added Matthew Small (pictured, right) to its team as head of investment.

The onboarding of Small comes as the fintech firm looks to continue to grow its team following its funding round, as well as the recent board appointment of well-known drinks industry figure Shilen Patel.

The new investment head’s past experience combines both traditional asset management with fine wine investing. Small has previously served as senior portfolio manager at Cru Wine and portfolio manager at Cult & Boutique Wine Management. Earlier roles included a position as a cash equities sales trader at Danske Bank.

CEO of WineFi, Callum Woodcock (pictured, left) has long been aware of his new recruit’s wine investment nous.

He commented: “I first met Matt over a year ago and his background was a perfect fit for what we are building at WineFi.

“He has continually impressed me with both his high integrity and commitment to plugging the gaps which have prevented wine becoming a more widely used asset class.”

Small is buoyed by the prospect of working at the company.

He added: “From the outset, it was clear that WineFi was taking a genuinely professional approach to fine wine investment – combining quantitative data, qualitative insight, and technology, all with a clear focus on maximising returns.

“That level of rigour is rare in the wine world. I was also struck by Callum's transparency and strong commitment to overhauling the status quo, which made joining the team an easy decision.”

To learn more about WineFi and its approach to wine investment, keep an eye out for the Harpers Wine & Spirit June magazine.