On November 9th, Maison Bernard Magrez organized a live webinar from Château Pape Clément titled “NFTs shake up the wine world.”
This event marks the opening of the NFT club of Château Pape Clément. A unique access reserved to the holders of the 1252 NFT put on sale on the occasion of the 770th harvest of this Grand Cru Classé of Graves. Club members will receive, in addition to a numbered digital artwork by artist Pierre Blaise Dionet, a bottle of an exceptional vintage, a limited edition 2016 Château Pape Clément. Club members will also have privileged access to the various events of the Bernard Magrez Institute and its various classified châteaux.
“From the first grape harvest in 1252 to the Web3 in 2022, Château Pape Clément combines tradition and innovation.”
This is a real revolution in this sector known for being very traditional. In comparison, the mythical Château Cheval Blanc, one of the most famous in the world, has only a very simple website and no Instagram account. Why? Because they don’t feel the need and it doesn’t fit in their communication strategy which advocates scarcity and inaccessibility. So talking about NFT or WEB3 to the wine world is a real revolution in this very traditional industry.
We met Bernard Magrez and his NFTs at the Wine Paris and Vinexpo 2023 trade shows, which concluded on Wednesday, February 15. It was the occasion to notice the growing interest of the wine world in new technologies, and in particular the NFT. Particularly visible on the show, the company Web3 Arianee presented us a few days before its collaboration with the domain Château Pape Clément, property of Bernard Magrez, concretized by the production of a special vintage for its 770th year associated with an NFT, which represents a membership to a very private club. A proposal that recalls that of the Wine Bottle Club for the 1855 holders of its NFT, issued last year.
Today, NFTs are mostly used to sell high-flying bottles to collectors without shipping the bottles to them. The Maison Bouey, in Ambarès-et-Lagrave, Gironde, started last year.
We see a lot of interest in it,” says Jacques Bouey, its president. Usually, a bottle of vintage wine goes through several intermediaries before reaching the customer: merchant, importer, distributor… and sometimes fakes circulate. In Asia, bottles are emptied and then filled with a wine of lesser quality and sold at a high price. With NFT, the wines in our cellars are kept in optimal conditions until their owners ask for them.
For example: Motier Ventures, which has already invested in some thirty French Tech start-ups (commerce, fintech, web3, creative tools) since its creation 18 months ago. At the end of January, Winechain announced that a first series of great estates (Fleur de Miraval Champagne House created by Brad Pitt, Egon Müller, Ceretto, Cos d’Estournel, Graham’s, Château de Beaucastel…) will see their bottles offered to individuals worldwide on the first independent NFT platform created and thought for winemakers. “We are happy to be able to combine land and tech with Winechain,” details Guillaume Houzé, president of Motier Ventures, “and create with them a new distribution channel for great classified growths.”
Winechain is the first independent NFT platform created and thought for the great winemakers. This marketplace is resolutely focused on connecting directly with new generations of consumers around the world. The initiative launched in April 2022 by four experts – Xavier Garambois (former head of Amazon Europe), Marc Perrin (Château de Beaucastel), Guillaume Jourdan (CEO of VitaBella) and Nicolas Mendiharat (CEO of Winechain) – will see the light of day in the first quarter of 2023 with the release of the first wiNeFT (the official name of an NFT on Winechain).
“The most cutting-edge technologies are at the heart of the WineChain platform and it is essential to surround ourselves with high-performance teams to offer major wineries access to the world of blockchain, NFTs and Metavers,” explains Nicolas Mendiharat, CEO WineChain. Alongside a group of international winemakers who began forming from the birth of the project, we now welcome a new partner who validates the relevance of a business model based on a disruptive vision of a world of great wines that historically is rarely challenged.”