Episode #349: Anthony Zhang, Vinovest, “You Should Separate Your Drinking Preferences From Your Investment Preferences”

September 8, 2021

Episode #349: Anthony Zhang, Vinovest, “You Should Separate Your Drinking Preferences From Your Investment Preferences”

Guest: Anthony Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Vinovest, the world’s first platform for investing in fine wine. Anthony is a repeat entrepreneur who has previously founded and sold two companies, EnvoyNow and KnowYourVC. He has also held leadership positions at Blockfolio and is a board member at RateMyInvestor.

Date Recorded: 8/24/2021 | Run-Time: 1:03:00

Summary: In today’s episode, we’re talking about wine as an asset class. We start with Anthony’s background, which includes a Thiel fellowship. Then we dive into the ins and outs of investing in wine. Anthony walks us through wine’s investment case and how it compares to traditional stocks and bonds. Then we walk through the process of investing in wine through Vinovest, which does the analysis, bidding, inspection, and storage on your behalf. We touch on the different offerings, taxes, fees, risks, and trends affecting the industry today.

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Links from the Episode:

0:40 – Sponsor: Masterworks – Use code “MEB” to skip their waitlist today
1:39 – Intro
2:29 – Welcome to our guest, Anthony Zhang
3:54 – Starting his first company and dropping out of college with the Thiel Fellowship
5:54 – The original idea that lead Anthony to investing in the wine industry
8:25 – Making a case for investing in wine
11:05 – Triumph of the Optimist; Episode #100: Elory Dimson, London Business School
11:51 – Parallels between the wine market and the stock market
15:10 – How Anthony approached starting Vinovest
17:33 – The customer onboarding experience
24:56 – Diversifying the bottles you’ll hold in your portfolio and the range of bottle prices
27:20 – The typical Vinovest investor
30:05 – The impact of climate change on the wine market
31:28 – Capital gains and cashing out of your position
33:27 – The user experience of both the automated side and custom side
34:09 – Overview of Vinovests fee structure and warehouse storage
36:23 – Can you choose to drink from your portfolio?
38:29 – Sour Grapes and Somme documentaries
40:54 – Risks to consider when investing in wine
42:15 – Anthony’s biggest surprise after building Vinovest
46:02 – Anthony’s favorite wines you can buy for less than $100; Favia and Domaine Arlaud
48:37 – Client acquisition and educating wine enthusiasts
49:49 – Wines he feels could be interesting investment opportunities
50:37 – Outstanding in the field dinners
51:25 – Potentially stepping into the whiskey side of the alcohol world
53:02 – How the pandemic has affected Vinovest
54:56 – Top 10 Alcohol Stocks to Invest in 2021
56:34 – Their funding rounds and who has invested so far
57:52 – Episode #287: Jonathan Hsu, Tribe Capital
58:16 – His most memorable wine and his most investment
59:46 – Learn more about Anthony; vinovest.co; anthony@vinovest.co

Transcript of Episode 349:

Welcome Message: Welcome to the “Meb Faber Show” where the focus is on helping you grow and preserve your wealth. Join us as we discuss the craft of investing and uncover new and profitable ideas, all to help you grow wealthier and wiser. Better investing starts here.

Disclaimer: Meb Faber is the co-founder and chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management. Due to industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria’s funds on this podcast. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates. For more information, visit cambriainvestments.com.

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Meb: What’s up, everybody? Pour yourself a nice tall glass of wine and sit back for today’s episode. Our guest is the founder and CEO of Vino vest, a platform for investing in a managed portfolio of fine wines. In today’s show, we’re talking about wine as an asset class. We start with our guest’s background, which includes a Thiel Fellowship and a few startups. Then we dive into the ins and outs of investing in wine. Our guest walks us through wines investment case and how it compares to traditional stocks and bonds. Then we walk through the process of investing in wine through Vinovest, which does the analysis, bidding, inspection, and storage on your behalf. We touch on the different offerings, taxes, fees, risks, and trends affecting the industry today, and our guest gives us a few special bottle picks. Please enjoy this episode with Vinovest’s Anthony Zhang. Anthony, welcome to the show.

Anthony: Awesome, Meb. It’s great to be here. Great to connect

Meb: I mean, here is right down the road. You’re in Culver City, my neighbor.

Anthony: Yeah.

Meb: There’s an upside and downside to doing this today with you. The downside is we’re doing this relatively early in the morning, so I don’t have a glass of wine with me because it’s 10:00 a.m. and that would just be a little too much for me. And second, man, what a gorgeous day. We should have done this outside.

Anthony: That would have been awesome.

Meb: You got a favorite wine bar nearby? What’s your go-to?

Anthony: Yeah. I mean, probably closest to us is the Wally’s in Santa Monica. So that one is beautiful, right next to the ocean. So next time we could have done a 5:00 p.m. recording and both had a glass of wine.

Meb: We’ll do a whole series. My go-to shop is a buddy of mine from university, and his wife, opened Esters, which you may have been to, and also in Santa Monica.

Anthony: Yes. I’ve heard of it. Yes.

Meb: Cool. Well, I’ll take you. It’s part of that whole rustic canyon family of restaurants.

Anthony: Yeah. And they do incredible food and wine, so…

Meb: Yeah. Well, good.

Anthony: Anything under that group, I’ll take.

Meb: We used to do a couple of book launch parties there a few books ago. That was always my go-to spot. So I’ve promised never to write a book again, but if I do, we’ll definitely get you there and help out on the Vino. All right. We’re going to talk about all things wine and investing and put together. But first, you’re a Trojan, right? You’re like a quasi-local guy, a little time abroad and a little time here. Did you officially graduate or did you go full Zuckerberg and only get halfway?

Anthony: I only got halfway. So my first company I started, I was freshman in college and it was a food delivery app called EnvoyNow. And had the opportunity to take a Thiel Fellowship and got out of school to take it full time and really haven’t had the chance to finish school since.

Meb: Were you a wine drinker in college? I mean, I think like growing up partially in North Carolina, it was like Boone’s wine and just like the really cheap, terrible stuff.

Anthony: Yeah. I’ll be honest, in college, it was the bagged wine. It was the Franzia in a box.

Meb: Yeah. That’s just giving me shutters thinking about how sweet that was.

Anthony: Yes.

Meb: All right. We’ll come back to wine, but I had to ask you. All of our pallets as a young university student, whether it was with any of the spirits, beer, tequila, when you fast forward 10 years and then like some of these you’re like, “I didn’t even know this is the same thing,” tequila’s a great example. My God. All right. So Thiel fellowship, what was after that?

Anthony: So took that company full time and were able to grow that business out to 23 campuses, nationwide, a little over 150,000 students using the app before it got acquired by a company called JoyRun. They got bought out by Wal-Mart last year. And after that acquisition was when I first started becoming interested in investing in, and not just stocks and bonds, really discovering alternative assets. Angel investing was one of my earlier passions just given that so many great angels had taken a chance on me when I was in college. And then that sort of passion and being around those groups naturally let to being curious about other alternative assets, which is kind of how I stumbled onto knowing about wine investing.

Meb: What was the origin story? Were you just around having a nice Chardonnay on an afternoon at Wally’s and you’re like, “Huh, maybe there’s something here that this costs $20 a glass in Santa Monica.” I’ve been to Wally’s. It sounds like about the going rate. Although I was just back in North Carolina and I tweeted out a photo, I was like, “Inflation, what inflation?” And it was like house wine, $2, beer, $2. So it is a little different in LA. But what was the origin story? Do you recall?

Anthony: Yeah. So I think it was just stumbling upon an article. I believe it was on Bloomberg or the “Wall Street Journal” talking about all these exotic asset classes that ultra-high networth’s were investing in and how all of these exotic asset classes had actually outperformed the market over the past decade. And one of them was wine. And that just really stuck in my head for a few days, like, “Wine? Really? That’s kind of nuts.” And when I started digging into it, I realized that it was really just a supply and demand play. You have say, 5,000 bottles of wine produced from this particular winery each year. And each year that goes on, there’s less and less of it because people are drinking it. And as the wine ages and gets better, it becomes more desirable and then there’s also less supply. So I was like, “All right. This makes sense to me and I’d love to give a shot, trying to invest in some wine. If I’m not great at it, at least I have a bunch of nice wine I can drink. It’s not like it’s a total loss.”

So that’s how I really started digging into the space. And I realized very quickly that I was completely out of my depth. I had no idea where to even start with looking at what makes a wine investment-worthy. And even after my research, knowing those wines that I wanted to buy, I couldn’t get access to them because I was really just an outsider in the wine world. I didn’t really have access to those top wineries, the mailing list. And then I had no storage. I was like, “Wow. How do I store all these expensive bottles? I can’t just shove them in my fridge or in my closet, they would just completely go bad.” So I ran into a ton of logistical issues and I realized why only ultra-wealthy people invest in wine. It just takes so much time and resources to manage. And I thought to myself, “There’s just got to be a better way.” And as I started building easier pathways for myself, I realized that there was probably a bigger opportunity here, not just to solve this for me and a couple of friends, but really be able to offer this to everybody. And that’s where the idea for Vinovest came about.

Meb: As you were talking about storage, I was smiling because my… We have a wine fridge at home, like, a little, like, 12-bottle size one and for some unknown reason, my 4-year-old now, his favorite thing to do is to go play with the temperature gauge.

Anthony: Oh, boy.

Meb: So I’m sure it’s because the first time he did it I scolded him and so, of course, like his only goal is just now go change it, because I routinely come up and it’s at like 68 degrees or 70-something degrees, you know, where he’s just totally tweaked it. The good news is the stuff in there, I don’t think I would notice the difference between if it were turned or not. So, all right, before we get to kind of what you guys do, let’s walk through the investment case of wine as an asset class in general. We’ve touched on this very briefly on the podcast in the past, but let’s hear you all walk us through it.

Anthony: Yeah. I think when you’re considering the investment case for wine, it really is, I think, one of the few asset classes out there that, A, have very, very low correlation to the market while still providing above-market returns. And what I really mean by that is that if you look at the investment track record of wine over the past couple of decades, especially during the recessions, during ’08, ’09, while equities dipped around 40%, 50%, the wine market dips around 10%. And even last year, when…I think it was the late February when the market dipped like close to 30%, the wine market actually went up. So you even had a fully negative correlation. And that, I think, is pretty powerful in the fact that the factors that influenced these high-end wine prices really are very different than what drives the market. And over the past 15, 20 years, it has outperformed the S&P, even including dividends.

So it is something that has pretty low volatility, about a third of the volatility of bull equities. So it provides a really strong risk adjusted returns. And I think, on top of that, the kind of interesting thing about wine is that you can kind of think about it like a bond because different wines have different sort of ideal drinking windows where you can kind of think about it as a maturity date. So if you wanted to have a 5-year wine portfolio versus a 20-year wine portfolio, you’d be selecting completely different wines or different sort of return potentials and you could really customize it based on what else you have in your portfolio and what sort of goals you’re sort of trying to achieve with adding wine as a diversifier.

Meb: So you touched on a couple of things. The first is there’s actually a surprising large amount of academic research on wine as an asset class and it’s come from sort of two places. One is the academics. And so if you go on SSRN, there’s probably dozens of papers and they all have like tons on the name and everyone’s like the case for wine, like they have all these punny names. But I remember talking about this, my favorite investing book, we talk a lot about is “Triumph of the Optimists” by Dimson, Marsh, Staunton. And they wrote a paper, Professor Dimson, who we had on the podcast, about wine and talked about it in their Credit Suisse global investing yearbook. And so there’s the academic side and then there’s sort of the practitioner side too. Talk to the listeners about… The wine industry reminds me of like the stock market. And it’s hard just to say wine because you could have the NASDAQ, which is going to look different than the Dow Jones, which is going to look different than foreign stock index, which is going to be on, and on, and on, or evaluated, yada, yada. How do people put together some of these indices over the years? How far do they go back? What do you think the biggest issues are? Talk to us a little bit, how to even think about measuring returns in the past.

Anthony: Yeah. That’s an awesome question because there are so many similarities between the wine market and the stock market. It’s very global. There’s wine produced all around the world and each bottle produced by a winery, and each year even, can be thought of as its own individual stock. I kind of think of it as a winery that pretty much IPOs a new batch of wine every single year, but the outlook for that new batch of wine is going to be different year to year. There’s supply and demand, there’s vintage scores, there’s critics’ ratings and things like that. And when you’re trying to look at returns over the past 10, 20, 30 years, the great thing is that these wineries, most of the ones that we consider blue-chip or investment-worthy, they’ve been around for 50, 60, even 100 years. So you can see the secondary market pricing of what their bottles are worth on average at year 5, versus year 10, versus year 25. And when we’re looking at these indices that track the performance of the overall wine market, what they essentially do is they take, you know, say, the top 100, 200 wineries and then they’ll also track the last 10 years of the wine that they produced and put that into a rolling average that represents the winery’s performance. And then there’s, of course, your sub-regions, breaking down France, or Italy, or the United States that show regional performance as well, which can show kind of trend lines on what is hotter or what is kind of overpriced and coming down.

Meb: Thank goodness for the academics. I mean, I imagine putting together some of these indices is a ginormous task that sounds like a lot of work. But what’s the furthest back most of these go? Do they get back to like the ’90s or is there anything that goes back to like the ’50s or before? I’m trying to remember if some of these are through serious cycles or, do you recall a fan?

Anthony: So I’d say, with the data, it gets a lot narrower past, I’d say 1980. So anything before that, the wine market was very, very narrow. It was pretty much only Bordeaux wines or Burgundy wines. And we’ve seen, in this past 30, 40 years, just a broadening of the wine market. Now wine from Italy, or the U.S., or Spain, or Germany has become investment-worthy. And when you look at that from a return standpoint, it means the indices had to be broadened. So a lot of the main ones that are well-respected by the industry are, I’d say around maybe 15, 20, 25 years old at most. And then anything past that, it’s going to be only looking at the performance of two regions.

Meb: All right. Well, we’re going to kind of tie in a bunch of the topics that we’re talking about with wine as an asset class as we discuss your company and offering, and I imagine go down some rabbit holes as well. So why don’t you walk me through the first steps? Not what it is today, yet. We’ll get there, but what the formation was like, did you go from, “Hey, okay, this is a cool idea,” to, “All right. I’m going to buy a bunch of wine and drink it and see how this world works. Am I going to invest in some wine funds?” There used to be a handful of wine funds. I don’t think we see them as much anymore. They were mostly in Europe, if I recall. What was the sort of on-ramp to starting the company?

Anthony: Yeah. I mean, I did look at some of those wind funds as well. And you’re right in that a lot of the wine investment companies are based in Europe where, I think, just wine is a lot bigger part of the culture and society there than it is here in the states. But I didn’t really feel like I found anything right for me. As someone who is a millennial, I want everything on an app or want to be able to have the level of transparency and not have to wait for a quarterly email to see what’s going on. So I think what really was lacking was, A, from an accessibility standpoint. Going to auctions is really expensive and they take a huge cut versus the other option was working with a wine investment firm or a broker, which just didn’t really feel right for me from a user experience standpoint.

And I kind of left with me and my now co-founder just doing this on our own. We were in forums trying to learn as much as we could, calling people up, and bit by bit we kind of cobbled together what’s now the foundation of Vinovest, which, A, uses quantitative analysis to be able to make decisions, so taking taste preferences and personal biases out of the equation, B, handling all of the logistics from access, to custody, to insurance and storage, taking it all under the hood, and then, C, having a delightful user experience. People want to be able to log on and see up-to-date valuations and really be able to know, just like logging into the Robinhood or Schwab account, exactly what’s going on. And when we built that out for ourselves we realized that we had that opportunity to just productize it and make it available to everybody.

Meb: So why don’t we do this? Why don’t you sort of walk us through. I have a Vinovest account. You guys do a very nice job of educating. I was reading some articles on Rosé and Chateauneuf. You guys also have a pretty sleek user interface, so kudos. Walk us through, person comes to your site after listening to the show, they say, “All right. I want to invest in wine.” How’s does it work? They sign up, what’s next?

Anthony: Yeah. They sign up and they’ve got two different experiences on the platform. The first one, which most people choose, is more of a robo-advisor experience. We take some inputs on how long do you want to invest for, your risk tolerance, a couple of the questions about your investing experience, and then finally we take what your initial investment amount is. Based on those parameters, our algorithm will be able to develop a strategy for you and actually go out there and acquire wines on the open market. So we’ll actually go out there, do the bidding, acquisition of the wine, inspections of the wines to make sure that they’re in the right condition to be considered investment-grade, and then we’ll store them for you. And after all that’s done, you’ll get to see the wines in your portfolio, you get to track the pricing, and also see that sort of education and research that I believe is really critical to making this more mainstream.

So we’ve got our in-house research team that shows you, like, why is this region hotter than the other? Or why is the year of 2016 performing better than the 2017 vintage? And our goal is to help the user understand the parallels between wine and traditional markets. So that’s the first option. Second option is more of a white-glove kind of custom solution for people who maybe want a little bit more control on their platform. They know, “Hey, I want to go all-in on champagnes. I only want champagne, so nothing else.” We can do that and provide the right guidance and sourcing abilities to be able to help people on a more self-directed basis as well.

Meb: And the minimum for the first and the second, is it 1K, 50K?

Anthony: Correct. So the Robo-advisor option starts at 1K, the more custom option starts at 50K.

Meb: All right. Let’s start with the 1K. How do you guys actually go about buying it? Do you have direct relationships with the actual vineyards? Are you going through exchanges? Are you going through auctions? How does it work?

Anthony: A little bit of all of the above. We’re really optimizing for the best pricing. So sometimes we can find the best deal on an exchange or through a distributor. Sometimes we can get it directly from the winery if it’s a newer vintage. And we work with all these producers either from an API-driven side with a lot of the exchanges, where all of it’s automated, or with lot of the more traditional producers, we have wine traders that are actually communicating with them on a daily basis to be able to see what that sort of live supply and demand is like.

Meb: So, all right. I put in 5k, transfer my money. Did I see you guys even allow crypto deposits? Was that one of the choices?

Anthony: We do. Yeah. So you can pay with your Bitcoin, your Dodge, or whatever.

Meb: Okay. That wasn’t me. But let’s say I put in some money, what happens next?

Anthony: So as soon as you put in the money, we’ve got your preferences. Like…

Meb: What do you mean by preferences?

Anthony: When you signed up, you filled it a couple of quick questions on your investing experience, your risk appetite, as well as that investment horizon. So based on those preferences, we’re able to then triangulate a strategy that’s right for you. So say if you want to go super aggressive for 5 years with that 5k, we’d be getting you a different mix of wines than if you wanted to go super conservative for 10-plus years for that same 5k.

Meb: So what do those look like? I’m trying to think and I was trying to guess in my head as I went through this, what conservative versus aggressive looked like, if that meant…and I’m just talking out loud, obviously, you’re going to explain it. But I was like, in my head, as I went through the user experience, I said, “I wonder if conservative means I’m going to end up much more diversified, where I just have a lot more bottles of varying geography and location.” And then aggressive, I said, “I wonder if that just means it’s the more volatile but historic higher growth sort of returns.” I wasn’t quite sure. So tell me what the difference is between the three levels.

Anthony: Yeah. You’re on the right track, Meb. On top of that, we also take a look at regional performance as well. So if it is a newer region or a newer winemaker, we have less historical data on them. So when we’re looking at the projected performance of it, there is going to be a little bit more speculation than say if we bought wine from a winery that’s been around for maybe 150 years and we have a ton of historical data and know, with a higher level of confidence, what that sort of predicted return profile looks like.

Meb: Okay. I need a fourth category, which is the Meb category, which is like the cheap bastard category. Like, you have wines where they historically are good, but it’s like highly questionable vintage. Like, it may work out…or you just have like bids under the market when there’s a forced seller, that would be mine. So, all right. So tell me, like, all right, I put money in, what would be a example of, say, like a $5,000 portfolio…and you can choose conservative, aggressive, whatever, like give us some examples. How many bottles do you end up with? What’s the price range? Am I just going to end up with one $5,000 bottle from the Rothschild and then I’m just winging it, or how does it work?

Anthony: No. We absolutely do not want to put all your money into one bottle of wine, no matter how much we believe in it. Say we meet somewhere in the middle, right? You take a moderate approach. You’ll likely have wines from really, I think, classic wine-growing regions, whether it be champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy. It is with that 5K level going to be not one of these like ultra-high-end producers, but definitely a blue-chip producer. So say in Bordeaux, it may be a sector-classified growth, or maybe the second wine of the first growth, which is kind of like the crème de la crème class A of Bordeaux. Wines, I’d say they’d be around anywhere between $200 and $400 for those. And then we’d probably put some Italian wines or champagnes in the mix. So those are, from a momentum standpoint, haven’t had double-digit returns the past six years in a row.

They’re at usually a little bit more of an affordable price point closer to like $100 to $300, and those ones offer diversification because they have completely different drinking windows than the Bordeaux’s do. If you don’t have those, we’d probably do something from the new world. So mostly in Napa, there are a few really incredible producers there that have really skyrocketed in price in the last few years as California wine’s getting a little bit more international. I’d say total amount of bottles, it would be closer to, I’d say 24 to 36 bottles. We buy those bottles by the case. So you’d have six-packs or 12 packs and you’d have a pretty good diversified mix as a start to kind of building on top of that for the future.

Meb: So you would roughly end up with four to six different six-packs. Is that kind of the way to think about it?

Anthony: Yeah. Yeah.

Meb: Cool. Okay. And is there a scenario where you end up with all six, six packs of Bordeaux or all six champagnes, or do you kind of ensure that there’s some diversity amongst the mix?

Anthony: I think if the wines are all from the same region, which is very, very rare, they would be at drastically different price points. So you would have at least some sort of diversity between the sort of return and risk profile. It may be a brand new winemaker versus a really established winemaker, they could still be able to balance out from a risk management standpoint, but we see that very rarely, especially if you are investing a few thousand dollars. We definitely have enough sort of leeway to play with around a bunch of different regions instead of the price points and vintages.

Meb: So for the Robo, which is the sub-50, what’s the like maximum range on the bottles? Do you ever end up with bottles above a grand or…and what’s the lowest? Does it go below like $100?

Anthony: It’s pretty rare for below $100, but you can find some pretty good investment wines. Usually, they are kind of like the, maybe like an emerging brand, like a second label underneath the big producer. That’s when we’ll go below the $100 range. And, yeah, absolutely. Like, if you’re investing say 40k, 45k you will have bottles that are worth a thousand, $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 because from a diversification standpoint, that bottle is not taking up too much of your portfolio to be outside of our sort of risk ranges.

Meb: I assume you can’t do this with a Robo, but you can correct me if it’s true. Let’s say I ring you up and I’m like, “Yo, Anthony listened to this on the “Meb Faber Show.” I’m going to put in 10, 20, 30 grand, but I cannot stand red wine. Am I able to get a Robo of customized or do I get to go 50-plus for that?”

Anthony: So for that, I would counter with, are you looking at drink this wine or are you looking to invest this wine? Because we want our customers to throw their taste preferences out the door. You shouldn’t care if you’re drinking a red, white, or blue. We’re here to make you returns so you can buy more white wine with your returns. That’s what we would say. And we have quite a few clients that are like that. Maybe they’re not wine experts, but they do have wine preferences. They’re like, “Can you avoid so-and-so region?” And that’s what we always counter with, is that you should separate your drinking preferences from your investment preferences.

Meb: So what’s the typical investor? I imagine there’s kind of barbell where there’s a certain client that’s like sub-50 and above 50. But talk to us about who’s been onboarded and your experience over the past, you guys started 2020 or 2019?

Anthony: 2019. So we’ve been around for a couple of years. And yeah, you’re right. It is really two distinct types of customers. The first is just kind of retail investor. They’re not sort of super high net worth yet but they’re getting there and they’re actively diversifying their portfolio. They’ve got their stocks, they got their 401k. Maybe they got some real estate or crypto on the side and this is something that they’ve been looking to do. Not wine investing specifically, but to actively build and grow their portfolio.

Meb: Walk me through the white glove now. So somebody comes to you with 100 grand, 500 grand and says, “I don’t want to deal with this. You guys seem much more capable than I do, but I do want to build this out.” What’s that typical experience like as far as the customized boutique offering?

Anthony: Yeah. So the second sort of segment of our audience is this sort of higher net worth family office RIA type of client where they are either really, really knowledgeable about wine investing and just didn’t find a good way to deploy it themselves or through other people or they are representing other clients. So at that point we get a little bit more granular when we’re discussing the portfolio construction, targeted maturity, as well as when it comes to actual preferences on region, some of them come in with like a very clear thesis. Like, we had a client recently who was like, “I only want to invest in wineries where I believe will be most impacted by climate change in the next 10 years.”

Meb: That sounds counterintuitive. That sounds like something that would be the opposite. Like, I don’t want to invest in wineries that are going to be impacted by this. Like what was the thesis there?

Anthony: Yeah. So if you think about it, with climate change, we’re seeing that in these major wine-growing regions, the average yield is getting lower and lower because it’s getting hotter, grapes are ripening earlier, but in smaller quantities. So these wineries, they’re producing less and less wine where the demand for their wine is growing every single year. So they’re kind of forced to be able to release at higher prices as the years go by just because the product that we’re working with is dwindling. So that’s the thesis that that investor had, who was like, “Hey, like I want to hold on to a bunch of these wines because they’re going to become much more rare and the supply is going to be drained much more quickly than other regions.”

Meb: Okay. That’s interesting. And so how does that impact, I mean, is this something that’s immediate horizon as far as wineries where you’re like, “Dude, this is like not 30 years from now. This is five years from now where this is going to shift some of the regions and have the impact,” or what’s the sort of narrative assumption in the wine industry right now?

Anthony: I think it’s definitely something that’s on everybody’s radar. Folks are trying to figure out more sustainable ways to plant, figuring out better ways to be able to preserve their yield. So it is very much on the forefront of most wine producers, but climate change is slow. You can kind of see the tenure path on, “Hey, if we don’t do anything about this, this is what it’s probably going to look like.” And it is unfortunate for those wineries or regions being impacted by that. But also on the flip side, that means that a lot of other regions that previously were not suitable to grow incredible world-class wines are starting to get into that sweet spot. So it is kind of like a changing of the guard of sorts where some doors close, others may open.

Meb: So pretty soon North Dakota, the new Napa.

Anthony: Exactly. Doesn’t have the same ring yet, but we’ve got wine in New York now, wine in Canada. Like, who would have thought of that 10 years ago?

Meb: Yeah. I’ve had some ice wine before. Most of it’s too sweet, but some of it’s actually pretty good. What are the, for all the investors listening to this, how does this get treated? Do you get a K1? Do you get only sort of recognition when you liquidate? How does all this work?

Anthony: So with Vinovest, you are purchasing full case and bottles on your own. So you won’t get a K1 since it’s not classified as a security. But on the sale of the assets, say, like you buy it, we hold onto it for a few years and you sell it, in the U.S., it’s going to be treated as a collectable. In most European countries and Asian countries, it’s actually exempt from capital gains. So depending on where you are listening to this, you could have some really favorable tax treatments on investing in wine.

Meb: That’s why all the investment funds are located in Europe, I think.

Anthony: Exactly.

Meb: Are you guys open to international customers or just U.S.?

Anthony: Yeah. So we’re open globally. As long as you are old enough to drink, you are old enough to participate.

Meb: And so what’s the selling algorithm? Is it opportunistic? Is it something where you’re managing a portfolio and you’re trying to…once somebody puts in five grand, is it that you’re then selling based on the wine’s maturity, the market response, or simply you’re going to start to roll over the vintages and re-invest? Like, how does all that work and what’s the timeframe? Is it like, you’re not going to touch it for 10 years or is it you’re going to start making sales in year one?

Anthony: So we won’t make sales in year one, but usually around, I’d say year three or four is when our algorithm usually starts seeing rebalancing opportunities. So say if you had, let’s say an eight-year time horizon, around year three or four, we’re going to start looking for opportunities for some of those initially purchased wines to hit the market and be able to see what sort of new opportunities are out there and make sure that it’s not just a set it and forget it type of portfolio, that we are responding to market movements as mentioned.

Meb: And so then is it automatically get reinvested at that point or do you reach out and say, “Hey, we just sold all your Chablis. We’re now buying this.” Like what’s the kind of user experience?

Anthony: So on the automated side, it’s going to be like, “Hey, we sold this, we bought this.” It’s all going to be fully determined by our strategy. On the more custom side, we’re able to time it based on the investors’ liquidity requirements. So say, if they wanted some sort of like pseudo type of like dividend or yield where they’re saying, “Hey, like I want X percent cash out of this after the fifth year,” instead of just reinvesting those funds, we can actually pull them out and have the investor have some sort of cash yields.

Meb: Yeah. Fees. How does it all play in? Where do you guys make your money? Is it annual fee? Is it carry? Is it brokerage? Is it what?

Anthony: Great question. So when we move into fees, where wine differs from most other asset classes, we have actual fixed costs, right? We’re not charging the 2% just for the sake of it. We’re covering physical storage, making sure that that wine is under proper temperature, humidity, away from vibration and light, and is also insured in case anything happens to it while it’s in storage. So to cover all that, we have an annual sort of fee for membership on the platform and that ranges from 2.85% all the way down to 2% for the larger clients. So it scales down as you invest more with us.

Meb: Where are you guys storing them? Is this in Malta? Is this in…whereabouts?

Anthony: Close. They are all in bonded warehouses. So for tax treatment standpoint, you don’t have to pay any sort of additional sales tax or value add tax when you’re buying, regardless of where you are in any country. And they stay there in warehouses that we have set up all around the world, but they’re mostly located next to the major wine-growing hubs. So got one in France, got one in Napa, and then the major trading hubs, like the UK, and Hong Kong and such.

Meb: You mentioned something that, when I was doing some research, I had never heard of before, which was vibration impact on wine. And I scratched my head. I said, “That’s odd.” Is that a well-known risk factor? I mean, I understand the other ones with temperature and yada, yada, but I feel like that would almost be beneficial. It’d be like, “Hey, shake it up a little bit, move it around.”

Anthony: With wine, you really just don’t want to disturb it at all. So anything that could quicken the pace of the fermentation process like vibration or like heat is going to make that wine tastes older than it actually is. It can also upset some of the particles that are both inside the bottle and around the cork that could potentially also shrink the cork. So those are two risks that vibration puts into play, which is why a lot of the wine sellers are underground. They’re pretty much in a bunker and nothing can disturb it.

Meb: I’m sure a lot of listeners are licking their lips at this point. Can you get these delivered? If you’re like, “Look, man, I love these wines, but I actually just want to drink them.” Is that something you can do? Or that’s just…it’s a separate choice?

Anthony: Yeah. Not recommended, but you can, because everybody owns their own wines. They own the full bottle and case. And we do have some of the clients that are like, “Hey, it’s my birthday. I’ve got a bunch of these awesome wines. I’m already up on my portfolio, might as well take some profit off the table.” So we have had that happen. It’s not frequent.

Meb: Wait. What do you mean not recommended? I feel like that would be really recommended because they liquidate it and then they got to buy some more.

Anthony: Yeah. I mean, for the returns it’s not recommended, right? You’re at 20% of you drink 20% of your portfolio, then it’s like, “Hey, we’re back where we started, but you just had some nice wine for free.”

Meb: Yeah. But, you know, I think like the demographic you’re targeting, I feel like it might even be the opposite effect because if you’re putting probably tens of thousands of dollars into wine, you may not be optimizing this section purely on investment return. I don’t know. It may just be one way I feel like a lot of people would see it. And tell me if you’ve heard this reasoning, would be almost like they’re going to spend their dividends where they put in 100 grand. They’re like, “This is like a retiree with their dividend checks of 4% a year.” Well, the 4%’s gone. It’s 1% now in the U.S., but…

Anthony: Yeah. Unfortunately.

Meb: Let’s say you’re an emerging market stocks at 4%, you got 100 grand portfolio or like, “Look, I’m going to treat myself to 4% wine per year, 4 grand worth of wine.” That seems like a pretty big wine budget.

Anthony: Yeah. No, that is a pretty big wine budget. And potentially one bottle could completely fill that budget, but I think you’re right. I mean, if you are a true sort of like wine lover or maybe you’re just thinking about this in maybe a more playful way, like why not? Someone at the end of the day is going to drink this bottle of wine. That is ultimately what it’s meant for, that’s ultimately what drives the market. And, hey, like if you’re consuming a bunch, you’re probably making the remaining supply that much more valuable too.

Meb: Right. Good point. I feel like a lot of people, when you’re buying a stock, you know what you’re getting in the sense of it’s exchange-traded, yada, yada, their account is FDIC, SIPC, all that good stuff. The wine world, to most, would seem to be an extremely opaque although that seems to be changing, of course, world. And you see some of the documentaries…I’m blanking on the one about the recent fraud. What was the name of that?

Anthony: “Sour Grapes.”

Meb: That’s an awesome one. “Sour Grapes.” Great documentary. We’ll put it in the show note links. And then there’s another one about the like four or five people that goes through the Sommelier course.

Anthony: Yeah. That one’s called “SOMM.” Yeah. That one is crazy. If you haven’t seen “SOMM,” you have to. I mean, regardless of if you like wine or not, that test is one of the hardest tests in the world. There are only, I think, around 260 people who have passed it ever and we’re thankful to actually have three of those folks on our team.

Meb: Awesome. I would like to go… They’re three levels, right? Is that right?

Anthony: Four levels. Yeah.

Meb: Four levels. So it’s like a harder CFA test. And so I was like, “You know what? I’d like to go through just level one, maybe two.” I was like, “I could never progress beyond that because I’ve had too many baseballs to the face, to the nose, skiing accidents.” I’m pretty sure my palate is…like, graduates it distinguishing box wine from a Bordeaux from something that’s been turned for two weeks, which is a regular occurrence in my house. We’ll take out a bottle of wine and that’ll be like three-quarters of the way through and my wife will take a little bit like spit it on the wall and be like, “Are you joking me?” I was like, “What?” She’s like, “This is terrible. This is like pure vinegar.”

Anthony: They’re like, “This doesn’t taste right.”

Meb: And I was like, “It tastes fine to me.” I think that would be a lot of fun. Is there like an online course or is it through the SOMM program? Like if you wanted to go through level one or two, is it like a standardized, they’ll send you the materials, all the stuff? How does it work?

Anthony: Yeah. It’s actually quite easy to set up. You can apply online and then be able to just show up to a testing center, although I’m not sure what’s going on right now with COVID, but show up to a testing center and take the test. And yeah, I’ve had quite a few friends, a lot of our employees have done it as well. And it’s fun. That’ll get you to the level where you know more than most of the people at a party and then you can show off your knowledge a little bit.

Meb: Well, I think I got to stick to my knitting. I would crush the beer one, I think. I would be a great beer sommelier. I got sidetracked. Sorry. Listeners are used to it. Talk to me about the risks. How prevalent is fraud? Is it a situation that you say you only worked through, I don’t know, exchanges or dealers? What happens when it actually gets revealed? Is it insurance? How’s all that come to play in this sort of world?

Anthony: So I do think fraud is definitely a risk in the wine world. With any sort of luxury good, any sort of secondary market traded item where there’s more demand than supply, you’re going to have counterfeiters, which is why at Vinovest, we take a pretty stringent approach in our acquisition strategy. So as I mentioned, we only work either direct with wineries or with sort of trusted exchanges where we’re actually able to also trace the string of receipts for previous purchases all the way back to the winery. If we weren’t able to do that, we’re not going to buy the wine. So we rarely source from auctions. We rarely source from third-party collectors because of those reasons. I think a second risk is storage. If you don’t have the proper storage, you’re kind of out of luck when it comes to having a bottle of vinegar versus a bottle of priceless wine. And I think that is also really important because most people don’t have the resources or the space to have a giant wine cave in their house or manage a third-party relationship. So I’d say those are two pretty significant risks in this space.

Meb: Yeah. I mean, this asset class, in particular, and collectables, in general, falls into this category for me. And you’ve seen a lot of democratization here, which is awesome and hopefully a lot more transparency come to the space, which is great for everyone involved in the industry, the growers, the buyers, the investors, the drinkers. What has been your experience over the past few years? I imagine you have a lot of stories, some you could tell on the podcast, some you couldn’t. Just about the industry in general, what has surprised you? Is there anything that comes to mind where you’re like, “Man, I never knew this was so backwards or this was so complicated?” Whatever, the floor is yours, but what are some of the things that from a newbie, kind of an outsider, that came to this and built this company, what are some of the things that have surprised you in general?

Anthony: I’ll tell a story about when we were looking for our first storage facility. So there is a wine cellar in the UK that used to be a World War I bunker and everything is stored a couple of 100 feet underground, perfect temperature and humidity controlled, 24/7 monitoring on that. And they store several billion dollars worth of wine. And the thing about them using that much technology in terms of protecting the wine, I couldn’t even find them online because they didn’t have a functioning website. So you can tell that the wine industry, there’s a lot of technology and a lot of improvements built into this space, but most of it is still offline, unfortunately. And for companies like ours where we’re trying to bring everything online and at the fingertips of our consumers, there is a fair bit of working with these partners and finding what’s the easiest ways to get them online. And that’s kind of, part of our big mission, is not just to serve the end consumer, but also to find ways to benefit and streamline processes for everybody else involved.

Meb: What’s kind of changed? Talk to me about anything in general that as you look at the wine industry, we mentioned global warming. I imagine you all are having a bit of a impact as sort of the development of a lot of the online buying, throw in COVID as well, what sort of tectonic forces are happening that you think are things people should think about or be aware of here in 2021?

Anthony: So I’m thinking when we’re talking about big forces that are shifting our industry, in particular, it’s really just going to be the trends of, I think, really Asia. There are more and more people getting wealthier. And when it comes to their buying preferences, we’ve just seen more and more of the sort of investment-grade wine being consumed by wealthy Asian countries. Right now the United States is still number one in terms of its consumption, but we think that China will absolutely surpass it within the next five years. And most of the taste preferences between Americans and folks in China are going to be different based on what they want to drink with their food pairings, based on when they want to drink it in terms of the age of the wine. And those are things that we’re closely watching in terms of how that impacts investor prices of wines where maybe you don’t need to wait 20, 25 years for that Bordeaux to actually increase in price. Maybe it’s closer to 5 to 10 years, which is really exciting because that completely changes the projected return profile of this asset class in some ways.

Meb: We’ll definitely have to do a follow-up show, or if it gets invested by the time this publishes, with what wines I ended up with and see where the algo puts me. I’m a quant, so I like this approach. Before we leave wine because I have a question that is hidden on your website, give us a few suggestions. Listeners want to grab a bottle, all right. So here’s my criteria. So special bottle, but under like 100 or 200 bucks, what is Anthony’s favorites? What’s your go-to? Do you have any particular wine favorites that are on your list?

Anthony: Yeah. I’d say for under 100, you have a ton of options, first of all. If we’re going to go domestic, I would recommend a winery called Favia, the head wine maker, Andy Erickson, used to be the head winemaker at Screaming Eagle, which makes $6,000 and $100,000 wines. And this is one of his new projects. The wines are mostly under 100 bucks.

Meb: Do you say Fabia? How do you spell it?

Anthony: Favia. So F-A-V-I-A. They make some pretty incredible wines up in Amador County in California. So that would be my domestic choice. They’ve got everything from Cabernet, to red blends, Roz, even the Chardonnay. So you can find something pretty incredible for the value, for the experience of the winemaker at that. If we want to go international, my that would be Domaine Arlaud, which is Pinot Noir from Burgundy. This producer, he makes $300, $600 wines, but he also makes really great entry-level wines that are 30, 40 bucks. So you just have the experience of a winemaker that is creating elite Bluechip investment wines but also has kind of a more affordable label at the lower level, which I think is a great entry point for people who are looking to get into international French wines and such.

Meb: Say that one more time, Domaine what?

Anthony: Domaine Arlaud. So it’s A-R-L-A-U-D.

Meb: Awesome. Listeners, we’ll post show note links. If people just want to buy some to consume and not to invest, like what’s the best place? Is it wine.com? Is it just going to your local BevMo? Do you have any suggestions for listeners that are just trying to get their drink on?

Anthony: Yeah. I would say go to your local wine store because shopping for wine online is pretty hard. All the bottles, they pretty much look the same at some point. And you really want something that you’ll like or whoever you’re bringing it to will like. So going to your local wine shop, chatting up the sommelier there. And after a few trips, they’ll start to know what you like and you can really develop a cool relationship and get to learn more about what you like, what you thought you liked, but maybe a new region or a new producer. So I think that’s a really great way to just, first of all, get educated, but also be able to support local.

Meb: What’s been the major client acquisition for you guys? Has it been word of mouth? Do you guys do any like events? Has it been through digital marketing? Is it a little bit of everything? What’s the kind of main focus?

Anthony: It’s largely through education because even a couple of years ago, I didn’t even know what wine investing was. And most people don’t. So finding ways where we can share our story, educate folks on seeing if this is right for them or not is our biggest channel. So whether that be through opportunities like these, which I’m very grateful for, or creating our own content and research and distributing that to our community, those are really, I think, the most effective ways to get the Vinovest word out.

Meb: Well, I just need to start having some Vinovest parties.

Anthony: Yeah. Now that things are opening up, we’ll do a party.

Meb: We’ll co-sponsor some with you and we’ll get people together. The algo, has it ever spit out anything that’s a little wonky or is it ever or currently saying things like, “Man, we have to go big in the paint and Tasmanian.” I don’t even know what wine they make there. I was trying to come up with a good example as Australian white, something from Perth. I don’t know if they make wine there.

Anthony: They certainly do.

Meb: Is there anything in the world in 2021 where you’re like, “Wow, you know, this seems…” It reminds me of like that “Wall Street Journal” weekend edition… Is it even the journal where they’re like, “Sell this, hold this, buy this.” But like, is there anything in general that you’re like, “Wow. This vintage or this wine is looking pretty interesting?”

Anthony: We do get that. And I’m trying to think of the last example. I think it was a German Pinot producer. When people think about Germany, they’re all like white wine, but there are some pretty incredible Pinot Noir producers that are pretty up and coming. I would say to put very little of your portfolio into it, kind of like a flyer. It could be a 5X, 10X. It could be nothing. So that is something that surprised me in the past couple of months as a potential target.

Meb: Interesting. I don’t know why I thought about this, it’d be a fun partner. Have you ever done one of these Outstanding in the Field dinners? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Anthony: No. I haven’t heard of that.

Meb: This is really cool. Pre-pandemic, I took my mom to one, but check it out on their website, listeners.

Anthony: Okay. Outstanding in the Field, got it.

Meb: It travels the country and they do dinners on local farms with local winemakers and it’s like 200 bucks, but it’s a really amazing experience. If you’re up in, I think, in like Santa Cruz or places, they’ll do it straight up on the beach in like a secret cove or something.

Anthony: Sounds incredible.

Meb: I went to one of them. I didn’t even know there was this giant…not giant, but giant for LA, this big farm in the middle of LA. I’m blanking on the name of it. Did one years ago. Anyway, it’s a special experience. Check it out. May be something fun for you guys to partner with.

Anthony: Awesome. Very cool.

Meb: I saw a hidden door on your website that started to allude to something that I’m keenly interested in. You guys are going to start to nozzle all your way into the whiskey world? What’s the story there?

Anthony: Yeah. So whiskey, like wine, has a lot of the same attractive properties from an investment potential standpoint, especially in the barrel, the age of the whiskey really matters and impacts the price. That’s a classic sort of supply and demand scarcity play, and it is uncorrelated. So we’re lucky to have some pretty talented folks in our network and on our team that have some great connections to the best scotch producers, the best Japanese whiskey producers, the best producers here in the United States. And that’s an offering that we hope to bring to the public very, very soon that we’re currently testing out with some select folks.

Meb: Well, I signed up for your list. And so if you want to push me to the front of the line, let me know because…

Anthony: There we go. We’ll give you a little nudge up there.

Meb: My go-to, and listeners have heard me talk a lot about this, I’m a big skier. Has been for the past six, seven years, skiing in Japan and having this added benefit of not just being one of the best ski destinations in the world, but having as you refer to the world has quickly woken up to this, a really great whiskey scene. I mean, absolutely fantastic. Which… God, we went toured one of the distilleries in the snow. And I’m blanking on which one it was, it was so much fun.

Anthony: And that’s why some of these whiskeys are so expensive, is that they’re literally distilled from the most pure glacier snow caps in Japan and they make some pretty incredible stuff.

Meb: All right. So talk to us about the horizon. You guys have survived. I imagine the pandemic, as challenging as it was for people and businesses, knock on wood, I know it’s not over, but the booze business, the wine business seemed to get a tailwind. Was that accurate for you guys too? Is it something that people were interested in when they were chilling at home?

Anthony: Absolutely. I mean, definitely in my household, the wine consumption increased through the pandemic. I’m sure for many other listeners too, and it’s really not stopping. I think people have just really woken up and a lot more of that transacting activity is online because it had to be over the course of the last year. So I think that’s really also helped to galvanize the wine industry, and maybe some of the more traditional thinking players in the space are now more open to partnering with folks like us for an online strategy to reach for our customers in a unique way. And for Vinovest, we’ve kind of got two different tailwinds. First was on the wine side that you mentioned, second was the whole Robinhood, “Wall Street Bets” movement. Right now everybody is an investor and they’re more open to investing in new things than I think ever before. And for Vinovest, we really want to sit at the intersection of those two trends and be able to build a large company in the next few years.

Meb: Well, the nice thing for you guys, as opposed to a Robinhood, is you guys intentionally are not. Wine is a illiquid asset and so holding it and being encouraged to hold it for longer periods and to let the value accumulate versus day trading or…not even day trading anymore, intra-hour trading of investments, speculations really just is not going to work. It’s the friendliest way to say it.

Anthony: Yeah. We’re not pumping into Franzia to make that brand go crazy. So it’s a long-term asset class.

Meb: You guys, as you mentioned, do a great job of content and you have some fun, quarterly updates. You have some fun articles you’ve actually written about some of the wine and alcohol and spirits, stocks too. There are a few articles. We’ll link to them in the show notes for listeners. All right. So as you look to the horizon, as we start to wind down here, you already mentioned the whiskey expansion. What’s the future look like for you guys? What are some of the…as you’re sipping on a glass of champagne, toasting kind of the success you’ve had so far, what’s the future? Is it to expand, just blocking and tackling or your current business? What other ideas you guys marinating on?

Anthony: So, for us, we just want to make it as beneficial, both for the industry and for the end consumer as possible for this industry. I think for that to happen, we really need to do a lot more work on education, on transparency, on both producers, understanding both the current and future value of their wines, as well as consumers understanding what impacts those things. So I think a lot more of building an ecosystem around our platform of both parties, really starting to understand each other, because right now it’s, as you alluded to, it’s incredibly opaque, it can be very much so disjointed. And there’s a lot of players in the middle that I don’t think are really benefiting both too much. So, for us, it’s really about building a long-lasting ecosystem and community around it because that’s, I think, the best way to push this industry forward, is not just us alone. We want the support of everybody else to help push this as a movement.

Meb: How have you guys built it so far? I know you’ve done a seed/series A. Is that right? How was that experience, what sort of investors did you target? Was it VC? Was it angels?

Anthony: Yeah. So we did a seed last year and then a series A this year, and really just targeting people that we believe would add the most to our company, so. Especially in the beginning, it was more so operators, angels, folks that knew how to get a company off the ground and help us be able to hire the right people. Then as we got to the series A, we got a great partner to lead around that is very much so well-connected and also industry players. So we have folks who are very senior and executive members of companies like Diageo, or Moet Hennessy, BlackRock. These are, I think, the marriage between wine and alcohol business as well as financial services, which is where we are at the intersection of. And those connections really go a long way for us.

Meb: Who ended up leading the round?

Anthony: Tribe Capital did. So they were an investor in us at the seed round, got to know the partner who ended up joining our board even prior to that. So we’ve had a great relationship for the last two or so years, and it also doesn’t hurt that he’s a huge wine lover. So we always have some fun stuff to chat about.

Meb: We had Jonathan Sue on…podcast alumni, episode 287, listeners. So…

Anthony: Perfect. Well, surprise because Jonathan’s on our board. So I will definitely give that a listen.

Meb: I mean, look, there’s all three of us. We’re kind of quant data nerds in different tangential industries. You can see why we all have ended up here.

Anthony: Yes. Absolutely.

Meb: You get to answer this twice because you have a bit of a unique position. I’m going to ask you what’s been your most memorable investment and then also what’s been your most memorable wine purchase or bottle. So you can answer these either way. The wine one, it could be like Paul Giamatti in…God, what’s the movie? I’m blanking… “Sideways?”

Anthony: Yes.

Meb: Where he’s doing a…

Anthony: Where he’s freaking out about, Pinot Noir. Yeah.

Meb: He finally drinks the really nice bottle in like a diner out of a Styrofoam cup at the end.

Anthony: I remember that, the Olivos

Meb: All right. So talk to us, your most memorable wine for you, experience or bottle, and then most memorable investment.

Anthony: So most memorable wine, this would be last year. I proposed to my now fiancé and we had a bottle of 1995 Dom Perignon Oenotheque. And that was our birth year. So it was really special to be able to celebrate that and a perfect night. That is definitely the most memorable wine. Most memorable wine investment, I would say is 2015 Sassicaia. We bought a pretty big position in this wine prior to them being named the world’s number one wine by Wine Spectator and the price doubled almost overnight. So that was kind of crazy. That doesn’t happen a lot in the wine world, huge movements like that. So it was really exciting for us and definitely my most memorable investment.

Meb: Awesome. Best place people to go, follow what you guys are up to, where do they get started?

Anthony: Come reach out to us at vinovest.co. That’s V-I-N-O-V-E-S-T.co. And I’m anthony@vinovest.co. So I read every single email. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or thoughts, and yeah, let’s start a conversation.

Meb: Anthony, thanks so much for joining us today.

Anthony: Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time, Meb. We got to get a glass of wine for you and Jonathan very soon.

Meb: Podcast listeners, we’ll post show notes to today’s conversation at mebfaber.com/podcast. If you love the show, if you hate it, shoot us feedback at themebfabershow.com. We love to read the reviews. Please review us on iTunes and subscribe the show anywhere good podcasts are found. Thanks for listening, friends, and good investing.

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