The Older, The Valuable - Wine

This age of capitalism has even monetised feathers, let alone the wine. The human habit of exchanging goods for profit has a long history, from clothes , food and livestock until lately London International Vintners Exchange built a marketplace for free trade of wine. Wine- which once was primarily a party essential and a flavour of the grand occasions, have now rested back in the shelves awaiting its buyers bid. It has become one of the key constituents of the Antiques and Artifacts trade ever since we had a peer to peer mechanism to store, value and trade wine. A man from East London unknowingly buried a fortune in his wardrobe from the 1920s, and today he can trade a winery for that bottle.

But then, why didnt we have an exchange up till late 2000s for a commodity so widely consumed and produced from over 8000 years. It was difficult to bring information transparency amongst the merchants across the global without a common platform which created frictions for free trade over borders. In the year 2000, internet paved way for a very robust exchange for the merchants, and sheltered the biggest wine cellars in the world. The original idea was to build it in a coffee house culture, where merchants could exchange ideas and information, but soon those conversations turned into bid and ask quotes. Today the fine wine market is worth $4 billion, and the number just keeps on increasing as the developing markets capitalise on the growing trend of peer to peer trading. We no more need to hold the prestige in our cellars but just our trading portfolios and then can further be profitably transferred to buyers.