⚖️Problems being solved

When you open a great bottle of wine, it was likely made 10 years ago by someone 10,000 miles away.

Inaccessible market

dVIN makes the wine asset class more transparent and accessible.

There’s a large disconnect between winemakers and consumers

Exploring the complex world of wine can be a daunting task for both consumers and winemakers. The challenges faced by customers in selecting the perfect bottle, coupled with the hurdles winemakers encounter in effectively reaching their audience, are the industry’s most pressing issues. This disconnect between buyers and sellers becomes even more obvious as new generations enter the game, especially given the significant differences between their buyer personas. We are seeing a shift in drinking demographics and behaviors that are unique across generations. Yet without data, winemakers are forced to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach that falls short of effectively engaging their audience.

Acquiring new customers is challenging for winemakers due to the heavily intermediated distribution channels that distance them from the end consumers, preventing direct communication and relationship building. Additionally, the vast selection of wines and brands creates a highly competitive market, making it difficult for individual winemakers to stand out and capture consumer attention.

This task is even harder when taking into consideration that methods to acquire customers are limited and expensive. For example, wineries cannot advertise on social media and mainstream alternatives (TV/Media) are either too expensive or ineffective.

On the consumer side, this fight for consumer attention often leads to consumer paralysis when attempting to learn more about wines.

Another consequence of this lack of consumer data is that, even when wine is sold, it’s impossible to track the real scarcity of any given label and/or vintage. To put this into context, let’s imagine there’s an exceptional edition of 20,000 bottles of wine by a small producer in France. As soon as they are sold and dispatched by the winemaker, it’s no longer possible to understand how many bottles have been consumed and, as a result, the real supply remaining. Now let’s imagine that half of those bottles have been opened. Without access to that real-time information, it’s not possible to determine the real price of that wine in the secondary market.

Improper Chain of Custody

Chain of custody in the wine industry supply chain lacks transparency, which increases the chances of fraud, counterfeit and improper shipping and storage. In fact, on average, 1 in 10 bottles are stored or transported without proper conditions, which alone is costing the industry $10B on an annual basis. Fraud and counterfeiting issues make the market unattractive and limit the size of the secondary market for wine sales by keeping investors away.

Inefficient and Expensive Transactions

When you open a great bottle of wine, it was likely made 10 years ago by someone 10,000 miles away. Accordingly, and largely driven by at least four intermediaries involved in the trade, the luxury and investment-grade wine industry sees approximately 20 million small cross-border transactions annually. This effect gets compounded whenever bottles are traded in the secondary market.

The reality is that these transactions involve significant counterparty risk, banking fees and foreign exchange slippage. Most importantly, this is an expensive problem for the 30,000 small wineries and over 10 million small middlemen. On an annual basis, it represents $10B in inefficiencies that could be saved by moving the industry on-chain.