Independent full service fine wine management

2013-04-04

Wine Owners – https://www.wineowners.com - the world’s first full service, independent fine wine asset management and trading exchange created by collectors for collectors, has just became finer still with the release of a new version inspired by user suggestions received over the last five months since the first release.

The Wine Owners platform is unique and is the first complete fine wine management solution for the whole spectrum of wine owners from enthusiasts to investors. It provides a wide range of integrated complimentary services and powerful tools for portfolio management - understanding, updating, analysing, comparing - and trading fine wine collections; inspired by the experiences of its founder, Nick Martin.

A veteran business leader from the world of information management and marketing, and with little spare time to devote to managing his beloved collection, he found it painfully time-consuming to trawl the Internet researching potential purchases and reviewing his wines. Martin says: “There are some very basic questions I want quick answers to: how much have I spent to date?; what’s a wine honestly worth if I wanted to sell it tomorrow?; how have my wines performed?; what should I drink now or drink up?; what do I have too much of, and what should I think of selling to make room for what I’d like to buy next? The answers were out there but it was really time-consuming work piecing together the disparate sources.

“With this new release, Wine Owners provides answers to all those fundamental questions and a lot more besides, and is freely available thanks to a complimentary subscription. “Determining what a wine is really worth demands a reliable pricing database. The process of price discovery is, after all, an essential precondition to any good trading environment. Buyers and sellers alike need the certainty of knowing at what price a wine is likely to find a market. Transparency and easy access to information empowers private clients to take decisions, just as many already do for their traditional investments.”

Wine Owners teamed up with Wine Searcher which sources pricing data from 25,000 merchants worldwide representing millions of real retail price points. Using proprietary algorithms, Wine Owners calculates a Market Level for each one of 85,000 wines in its referential database, based on the supply characteristics and spread of actual market prices for each one.

Martin believes that Market Level pricing is a significant step forward in bringing greater transparency to a highly fragmented market. “Private clients have the right to know at what level their wine is likely to sell, and therefore its true worth. Buyers have a right to know what is fair value,” he says.

“With the price escalation in fine wine witnessed over the last decade, the challenge of valuations in a burgeoning wine fund scene, and the opening up of large new markets such as China, reliable price discovery is more important and challenging than ever before. It’s one that Wine Owners simplifies for subscribers who can value individual wines or their entire collection freely.”

Martin’s desire to solve his fine wine needs also extended to secondary market trading; he yearned for more control over how his wines were sold. “Selling via the secondary fine wine market can take time, from the moment a private client gets quotes to the receipt of funds following settlement, commonly months later,” he says. “Many wines can sell well through traditional channels, others don’t. There had to be a simple alternative that would give me the transparency, control and choice I craved.” Martin says that none of the existing cellar management products and online sales options solved these problems. “Wine enthusiasts and collectors are crying out for the whole cycle of collecting to be made easier for them, and that can only happen when a single platform integrates physical storage with portfolio management, price discovery and safe, assured trading,” he says. “That’s what we mean by full service and is exactly what Wine Owners delivers.”