E88: dVIN Co-Founder - Disrupting the $250B Wine Industry With Blockchain

28:31And so by the time we actually had wine to sell, we were already making money. We already knew how to ship wine to the States. We already had a warehouse. And we had tens of thousands of customers ready as soon as we had wine to sell. So we were kind of doing, we were building the distribution on one side while we were building the product on the other side.

28:58So that's one thing, right? The other thing you realize is as a guy with a tech mind, right, is in technology, entrepreneurs make data-driven decisions. In wine, there is almost no data. Or at least there was almost no data. That's right. How did you realize that and what did you do to get more data? So there's still no data in the wine industry, right? And at some point we can talk about Devin, which is, you know, we're a blockchain business. I always say that we're the most boring blockchain pitch in the world. And we're the most exciting wine pitch in the world. And we're both things at the same time because we're really focused on data.

29:46We're focused on data, customer acquisition. were focused on kind of the meat and potatoes rather than the fancy 1 ,000x meme coins. But in the wine business, there really isn't any data. And I started thinking about data on the production side because I didn't know anything about wine. I didn't know how to make great wine. And every time I would ask someone, how can we make sure that we make great wine? They would say, oh, well, you just have to get a great winemaker. And I was like, well, I, you know, I don't know if I want to take this 10 year process of making wine and trust one person's intuition.

30:28Like that didn't make sense to me as a as a business person. Right. Like that felt like too much risk. So to de-risk the winemaking, we started collecting data. So we hired a bunch of Somalians because there was a big Somalia school in Mendoza. and we went and collected data from, we basically made a list of all of the great wines that came out of this region that came out of Mendoza. And then for each of those wines, we started basically deconstructing it. We would go to the vineyards and take measurements in the vineyards. Okay, what's the elevation of this vineyard? What's the rootstock of the vines?

31:12What clone the kind of plant that they use? what's the angle to the sun how far are the rows apart how far are the plants apart like we deconstructed how that grape was grown what the vineyard was like that grew that grape and said okay if we want to grow a grape like this we need to be at the same elevation we need to be the same angle for the sun we need to do some of these things the same and so we collected that for 80 or 90 different wines. And in each wine, there were maybe four or five component grapes. So probably we looked at 300 different vineyards and took all of these data points from the vineyards.

31:56And then we went in and talked to the winemakers and said, okay, how did you make this one? What was the bricks level at harvest? A lot of these little data points. What kind of oak did you use? What kind of tanks did you use? How long did it stay in oak? How long did it stay in the bottle? And we took all those data points and kind of put it in a database and started really attacking that database over what should we, how should we plant our vineyards? And if you went and looked today at Google Earth and looked at our vineyard versus all the vineyards around us, ours looks like a looks like a checkerboard right it's a bunch of little tiny one acre plots that all have a different angle to the sun they all have different they're basically formed in a different way whereas you know other vineyards they take you know a hundred hectares and they little tiny plots that kind of work almost like a laboratory.

33:04And so what we had from the beginning was maybe some of these would fail, but most of them were mirroring other vineyards that we knew were going to be successful. And I think that really de-risked our winemaking. And what it led to was higher take rates. Can you explain what that is? A take rate? Yeah, sure. So whenever you plant a vineyard. Take rate or tick rate? Take rate. So a take rate is when you plant a vineyard, some number of those vines are not going to make it. Some number are going to fail. And especially when you replant a vineyard, when you graft the actual vine to the rootstock, some number are just going to fail.

33:52and what we learned was that because we were really specific in how we created each of these vineyards our take rate was close to 95 percent like very very few vines failed whereas in a normal vineyard your take rate is like 70 80 percent so we we we again we de-risked so even from the planting so 70 take rate means 30 30 fail fails yeah and you've got to replant them or regraft which takes a lot of time a lot of resource and a lot of money and but mostly time right because once you got to do it again the next year exactly once a year

34:39so that's kind of like the first step towards what you're doing today right how do we collect data to improve our processes in the wine industry? Yeah. But now you are on to the next level, right, which is blockchain meets rare wine. Yeah. What is Devin? So Devin, you know, decentralized wine, right? Like that was the idea when we started. And, you know, we approach blockchain and wine maybe in a little bit of a different way than other blockchain projects. We started off as a group of winemakers, wine professionals, industry professionals, thinking about how can blockchain solve real problems?

35:35Like, what are the problems in the wine industry and how can blockchain solve that? And the biggest problem really is connectivity to the consumer. So when you open a great bottle of wine, it was almost always made 10 years ago by somebody 10 ,000 miles away, right, when you're consuming it. So your connection to that winemaker is really separated by a lot of time and space. And what that means is the winemaker has a very difficult time doing three things. Three things that we identified as being really important. One is product development. Right. So almost any product that you make, and especially in the digital world, right, you're getting instant feedback from your consumers.

36:32You make a product, you know right away what they like, what they don't like, and you can make you can make changes. In the wide world, you can't do that. Right. Someone they're not they're not consuming your product for 10 years. So how and even when they do, there's no real avenue to get feedback from them. So we wanted to create a way to get feedback. The second problem is... Why is feedback so important? And why has it not been solved until now? Is it just a technological issue, or is there another reason? I think it's a technological issue. I've been trying to solve that problem for 20 years.

37:12I did it through... We built an iPad wine list. That was one of my first tech projects in wine. I mean, that was so that we could, it wasn't so that it would be easier for the consumer in the restaurant, although that was important. But it was to collect data that we could give to the winemaker that would give them feedback. That, you know, that was, it was hard to do. We had some moderate success there. But most of that data was more interesting to the restaurant than it was to the winemaker. There is this app called, I forgot the name, Divino? No. It's like. Vivino. Vivino. Sure. No, Vivino's great.

37:51I know the people who, even my dad, right, use it. How is that not helping collect the data that you're talking about? Or how is that not closing the entire loop? So in a known Web3 world, right? So Vivino is, look, it's great. I was a user of Vivino for a long time. I don't use it so much anymore.

38:16Most of the winemakers that we work with don't really use it. Why? It's really because the incentives on Vivino are misaligned. So think about Twitter. I'm also not on Twitter. But the incentives on Twitter are for the loudest voices in the room, the most aggressive, maybe the most controversial voices get rewarded. So on Vivino, that's the same thing, right? Like if you say, I like this wine. It was great. No one's going to care. If you say some crazy, whether it's a criticism or even an accolade, But the more extreme you are on Vivino with your public review, the more attention you get. And so the incentives are not for you to provide real feedback.

39:17Your incentive is to make a name for yourself. To game the system. It's a very web to platform kind of game, right? How do I game the system to increase my personal score or my followers or whatever, right? Exactly right. So because of that, a lot of winemakers, they don't want to engage because they're not really interested in that kind of feedback. They don't want the most extreme voices in the room. That doesn't help them with product development. It doesn't help them with messaging. It doesn't help them with marketing or packaging. like that's the help that they need right they need to if they the more information they have on consumption the more consumption data they have meaning where is it consumed when is it consumed and remember in the wine industry consumption and purchase are separated in a way that is unique.

40:24Think about nearly everything that you buy. Everything. You're consuming right away. A t-shirt, you're wearing it right away. A car, you're driving it off the lot. A tennis racket, you're playing tennis with it that day. Maybe an avocado, you wait a couple of days. But for the most part, everything you buy, you're consuming right away. With wine, you're buying it and consuming it 10 years later. So that separation between purchase and consumption creates a real distance for the winemaker that they need to overcome in order to use consumption data as feedback on, you know, there are a lot of winemakers that say, I don't care what the customer thinks.

41:08I'm going to make the very best wine I can. That's great. Or for the best. That said, you know, most winemakers are going to make a second wine or a second wine and a third wine. They're going to try to grow their business overall. Maybe they won't change the recipe for the wine, but they might change their packaging. They might change their messaging or marketing around what is happening on the consumption level. And without that data, it's really hard to grow a business. Try to grow a business today. Without having some sort of customer feedback, it's almost impossible. So that's the consumption data part of it.

41:47The second part, which is, again, pretty unique to the wine industry, is supply chain data, right? So winemakers, especially luxury winemakers, they have a limited amount of product. I can only make 1 ,000 cases this year of this wine, 1 ,000 cases, 12 ,000 bottles. That's a pretty average-sized winery in the luxury space. that's making a$50 or$100 bottle of wine. If you only make 1 ,000 cases, how do you know where to send it? Do I send four cases or five cases to Norway? Do I send five cases or 10 cases to Seoul? How many cases do I send to Zurich? How many cases do I send to Singapore? I don't know how many.

42:32Without consumption data, your supply chain is really inefficient. And if you only have a limited amount of product, you want your supply chain to be as efficient as possible. That's how you're going to maximize your revenue and that's how you're going to maximize your business. So knowing where your products are being consumed and when they're being consumed helps with supply chain data and obviously depletion reports and supply chain data. The third thing, and we talk about this all the time, is customer acquisition. people talk about customer acquisition a lot for direct to consumer businesses right if i'm gonna like what's my customer acquisition cost if i'm gonna sell a product directly to a consumer well in the wine business customer acquisition doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to sell directly to that consumer it means you're going to acquire that customer as a loyal customer for your brand.

43:32Like when you walk into a wine shop or really even a grocery store, there's 500 different wines that you can pick from. How do you decide what to pick? If you're a good brand and you're acquiring a customer, they're going to buy your wine again because they bought it, they like it, they know your story. Maybe it's part of their identity. They're going to keep buying it over and over again. So when you acquire a customer, it means they know your story. Maybe they're buying it direct from you or maybe they're just buying it repeatedly from you know the wine shop or ordering it at the restaurant you can't really acquire customers in wine right you can't advertise probably nobody listening to this podcast has ever seen an advertisement for luxury wine i haven't they don't advertise on television there's no print advertising they won't let them advertise on social media.

44:29So if you can't advertise, how do you acquire customers? How do you tell someone your story? Probably most people listening to this podcast, me included, to making this podcast happen is think that the wine industry or the rare wine industry is kind of like old school and not interesting. We'd rather buy, I mean, meme coins than buying bottles of wine. For Like, for me, wine is made to drink, not even to collect, right? Because the collection of wine sounds like something that older people would do, right? Yeah. Without, I'd never really asked myself the question, but I'm not really aware of it, right?

45:11Well, so, but that's right. And that's because wine investment has really been captured by the boomer generation and my generation because of access. Yes. They've, you know, when you think about the real investment assets or the asset classes that are out there, like most of them have been captured by the boomers, right? If it's real estate, younger generation is priced out, stocks and bonds, that's really all controlled by boomers with big hedge funds. Wine is the same way. For the last 100 years, wine is a great performer. Wine as an asset class is maybe$250 billion, about$10 billion a year in turnover.

46:11but it's completely taken over by the older generations. What we think we can do by tokenizing wine is open it up to younger generations that can get asymmetrical information, that can get transparency and can invest in something that's fun and interesting. So if your mother comes to you today and asks you, why should we put the wine on the blockchain? and you need to answer to your mother in a sentence or two. Sure. What's your answer? I tell her that wine, especially, like we're not talking about your Tuesday night two-buck chuck, right? That's a very American reference. But we're not talking about your regular Tuesday night wine, right?

47:06The wines that we're putting on the blockchain are luxury and investment-grade wines, right? Wines that are$50,$100,$500,$1 ,000. So the reason we put it on the blockchain is because we turn it from a possession into an asset. We're creating a digital deed of ownership, or in Europe they call it a digital product passport. So each bottle has a chain of ownership, has chain of custody, has anti-fraud and anti-counterfeit protections, has elements of provenance that you can see and understand. that turns that bottle into something that more resembles an investment asset and less resembles a disposable possession.

48:07And for investment-grade wine, that's really important, right? You've got a$250 billion asset class, big asset class. But can you borrow against it? No. Can you insure your wine collection? No. Is there price transparency, price discovery? Not really. How do you even enter the market? We talked about this the other night. If you wanted to invest$100 ,000 right now in stocks, you could do it in two minutes on your phone. Bonds, two minutes on your phone. Gold, you want to buy$100 ,000 in gold? 10 minutes. Real estate, you could certainly make an offer. Maybe you couldn't close a deal because you've got to do some paperwork.

48:56But you could buy real estate intelligently in 10 minutes on your phone. But if you wanted to invest$100 ,000 in investment-grade wine, this$250 billion asset class that has had 1 ,000 % return in the last 20 years, Better return than gold. You wouldn't be able to do it in a week because there's no transparency. It's a completely opaque market.

49:31There's gatekeepers everywhere. You have to find someone that you trust in order to get access. So we think that by – and I know you asked for a two-sentence answer. I think I have more than two sentences. But the idea is we turn wine from a possession into an asset by building that digital deed of ownership. I'm not very good at two sentences. Sorry. I got to be more pithy. I'll figure it out. Maybe another glass of wine. I was thinking about it. I was like, maybe a bit more wine. Or maybe it gets worse. Hard to say. Hard to say.

50:13You talked about gatekeepers, right? Yeah. There is a lot of gatekeepers, which sounds like a negative thing. Before going into the kind of negative side or aspect of gatekeepers, can you identify the main actors in the wine industry who are the middlemen, who are the gatekeepers? And then we'll basically think about why are they needed, but what can be improved? Sure. So I think the main gatekeepers in the wine industry is called the Place de Bordeaux. Especially when you're talking about investment-grade wine or luxury wine, it's the Place de Bordeaux, which is an affiliation of what's called Négociants in France.

51:07What's a Négociant? A Negociant usually buys wine from the winery and then sells it to an importer or a distributor. They're like the first layer of middlemen in the wine industry. And they certainly have provided a lot of value in the last, you know, it's like a 200-year-old system. of Négotéance in France. And what you'll see is that lots of Napa wineries now sell on the Place de Bordeaux. Lots of Italian, high-end Italian wines. Penfold sells on the Place de Bordeaux. So it's not just Bordeaux wine. Champagne sells on the Place de Bordeaux. It's become the marketplace for producers and then importers and distributors.

52:08on the other side. They're the main gatekeeper. And I think they provided a lot of value for a long time. And I think they still provide value. They're good at matchmaking. However, they've taken an outsized share. The middlemen in the industry have taken an outsized share of the revenue. I think they take relatively little risk and they take an awful lot, really the lion's share of the profits. Can you give an example of risks that they're not taking, right? You mentioned cash risk. So I talked to you about my experience as a proprietor, right, making wine. I mean, we took risk by buying the land and investing money in getting the land ready to plant and then planting the vines and then taking care of the vines for three years.

53:03and then all of the money that went into harvest and winemaking and barrels and bottles and labels and branding and everything else that went into creating that product, blood, sweat, and tears for 10 years. That's the real risk in winemaking. Usually, the negotiants or the middlemen, not only are they not taking those kinds of risks, But they're not really even taking any cash risks, right? They're usually buying the wine on credit and selling it on credit with a more narrow window. So they're buying it with 120 days and they're selling it with 90 days. So they're not even taking any cash risk.

53:51They certainly created a lot of value over time by building the customer base, by creating the distribution. We talked earlier. You know, smart businessmen build distribution. You know, the first time entrepreneurs build product, second time entrepreneurs build distribution. Well, they built distribution. And that's why they take, that's why they're able to take the lion's share of the revenue. But I think that that, I think that that needs to change. And I think you need to start, you need to see winemakers that are taking all the risk and that are creating these wonderful products. I think they need to start making more of the rewards.

54:34So you're clearly saying that there is some people or actors in the wine industry that are incentivized to not have the wine put on the blockchain. Well. To have things not changing, which is the case in probably most industries today, right? I think about Bitcoin and the banks, right? It's like a good example. I think every industry has incumbents that are threatened by technology. And that's been true for 50 years, right? Probably longer, right? The buggy whip salesmen were really threatened when the car was introduced. So I think every new technology threatens the incumbents. That said, every new technology usually overall in an industry makes the pie bigger and creates opportunities for everyone.

55:40So I think that certainly there are incumbents that want to keep the status quo because that's how they're making all their money. But I think that there's also forward-looking incumbents that look at the industry as a whole and say, and this is, you know, when we first started what we were doing, we looked at the industry as a whole and we said, what are the biggest threats to the wine industry? What are the problems that need to be solved? And the biggest threats were the consumers, especially the next generation of consumers, their expectations are changing. 100 percent and unless the industry changes um they're going to lose those they're going to they're going to they're going to have a big problem with the next generation of consumers i know that i buy wine the same way that my parents bought wine and they buy wine the same way that their parents bought wine right my kids that are digitally native that are used to that that abhor opacity, right?

56:48They need transparency. They are rooted in transparency. They're used to finding any answer in two seconds on their phone. They also want experiences rather than products, right? They don't care so much about stuff, right? Stuff has been raining on them since they were born. They want experiences. They want things that they'll remember. They want things that are unique and interesting. That's what I think. They also want connections. Connections are really important. And most consumers that make a brand part of their identity, they build a connection with that brand digitally, usually. With wine, you can't do that.

57:34It's really hard to do. And we think that what we're doing at D-Vin is creating the rails. to connect winemakers and wine lovers. How concretely? I'm basically referring to what you showed us yesterday. And if we think about this Vivino app that is not onboarding enough winemakers, right? Sure. How is what Divin is building covering the entire kind of loop or feedback loop that everyone in the wine industry needs except the incumbents, right? But that might not have a choice if it's powerful enough, right? So what we've built is, and I've kind of hit on this a little bit, but we've basically built the universal protocol to put a bottle of wine on the blockchain, right?

58:36This is the digital deed of ownership. We call it a digital cork that has all of these specialized elements, right? It tracks chain of ownership. It tracks chain of custody, provenance, anti-counterfeit, anti-fraud, so on and so forth. We've added to that a mechanism that also is kind of unique for other assets. You know, most assets live forever, right? But wine, someday, if you're lucky, you get to drink it. And when you drink it, that asset is destroyed. So we needed to create a way to destroy the asset. And what we did right now, we're doing that on kind of an incentive basis where when you drink a bottle of wine, you can really easily with your phone, you can destroy that asset, the digital cork.

59:33And then what you get in return is what we call a tasting token, but it's an authentic proof of experience that says, okay, I tasted that one. And what that usually comes with is some rewards and status from the winemaker, right? The winemaker now says, okay, you're an authentic consumer. We know that you've tasted our wine. I want to provide you with, you know, you get enough of these tasting tokens. We're going to make you like a premier crew member of the winery. So you get some status in the winery. Maybe you get access to drops or access to tastings or whatever. And maybe we want to give you a reward.

1:00:14We want to invite you to a winemaker dinner. So that provides that really simple connectivity between the winemaker and the consumer. It's basically like building a loyalty program. Absolutely. but that's probably more interesting for wine passionate right sure for example I love a good wine but I'm not the one passionate yeah so I need something more you know where I'm going yeah so I need another glass for this one I need something more to kind of provide you my data right something where I'm thinking oh it's a no brainer I don't even want to say I'm about data privacy or anything I'm more like

1:01:09loyalty program whatever cool I could do it but I'm not necessarily thinking about it maybe I forget but there is maybe a mechanism that I know you implemented because we did a test yesterday evening right that is super cool that will make even people like me who care or don't care about building a profile, right? They're still going to do it. What is it? So what we're launching later this year in September at Breakpoint is VinCoin. So it's a native token built on Solana. And it is in the beginning, like air miles for wine. It's a So it's a token that the winemaker attaches to the bottle. The bottle makes its way through the supply chain.

1:02:01Then when you open the bottle, you can claim that VIN coin or you get transferred that VIN coin in exchange for that data going back to the winemaker. So the winemaker knows where their bottles are, when they're being opened. And if you opt in, they even get your customer information, right? Like you can say they can send you rewards or send you offers. So the winemaker gets consumption data, which helps them with product development. They get supply chain data because they know where those bottles are being consumed. That helps them with supply chain optimization. And they get customer acquisition.

1:02:42Super valuable to the winemaker. Incredibly valuable. And what the consumer gets is VinCoin, which is like air miles. They can go and buy more wine with that. They can go buy experiences, purchase experiences like everything from a tasting at the winery to a harvest experience to, like I said, winemaker dinners. or they can take that vin coin and use it like any other loyalty point with other luxury goods and services right because lots and lots of brands are interested in connecting with consumers who like to open 50 bottles of wine right like that's a great consumer for the four seasons or Louis Vuitton or Gucci or we actually have a deal with Rolls-Royce, interestingly enough.

1:03:38They want to identify high-end wine consumers to invite to the F1. Can I sell my Vincoin? Yeah, so we're planning to launch Vincoin on a number of exchanges. And if you want to trade it for dollars, you can. We don't recommend it. We think there's better things to do with VinCoin. We're actually going to launch a marketplace where you can buy a ton of wine with VinCoin. Nice. But VinCoin for us is the loyalty currency for the wine industry. And in this first kind of iteration, we think that it's going to be an incredibly valuable instrument for, certainly for any wine lover to, you know, what do they say?

1:04:34Glam up your wine life.

1:04:42You mentioned before that there is low liquidity in the luxury wine industry, right? Do you want to elaborate on that? how something like what you're building could help improve liquidity, which is basically one of the promises of blockchain, right? And tokens. And how it can help, I don't know if you say that in English, but undust the wine industry, right? And make it more attractive to young people as an investment asset class. So let's talk about the investment grade, right? So investment grade wine, a lot of people have asked me to define investment grade wine. It's actually really simple.

1:05:33Investment grade wine is any wine, any bottle that has value in the secondary market, right? If someone's willing to buy it in the secondary, then it's investment grade. What that really means is that that's scarce, is that there's actual forced scarcity. And for in the investment grade space, you're looking at the tiny wineries around the world. There's about 30 ,000 small, pardon me, small independent wineries around the world that make luxury wine. There's about 300 that make investment grade wine. Those are mostly in Burgundy, Bordeaux, Barolo, Napa, Champagne, the Southern Rhone. And there's regulatory reasons why those wineries can't make more wine, why their wine is scarce.

1:06:30There's a limited quantity that they can make. But there's also just the physical reality. Like there's only so many vines you can grow in that particular terroir to make that quality of wine. So the second point makes sense to me, but why is the first one? Regulatory reason. Well, for many years in France in particular, but also you see the same thing in Italy. You see the same thing in Germany, in the United States, in Napa, where if you want to plant new vines, you have to get approval by the local regulatory board. If you want to, in France, one of my good friends is a winemaker named Stefan Asseo who learned to be a winemaker in Bordeaux and moved to Paso Robles, California.

1:07:22And when you ask him why he moved, He said, because I wanted to plant vines in Bordeaux that weren't allowed, meaning that he wanted to plant a varietal in Bordeaux. And they told him, no, you can't plant the varietal. You can only plant these varietals in Bordeaux. And so he said, well, I want to plant whatever I want. So he moved to California and has built a very successful career there. But that kind of regulatory regime has created very narrow guidelines for what you're allowed to grow in certain places. And what that's built is a system of scarcity in the luxury and especially in the investment-grade wine industry.

1:08:09So when there's scarcity, big demand, very, very small supply, and when you've got a 15 to 20-year window before you can actually consume the wine, that creates this opportunity for trading. The regulatory reason, is it because of lobbies like you would have in other industries? because there is some interest, economic interest from some big actors that can influence politics and regulations? Or is it another reason? I don't know if it's necessarily a big actor. What it usually is is a collective, right? In Bordeaux, it's the collective of all the wineries got together, they form a regulatory board, and that regulatory board makes the rules.

1:09:00And, you know, a lot of those rules are to protect the brand, right? If you want to protect the brand of Bordeaux, they make those rules to protect Bordeaux, the status of Bordeaux as a brand or the status of champagne or the status of Barolo.

1:09:20So typical investment grade wine will leave the winery at 100, 120 bucks a bottle. And then over the course of 15 years, we'll change hands three to four times, usually doubling every time. So by the time it's actually consumed, the average price is about$800, U.S. dollars, when it's consumed. So that's kind of interesting, right? It's actually created, like I said, in the last 20 years, about a thousand percent return for the LiveX basket of investment grade wines. So better return than gold. I think a better return than the S &P. And with relatively low volatility. So it makes a really great investment product.

1:10:12The problem is nobody has access. Like it's very hard to invest. It's hard to get price discovery. It's hard to understand price movement. It's very hard to understand. I mean, you can have a general idea for scarcity, but you don't really understand like how many bottles of this wine are left. By creating a digital deed of ownership, we'll know relatively precisely how many bottles of any given vintage are left. How many bottles of 2001 Chateau Palmeire are left on the market. so I can know how to price the remaining bottles. With liquidity or price transparency global, every bottle of 2001 Chateau Palmeiro is trading basically at the same price.

1:11:04That provides price discovery, price transparency, which we think brings a ton of liquidity into the marketplace. And more importantly, it provides access to other investors. I think that there's a really, most investment grade wines, wines that sell for$2 ,000 or$5 ,000 or$10 ,000 a bottle today, 10 years ago, they weren't investment grade. 10 years ago, you were buying them for nothing. Some of the best collectors in the world, the reason that they got to be great collectors was not because they were buying wines that were already known to be investment grade. It's because they were identifying wines early on and buying them, and then they became investment grade.

1:11:53We think there's a really interesting opportunity there for younger investors that are priced out of the real estate market, that feel like the stock market is rigged or rightly think that the stock market is rigged by big players. that can find in the same way that they can invest in meme coins because they have asymmetrical information and because they can play in a place where the big players can't play. We think wine creates a really interesting opportunity for that as well. It's an experiential purchase. It's something where you can invest in things that you're passionate about. you can go and do the research and invest in things that are where you can have more information than anybody else.

1:12:45And more importantly, you can invest in a place where hedge funds can't play, right? Where the big players can't really get in. There's not a play for a hedge fund or for Ken Griffin to go and play in investment-grade wine. So we're trying to create the technology that creates a level playing field for exchanges, marketplaces all over the world to bring in new liquidity into the marketplace. So you're predicting some pretty big changes in the next couple of years in the wine industry, which are well needed. What's your biggest prediction for next 12 months? the next 12 months

1:13:38it's really hard to think of the wine industry in 12 months you can answer regarding anything else than the wine industry crypto, life, wine so I think what we're going to see in the next 12 months is the next level of adoption in crypto um meaning i was there in the early days when um you know when the internet was uh you couldn't change the background color of your website right it had to be gray uh you couldn't change the font and for a long time that was the case. I remember the days when my parents said that it would be crazy, insane to put your credit card number on the internet. Like how could you ever buy something on the internet?

1:14:39Why would you ever share your credit card number? It's going to get stolen. You're going to get your bank account ripped off. you know it's very very dangerous to put your credit card number on the internet now obviously everybody does that every day so i think that i don't know if it's 12 months or 18 months it's hard to hard to know what the actual timeline is but i think that that there's a step change that's going to happen when you're going to go from only the early adopters who are in today to the next level of, I want to say, civilian adoption. People that are regular civilians that aren't tech nerds that will be able to participate in blockchain and crypto either because they feel more confident or because it's been abstracted out And they don't know about wallets and they don't know about seed phrases, but they can still participate in more functional projects.

1:15:52And that's what we're building, right? We're building a functional project where you can claim a – somebody opens a great bottle of wine, mints you a tasting token and some Vincoin, and you don't know that you've got a wallet. You don't know that that's an NFT. I say all the time and then I'll stop talking. But my dad told me 20 years ago, he's a big music guy. And I was like, let me put some MP3s. Let me give you some MP3s. I'll rip some CDs and I'll rip your whole CD collection. I'll put your MP3s on your computer. And he was like, I don't know how to work an MP3. I'm never gonna be able to do that.

1:16:34Well, I challenge anybody to find the word MP3 on Spotify anywhere. You can't find MP3. You're just listening to music. And my dad listens to Spotify all day. So that change has to come. When we stop talking about NFTs and we stop talking about wallets and potentially we even stop talking about Web3 and we just start talking about the actual value that's being driven for the consumer. I met a couple of winemakers who tried to put the wine on the blockchain. And most of them told me that they tried, but it's pretty much impossible or that they kind of abandoned because of these big actors, right?

1:17:23And my answer to them was, but we need people who are going to do the hard work, right? And who are going to spend the next five or 10 years trying to make this happen and that's how big changes happen in industries. If no one tries or if people abandon too early, then nothing is going to happen. So I wanted to thank you for three things. The first one is for bringing this amazing wine today. The second is for doing this podcast, which was great, a great conversation. And the third one is for trying to do what others think is too hard because we need more entrepreneurs who don't, who believe they can change because that's how basically change happens.

1:18:04Look, I appreciate that. And thank you for inviting me on. This has been a really, really great conversation.

1:18:15But to the other folks that have tried to do wine on the blockchain, and I've run into a few of them, and some of them have been very successful and some of them have not been. I think the secret to what we're doing, and we've been doing it for a couple of years, and we've had some pretty good success. I think the secret to that is we're thinking about things in generational terms. I'm thinking about building tools that my kids are going to use and that the winemaker's kids are going to use. I don't need adoption tomorrow. what we need to do is set a big goal and move there bite by bite so we have a very very long term goal in mind thank you David thank you Kevin it's been great