Online Fine Wine Auctions

MyWines Fine Wine Trading Offers Château d'Yquem 1988 to Parker: "simply stunning" Level: parfaitEtiquette: parfaiteCapsule: a perfect Terms of Payment Voucher × bank. × Transfer. × Paypal. × species if hand delivery. Delivery × In 48 hours upon receipt of payment. × colissimo Sending with delivery against signature. × Discount by hand by appointment at [...]

Read Full Post »

Fine Wine Online Auctions
Online wine auction community, including rare wine collections of vintage wines for sale. Online Catalogue: Fine & Rare Wine 1 Oct 2008, New Bond Street Online Catalogue. Online australian wine auctions of rare wine fine wine and premium wine. If you cannot attend the Fine Wine Auction but would still like to [...]

Read Full Post »

62,00 EUR (7 Enchères) Fin: dimanche oct.-26-2008 19:00:00 CETEnchérir | Ajouter à la liste d’Affaires à suivre

The establishment FLOVIN specialist wine producers Récoltant6 CH 2002 Saint Emilion Récoltant Manuel harvest estimated at 25 € d other siteBouteilles Numérotéés Aging drums chêne12 CH GravesEstimé Written in 2002 to 14 € in the Guide Hachette des vins [...]

Read Full Post »

According to the Luxury Institute’s research (as referenced in a recent Newsweek story called Luxury Goes Undercover), “nearly all wealthy Americans (98%) use the Web to purchase [high-end] goods and services, and more than half do it frequently.”  The wealthy are “increasingly interested in immediacy and convenience,” not to mention privacy and selection.

Wine as a luxury item 

Fine wine prices have risen to the level where wine is now a luxury item (see my 2007 post, Wine as a luxury item).  Yet, only 18% of weekly wine drinkers bought wine online in 2007 according to the Wine Market Council (and almost two-thirds of that was from wineries, not retailers).

Pent-up demand for online wine buying

I believe the 18% figure is artificially suppressed, primarily because of the reduced convenience that complicated direct shipping laws create.  The good news is that wine retailers are now organized via the Specialty Wine Retailers Association.  The SWRA is fighting on consumers’ behalf to create a more streamlined regulatory environment that updates shipping laws to conform to the reality of 21st century web-based commerce.

Bottom line: If you’re interested in tapping into the benefits of buying wine online, support the SWRA and voice your opinions (in a comment to this post) about how online wine buying could be made more convenient for you.

Read Full Post »

The following question was posed in a reader comment from my post Globalizing fine wine markets and the rise of Asia:

“Is there any difference in the overall quality of similar wines sourced from [the UK and US] markets?

Answer: Generally speaking, no.

I addressed this question indirectly in my post “The impact of U.S. import labels on Asian wine buyers” but let me expand on my explanation.

1. Buyers clearly need to pay attention to the source of their supply as they don’t all pay the same degree of attention to provenance and handling.
2. Regarding UK sourcing, is wine transferred from Bordeaux to the UK, often in non-refrigerated trucks, better handled than wine transferred in a reefer directly from France to the U.S. that lands directly in a temperature-controlled warehouse?
3. Does the location of the purchase source indicate anything about where the wine has traveled?  You might be interested to know that many Bordeaux chateaux will buy back wine previously sold to UK wine merchants and then resell it as ex-chateau.
4. The large and growing auction market for fine wine in the U.S. is materially larger than London (and the gap is widening).  Moreover, prices tend to be higher in the U.S.  To me, this further confirms that serious wine collectors don’t believe there’s a quality difference.
5. The emergence and industry adoption of solutions such as eProvenance will help ensure there are no differences in quality regardless of where wine is purchased.

Read Full Post »

We are here to prove that pairing wine and food is easier than you think as you taste an array of Napa Valley wines paired with unique cheese from California and beyond. $10 for 5 wines & cheese.

read more

Read Full Post »

We are here to prove that pairing wine and food is easier than you think as you taste an array of Napa Valley wines paired with unique cheese from California and beyond. $10 for 5 wines & cheese.

read more

Read Full Post »

I make it my business to keep my eye on new California wineries, especially in Napa and Sonoma, as much as I can given the fact that I do a lot of other things besides write about wine. Whenever possible, I like to taste the first releases from these wineries. They are not always fantastic - some are good, some show potential, and some simply need to be written off as first efforts and retried again later. That’s the thing about wines, just because they’re not good now, that doesn’t mean they won’t be later, and, of course, vice versa.

It’s quite rare, however, for the very first vintage of a wine to knock my socks off. But when I got my first taste of Blackbird Vineyards out of the barrel a couple of years ago, I quite literally couldn’t bring myself to spit it out. I was immediately in love. And how delightful and against all odds that the best Napa wine I had tasted in many months was a Merlot.

Blackbird proprietor Michael Polenske is used to beating the odds unexpectedly. By all accounts he never should have gotten into wine in the first place. Spending one’s teens and early twenties in a fraternity at Chico State generally favors the the cultivation of a strong affinity for beer and bikinis rather than fine wine. But in between his finance classes, thanks in part to a roommate who turned him on to wine, he dabbled in the wine curriculum and spent weekends exploring Napa Valley visiting what were becoming his favorite wineries.

When he graduated from college, Polenske again took an unexpected turn, getting into the pragmatic financial planning industry just as everyone in that industry was moving towards more active money management. Polenske had the bright idea that he could do financial planning for people in the wine business, and so managed to find a firm in the Midwest that was willing to give him Napa and Sonoma as a territory. In addition to the territory of his choice, they also asked him if he’d be willing to cover the zip code 94025 as well.

It turned out that there wasn’t much interest in wine country, but Polenske found quite a lot of both interest and money in that other little zip code, which happened to be Atherton, California, and for which he found himself the sole representative in his company. Through a lot of trial and error, a ton of cold calling, and a significant amount of elbow grease, Polenske spent 10 years building a sizeable book of business in Silicon Valley, learning more about and continuing to fall deeper in love with wine in the process.

And then one day, relatively out of the blue, JP Morgan called and offered him a job as a private banker. Like a small town kid picked up out of high school by the Major Leagues, Polenske walked starry eyed into his first day at work, sat down next to his colleagues with their Wharton, Kellog, Harvard, and GSB diplomas on their desks, and when no one showed up to tell him how to do his job, he just did what he knew how to do. He started making calls.

At the time, the average JP Morgan banker brought on between seven and nine new clients per year. At the end of his first year Polenske had 35, a figure so shocking at the time, that executives at the highest levels of the company told his manager to get him on a global conference call so they could demand an explanation. Based on that call JP Morgan changed its approach to new client acquisition, and it wasn’t long before Polenske was in charge of the San Francisco office, and beginning to dabble in his other interests, including antiques (he would eventually go on to own Patina Atelier Antiques in San Francisco).

As Polenske’s star continued to rise in the financial services world, he kept his eye on Napa, thinking that someday it might be nice to build a lifestyle business. But each time he nearly got to the point of buying some land, another job opportunity would come along, and he’d be swept up into running a new company, division, or fund.

After years of almost buying vineyards, Polenske eventually decided to scrap the idea, and instead simply settle for a house on a hill in Napa with a pool. He ended up with a couple of houses on the flats, and a 10 acre vineyard. These things happen.

Napa has a way of turning people into winemakers overnight simply because they stumble on the right piece of property. Polenske’s acquisition, as you might expect, was a little more strategic than that. Call it a compulsion to seek out the undervalued parts of the market, or just call it instinct, but Polenske found himself staring at a Merlot vineyard that was selling fruit to prominent buyers who were making 90 point wines from it, yet the prices they were paying for the fruit were below market rates. Never mind that Merlot was on the down and out. Polenske saw the raw ingredients for the perfect boutique wine brand, and his idle fantasies about building a lifestyle business instead of another hedge fund began to crystallize. The vineyard was named Blackbird, and when Polenske found out that in French Patois Merlot means “little blackbird” the key turned in the lock and everything fell into place.

Today, with the help of winemaker Sarah Gott and winegrower Aaron Pott, Polenske farms the 10 acre estate vineyard to produce 1120 cases of a wine he has decided to call a Proprietary Red, though the wine will likely always be 90+ percent Merlot. Though it technically could be labeled Merlot, Polenske is keeping his options open to adjust the blend in the future, and doing a little bit of marketing by aligning the name with some of the big guns like Harlan Estate and Rudd who also produce wines with the same designation.

In 2005 the wine contained 96% Merlot and 4% Cabernet Sauvignon from the estate’s 11 year old vines in Napa’s Oak Knoll District. After meticulous sorting and careful crushing and fermentation, the wine ages for 20 months in French oak barrels of which 70% are new and 30% are older. The wine is bottled completely unfined and unfiltered.

In addition to this wine, in 2005 the estate has begun producing a rosé called Arriviste and a 50/50 Cabernet blend called Paramour.

Tasting Notes:
Dark ruby in color, this wine has an expressive nose of aromas of espresso and mocha, black cherries and chocolate. In the mouth the wine is nothing sort of gorgeous. At once explosively juicy and simultaneously rich and layered, beautiful, near-perfect acidity allows bright cherry fruit and spices to float above a deep resonant base of tobacco and earth flavors that all somehow meld and flex until they’re a vibrating chord through a stellar finish. This wine practically defines “delicious” and cellared well, will likely do so for 10 to 15 years.

Food Pairing:
Extremely food friendly because of its bright acidity, this wine will pair well with a lot of foods. I’d enjoy it with beef short ribs and horseradish potatoes.

Overall Score: 9.5

How Much?: $80

This wine is available for purchase on the internet.

Read Full Post »

I’ve been in Hong Kong all week and was pleased to see a front page story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Asia titled “Can Hong Kong uncork trading of wine in China?“  My answer is an unequivocal “yes” which is why Vinfolio is launching our own operations here (see earlier post). 

Barriers to creating cost-effective wine storage facilities in Hong Kong

But, there is at least one significant obstacle to overcome in realizing Hong Kong’s potential.  Proper warehousing facilities for fine wine don’t really exist.  Moreover, the nature of the real estate market is structurally biased against creating them on a cost effective basis.  Here’s why:

• Given the high cost of land, almost all warehouses are in high-rise buildings.
• The floor loading capacity of these buildings is low relative to the weight of wine which limits efficiencies on using the space (i.e., how high you can stack cases).
• Virtually no warehouses are readily available with appropriate temperature and humidity conditions.   This necessitates a capital investment to install equipment (and insulation).
• However, the market’s standard lease term is only 2-3 years which reduces amortization periods on your investment (effectively making it more expensive for a given length of time).
• Moreover, the fast-moving real estate market results in industrial spaces being subject to redevelopment into office buildings and residential towers that are more lucrative for landlords.  This means any market-rate renewal option you might negotiate could result in dramatic rent increases or, even worse, the landlord can trigger a “sales and redevelopment” clause and force you out of the space in 6 months (i.e., before your already-short lease term is completed).
• Finally, there is little new supply of warehouse space being built which could help moderate rental rates.

One suggestion to support market development

Hong Kong landlords should consider developing specialized “turnkey” facilities for wine storage and just charge higher monthly rents to recover investment costs (although this potentially limits their prospective tenant universe).

P.S.    The photo on the upper right is a typical Hong Kong warehouse building. 

Read Full Post »

The Financial Times’ annual Wine Investment Report was published today.  Jancis’ Robinson’s lead article, Asia gives the market a new flavour (or see this link to read a longer version on her site), provides a superb overview of global market changes.

As noted in my quote in the article, I firmly believe that being in the fine wine business requires a presence in major economic markets — that now means Asia.

Tangible evidence that markets are constantly changing

Consider this quote from Jancis’ article: “Last year, more than $233 million worth of fine wine went under the hammer in the U.S., as opposed to not much more than $35 million in the UK.”  There was a time when these relative percentages were reversed.

Why did UK fine wine traders (other than auction houses) never expand into the U.S.?

While the U.S. is a large fine wine market, the state-based regulatory environment and direct shipping laws likely seem daunting.  While many UK players serve the U.S. market remotely, only Bordeaux Wine Investment (through its sister company, Bordeaux Wine Locators) has U.S. operations.

Why aren’t more U.S. companies expanding into Asia now?

Other than Vinfolio and Acker Merrall, I’m not aware of other U.S. fine wine companies launching operations in Asia.  A few reasons come to mind:

1. The U.S. is a huge market in its own right.  Most firms have not exploited the opportunities on their doorstep, partly due to antiquated direct shipping laws that limit interstate sales.
2. Many U.S. firms are family-run and under-capitalized.  Most started as bricks-and-mortar businesses serving a fairly local community of customers.  Their next big step is moving online to at least address a national marketplace before going international.
3. Running a global business is more complicated, and therefore, harder to do successfully.

How will fine wine retailing in Asia evolve?

The market (including in Hong Kong) is still in an early stage of evolution and is fundamentally “up for grabs.”  The keys to success are:

1. Having access to the right supply of fine wine at competitive prices.
2. Ensuring that the quality of the wine is preserved through appropriate shipping, handling, and storage.
3. Providing a high level of service (hence our own guiding principle, “Fine wine. Finer service”).

Why will many Asian consumers storing their fine wine in London (or the U.S.) prefer Hong Kong?

1. Having your wine closer to where you live is comforting to many wine collectors who often feel emotionally attached to wine which they may have painstakingly acquired.
2. Proximity also means quicker access when you want your wine.  Air freight is expensive and not as safe a means of transferring wine from the UK/U.S. as refrigerated containers (by boat).
3. For Hong Kong-based wine collectors, even the modest risk that wine duties could be reinstated in the future argues for bringing wine back to Hong Kong while the duty is zero.
4. Climate-controlled, secure storage environments are replicable almost anywhere.
5. Future sales of investment-grade wines will increasingly be made within Asia (just as they have already shifted to the U.S. from London).

Vinfolio’s Hong Kong storage facility

As noted before, we are actively engaged in taking steps to open a Hong Kong-based wine storage facility, both for local storage of our own retail inventory as well as to provide full-service wine storage to others.  If you’re interested in registering your interest in our Hong Kong storage, please email us at service@vinfolio.com (make sure to mention your estimated quantity of cases to store).  I also be in Hong Kong for the week of May 26th and would be glad to meet interested parties subject to my schedule.

Read Full Post »

As any wine collector knows, it’s difficult to find all of the fine wine you want to buy from a single wine retailer.  As noted before in Buying smartly from wine retailers, you increase your odds of obtaining scarce fine wines by concentrating your purchases because most retailers make some attempt to reward loyal customers with priority access.

Our approach to cultivating loyalty 

In early 2007, Vinfolio created a customer priority program.  Benefits increase with reaching higher annual spending levels ($5,000, $25,000, and $75,000+).  The prime benefit is priority buying access to scarce, allocated, and/or highly rated wines.  These wines are generally highly sought after but given excess demand, I’d always prefer to offer them first to customers who have demonstrated their loyalty to Vinfolio.  So that’s what we do — in a very systematic fashion.

How it works 

For newly puchased wines that fit our criteria for scarcity and high ratings, we literally offer these wines in three successive 24-hour periods to an expanding group of priority customers before releasing any remaining unsold wine to the general public on our website.  Wines that sell out at a given level are simply not presented to the next level.  When signed in on our website, priority customers are recognized and wine available at their benefit level is made available to purchase.

Moreover, the email notification such customers receive that announces newly available wines is personalized to reflect whether the customer already owns a wine being offered and in what quantity (based on the contents of their VinCellar cellar management software account).

Bottom line: If your retailer is not reciprocating your loyalty in some proportionate manner to your spending level, then take your business elsewhere.

Note: This post was inspired by a book excerpt titled “Loyalty is a Two-Way Street” from a new book called Marketing Metaphoria that was written up in a recent article in the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge email newsletter.

Read Full Post »

Do the wealthy think we’re in a recession?  Yes (see yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story, Wealthy See Recession, Poll Says).

Is it affecting their spending on fine wine? No (based on Vinfolio’s growing sales volumes as well as those of some other fine wine importers I know).

Why not? Demand for fine wine is determined on a global basis and other parts of the world are still going strong enough to absorb finite supplies.  Moreover, “spending” really only occurs when you consume your wine.  Until then, you are merely converting cash into another asset class, which in this case is likely to grow in value.

Read Full Post »

The director of cult comedy film Withnail & I drank 200 bottles of blue chip Bordeaux in just two weeks, he has revealed.

Read Full Post »

Chinese wine will conquer the world in terms of volume and fine wine, a recent study suggests.

Read Full Post »

Joke’s on rocker Roger Waters - and so’s the fine wine Dallas Morning News, TX - 3 hours ago Bassist Roger Waters, the mastermind behind Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album, was taken aback by the crush of people at the bar when he entered Al …

Read Full Post »

MLive.com

Ontario, Canada, bound: Niagara-on-the-Lake has fine wine, dining … MLive.com, MI - 4 hours ago This rich agricultural area is more southerly than Bordeaux and other famous wine regions, and offers the ideal atmosphere for grapes. …

Read Full Post »

Wine Tasting is more of a traditional pursuit, like minded people gathering together to taste fine wine. Twitter wine tasting has been tried before, a wine tasting party that gathered web notables in person to try wines tried the …

Read Full Post »

Deep Creek Wine Estate Z3 Family Reserve 2004 Unique by itself this red blend of Syrah, Zweigelt and Merlot grapes comes from the Okanagan Valley. Here, the Syrah provides the foundation of a tasty and satisfying table wine, …

Read Full Post »

Asian wine buyers sometimes ask if European fine wine being sold in the U.S. bears U.S. import labels based on some concern that such wine has been handled more often and is at greater risk of being damaged than wine sourced directly from Europe.

This rationale fails on several counts:

1. Unless the wine is from a newly released vintage, it will likely have been handled by multiple parties already, whether American or European.
2. The seller of the wine (the retailer or auction house) has a reputation to maintain for selling wine of sound provenance.  In Vinfolio’s case, in addition to questioning the seller on purchase sources and storage conditions, all wine is inspected according to our inspection guidelines before purchase.
3. Rare wine is simply not abundant enough for buyers to refuse to source wine from the entire U.S. market.  Note that all wine imported into the U.S. must comply with federal wine labeling regulations.  Either the wine’s official U.S. importer creates a U.S.-specific label which is applied overseas before importing (see Petrus photo) or the wine is sourced directly in Europe through trade channels and supplemental “strip labels” are added to the European label to satisfy the U.S. requirements (a common practice).

An upcoming test in Hong Kong 

As I have been paying close attention to the Hong Kong market given our decision to launch operations there, I noted that Acker Merrall’s upcoming May 31 wine auction, the largest ever in Asia, is sourced from six American collections and two European ones.  Does anyone really think bidders will pass on the American-sourced wine?  I don’t.

Read Full Post »

Exports of Austrian bottled wine jumped 30% in 2007, further cementing the country’s reputation for fine wine produced in small quantities.

Read Full Post »

The World of Fine Wine magazine’ s latest issue (#19) contains a must-read article called “Every one a critic: The future of wine writing.”  Mike Steinberger provides a fascinating, state-of-the-market assessment of what he references as the “twilight era” of Parker.  He makes many valid observations about the inroads being made by what are essentially lower-cost (often free) substitutes for professional (fee-paid) wine criticism.  What’s going on and how can the professionals respond?

The “good enough” effect enabled by the Internet

Several trends are at work to shrink the size of the “fee-paid” wine criticism market. There’s no question that the Internet has provided a platform for talented amateurs via blogs, forums, and community review websites (Note: Vinfolio is introducing community reviews in our upcoming version of VinCellar).  Many of these reviews (although typically free) can be on a par to those of a professional critic’s.  Pragmatically, free amateur reviews need only be “good enough” for the reader to substitute for a paid review.  Moreover, if an individual amateur reviewer is prolific enough and/or focuses his reviews on a particular category of wine, regular readers can calibrate their palates in the same way they do with professional reviewers.

What will happen to the fee-paid wine criticism market

Despite increased competition, there will always be a market for fee-paid wine criticism.  Quality in most areas of life is worth paying for and there’s no question that the mainstream professional critics are highly talented.  Moreover, the cost of “paying” (typically $75-$125 annually) is relatively modest compared to the cost of a buying mistake.  However, the “business model” of the professional wine critic may need to evolve to maintain their income.

Advice for professional critics

The theme to my advice is to become more aggressive in disseminating one’s professional content to combat the rising “noise” levels.  This can be done in a controlled manner while developing new sources of income to the critic.  Here are some ideas to consider:

1. License content to wine websites and online services -  Vinfolio pays annual fees to Steve Tanzer, Allen Meadows, Roy Hersh, and Richard Juhlin for licensing their wine reviews for specific uses within our free VinCellar cellar management software and within our ecommerce site.  Certain access to full text reviews requires a separate paid subscription to the reviewer’s site so we can help drive new consumer subscriptions.  As we expand the utility (uses) of a paid subscription beyond the reviewer’s own site, I’d argue that we also increase subscription renewal rates.
2. License content to retailers - If consumers are more reluctant to pay, maybe members of the trade who rely upon the reviews to help sell wine will not be.  Right now, the trade must manually cut-and-paste reviews from the professionals’ websites (or otherwise enter data) for what may be thousands of items.  These reviews may need to be refreshed if a review is later updated.  If these reviews were available in an automated way via an electronic API, I believe many retailers would pay material annual fees just to obtain the labor savings.
3. Create foreign language editions - Asian markets are emerging as major wine buyers. Why not offer a Chinese language edition?
4. Generate advertising revenue - Sell online advertising to support access to selected free content.
5. Go “on tour” - Wine critics are analogous to rock stars.  Even if the music (content) is free, fans (readers) pay heavily to attend concerts (wine events).

I could go on but you get the idea.  What would you do if you were a professional critic in this situation?

Read Full Post »

Are wineries that sell direct ruthlessly competing with the clicks and mortar crowd?
That’s one of the questions David Williams poses in the latest issue of Wine and Spirit (UK). After taking the reader on an extensive survey of the past and present of online wine retailing, David asks whether the current buzz about wine/web 2.0 [...]

Read Full Post »

The 2008 American Wine Blog Award Winners were announced today and I’m pleased to report The Wine Collector won in the category of Best Wine Business Blog.  Thanks for your support.

When I started writing this blog in 2006 (see Launch of The Wine Collector), I did not foresee writing as much about wine business issues as I have done.  However, wine collecting is all about buying fine wine and the context in which one does that is fundamentally affected by a whole range of business factors affecting retailing trends, global demand, regulatory changes with shipping and foreign duties, wine authentication, investment trends, and more.

I look forward to continuing to write on issues facing wine collectors and the wine business.  The process of thinking through a blog topic is actually quite helpful to my “day job” running Vinfolio and one I thoroughly enjoy doing.   Should you have topics to suggest for The Wine Collector, please feel to email me at steve@vinfolio.com. 

Read Full Post »

While the basic economics of supply and demand affect pricing of any good, for items marketed globally such as fine wine, significant shifts in currency values in major markets will take their toll.

“Cannot take it any longer” 

Yesterday, Reuters ran a story titled Burgundy wine prices hiked in U.S. due to weak dollar (read it, it’s short).  Prices are being raised 10%-20% in the U.S. (the second biggest Burgundy market after Britain) as “they cannot take it any longer.”

Burgundy demand is also high (see Burgundy exports to hit all-time high and my prior post, A leading indicator of higher Burgundy prices).  Therefore, if the U.S. market balks at higher prices, the wine will simply be sold elsewhere.

Just how much as the dollar weakened?

The dollar has depreciated 19.6% against the Euro since the beginning of 2007 and 26.5% since January 2004.  Given that the dollar fell 10.7% against the Euro in 2007, its decline in Q1 2008 has accelerated. 

The broader impact of the weak dollar on wine prices

• Domestic wine will become better values relative to imported wine (although certain items used in making some domestic wines such as French oak barrels have increased dramatically in price).
• Domestic U.S. retailers will increase their efforts to sell wine abroad.  See my post from earlier this week, Vinfolio to open Hong Kong operations.
• Foreign buying in the U.S. will increase (including European wines being sold back into Europe).
• Foreign investment in the U.S. wine industry should rise.

Bottom line: Fine wine prices are set globally and are on an upward trend given that rising demand is outpacing new supply (see Why fine wine prices will keep rising).  Fundamental shifts in currency values will cause supply to shift to other markets as well as new opportunities for those paying attention and able to operate globally.

P.S.    Today is the last day to vote for this blog in the 2008 American Wine Blog Awards.  Read about it and vote. 

Read Full Post »

A new company, eProvenance, just launched with a holistic solution for verifying a wine’s provenance (defined as “authenticity, traceability, and knowledge of storage temperatures”). Read the press release.

Implementation challenges 

Read Full Post »

Vinfolio is taking immediate steps to launch its first international operations in Hong Kong by Fall 2008.  See today’s press release.  Here are a few factors which drove the decision:

• The demand for fine wine has been growing steadily in the region and we expect it to continue.
• The recent elimination of wine duties in Hong Kong provided a further catalyst and, over time, will create pressure for other countries to cut duties, too.
• Hong Kong offers an attractive business environment and excellent location from which to serve neighboring geographies, especially mainland China.
• The weak U.S. dollar is stimulating more Asian buyers to focus on the U.S. market to buy their fine wine.
• Additional wine storage services are needed to support the arrival of wine historically stored outside Hong Kong.  Vinfolio’s experience in running a full-service storage facility in San Francisco combined with our VinCellar online cellar management software create competitive differentiation for our services.

Next steps

I will be in Hong Kong again from April 8-11 to begin exploring warehouse and office locations.  In addition, we’ll start searching for a Managing Director/General Manager hire.

Bottom line: The fine wine business is global and Vinfolio’s operations need to mirror the market to maximize our opportunities.  This is no doubt only the first step in the globalization of our business.

Read Full Post »