Taking a stake in fine wine
As an asset class, wine offers strong returns and a low correlation to more traditional financial assets, says Nick King, founder of Vint, which lets investors buy shares in collections of wines and spirits.
Jeff Benjamin [00:00:03] Hey, folks, welcome to Three Questions, I’m Jeff Benjamin talking today with Nick King, founder of Vint, a unique platform for investing in fine wine. How are you doing, Nick?
Nick King [00:00:14] Doing well. Great to be here, Jeff.
Jeff Benjamin [00:00:16] Yeah, thanks for being here. I’m really interested in hearing more about this, this platform for investing in fine wine. I honestly don’t know anything about it. So kick it off. What? What is this platform and how does it work?
Nick King [00:00:28] I’ll give you a quick backstory. I come from the investment world. That’s how I looked at wine was through that lens. As an investor, I saw an asset class that has had strong returns, low correlation to traditional financial assets. But it was a broadly inefficient market. So the ways to invest was basically send some guys twenty five thousand dollars and you would get a list of wines three weeks later. That’s not how I invest in equities or other assets, so we thought there was a better way. So we spent eight months with the SEC to get qualified under Reg A plus. What that allows us to do is curate collections of fine wine and spirits, file paperwork with the SEC and then allow anybody both accredited and non accredited investors to purchase shares in these collections.
Jeff Benjamin [00:01:18] Wow non accredited. That’s interesting. I wasn’t expecting that. What what what’s the minimum investment? How, how can how can I invest?
Nick King [00:01:26] Yeah, I’ll give you a kind of typical collection. So we had a one hundred and eighty seven thousand dollar Japanese whiskey collection. There were five thousand five hundred shares at thirty four dollars a share. You can go and buy one share, you can go and buy one hundred and you can buy up to 20 percent of a collection. So we make that entry point very accessible for people to get started and the product very transparent and very efficient to diversify across these world class assets.
Jeff Benjamin [00:01:59] And then finally, what I see is the two part question. You ever get actual possession of the alcohol or is it stored somewhere else and I have a certificate or something?
Nick King [00:02:12] Yes, you as an investor do not. These are LLCs, and when you invest, you own a membership interest in an LLC. So we wanted to structure it that way to be highly financial because I believe this is where the alternative asset industry is going, it’s going to become more and more institutionalized. So having this structure, it lends itself to access those markets. We’ve explored experiential type of things tastings related to collections by a wine box. But the investment is financial.
Jeff Benjamin [00:02:47] OK. And what does it cost? What’s the transaction fees or ongoing fees or anything like that?
Nick King [00:02:56] Yeah, there’s no annual management fees which are just sourcing or origination fee on average six to eight eight percent. We justify that in that we are sourcing through our commercial channels. We’re buying about a million dollars worth of wine at a time. And yeah, that’s baked into the share price. Nothing beyond that.
Jeff Benjamin [00:03:19] OK, and one final of our three plus questions. Is there a minimum investment requirement?
Nick King [00:03:25] There’s not. You can buy one share and our shares have range from $10 to seventy dollars. So I would say we’ve pretty much removed any barrier to entry to access this, this asset class.
Jeff Benjamin [00:03:41] All right, well, I hope we’ve wet some appetites out there. Nick King, founder of Vint Thanks a lot. Nick.
Nick King [00:03:50] Thanks, Jeff.
[More: Fine wine – The unconventionally attractive alt investment]
