Additionally, buyers have the rights to age their physical bottle for 10 years in the estate cellars before redemption, and are invited to attend a one-of-a-kind experience at the winery. All nine NFTs sold via auction on the Cantata platform within a week for about $700, or 10 times the cost of a regular, non-NFT 2018 Trefethen—a superb wine, by the way. Tokens can be redeemed at the winery starting at the end of this month.
“It’s the future, but the tech needs to mature,” says Trefethen. “Once an NFT is as simple to buy as a swipe of your credit card, you’ll see wider adoption by wineries and collectors.” He’s working with developers to deliver a solution this summer.
Tom Gearing, chief executive officer of Cult Wines, a U.K.-based wine investment and collection-management company, explains, “For NFTs to make sense for traditional wine collectors, they have to tokenize something that’s unique and highly exclusive.” Last spring, the company collaborated with Bordeaux’s Château Angélus on an NFT that included an entire barrel of its splendid 2020, which sold for $110,000.
Gearing’s not rushing another one out, but he’s convinced that NFTs will make buying and selling wine faster, more secure, and more transparent. Anticipating that collectors will pay more for a 20-year-old wine with an NFT chip that shows where it’s been all those years, the company has a blockchain record for every wine in its portfolio and warehouse.
In the short term, though, wine NFTs aren’t necessarily good investments.
Last fall, Napa’s Robert Mondavi winery grabbed attention by offering 1,966 NFTs of three unique cabernet blends in fancy porcelain bottles. Many are still for sale on the company’s website, and some buyers looking to resell them on OpenSea are settling for half the original 1.16 ETH price.
Australian winery Penfolds’s latest NFT consists of two cabernet-shiraz blends in 6-liter Imperial (aka Methuselah) bottles, a 2018 Superblend 802.A and 802.B Imperial Duo. Both dropped on BlockBar on April 11 and remain unsold.
Still, Jamie Ritchie, Sotheby’s chairman of wine and spirits, says the auction house is actively looking into the best way to sell wine NFTs. “But there has to be added value to what you’re selling, like special experiences.”
Which brings me back to Club dVin, which aims to be “a global NFT wine community”—not just a virtual one. The lifetime-membership NFT, which itself can be traded, gives you the chance to join such adventures as the first harvest of grapes in Bhutan with the Bhutan Wine Co. in the fall, plus exclusive access to private tastings and parties with top winemakers.
Like other expensive wine clubs, hard-to-obtain wines will be offered, direct from wineries. What’s different is that each bottle will be linked with a Digital Cork NFT on the blockchain, so you can track the chain of custody; when opened, Tasting Tokens will be minted to include not just wine information but also offer a way to record your tasting notes and create a journal. What else they might present is in contemplation.