WineFi shows the future of wine investment is now

By Andrew Catchpole

Published: 16 June, 2025

Callum Woodcock (pictured, left) has just come out of what he describes as fundraising mode, when he, colleague Ollie Thorpe (pictured, right) and I meet to talk about their year-old start-up.

The pair – CEO and operations director, respectively – are the driving force behind WineFi, which they’ve enthusiastically billed as a wholly new form of wine investment vehicle, and which recently completed a £1.5m seed round of funding. The business allows, they say, a more democratically inclusive demographic to invest in this liquid asset, while also offering unrivalled transparency and traceability in terms of the true value of the stock and where it is held.

If this sounds too good to be true from entrepreneurs aged just 31 and 25 years old, then to reinforce their credentials they can flag both wine trade heritage and impressive backing from one of the bigger beasts in this world. The pair have also just won Startup of the Year from the SeedLegals Startup Awards, adding to an already lengthening list of accolades.

Woodcock’s father-in-law Mike Paul “is deep into wine”, he says, having run Western Wines for many years and now holding the deputy chairmanship at Gusbourne Wines. Meanwhile, Thorpe reveals that his father is Simon Thorpe MW, who currently sits as MD at Thorman Hunt. And, in addition to these connections, the WineFi team has attracted investment to the tune of a 10% share in the company from Coterie Holdings, further lending what Callum admits is “essential credibility” in a sector that has thrown up some less-than-ideal operators.

WineFi was born of what Woodcock describes as a perhaps inevitable growing interest as his investment-background-trained mind began to clock the possibilities with wine, but also the opportunity to approach this a little differently from the established investment routes.

“Because my father-in-law was very into wine, and also because of what Ollie’s dad does too, it didn’t take long for us to start looking at wine through an investment lens, and it has really interesting characteristics,” says Woodcock.

“Of course, there’s the diminishing supply side, but what that means as an investment is that you’ve had historically very attractive risk-adjusted returns, and it’s an interesting investment to hold, with a low correlation to other asset classes.”

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Seamless investments

Moreover, as Woodcock reminds, wine is capital gains free in the UK, along with the most important bit, he adds, that you can drink it. It’s also the “fun” part of an investment portfolio, which the investor can “happily discuss at a dinner party – unlike your S&P 500 Index fund”.

How, though, does this specific business differ from the run of the mill?

“We make it very seamless and cost effective to invest in fine wine,” says Woodcock. “So, that means two things; one is the ease of access, and then how they can trust that the organisation they are dealing with has chosen the right wines to go within a portfolio.”

Ideas and innovations that back these assertions come tumbling out at this stage of our conversation. But suffice to say that the WineFi MO primarily relies on a twin-pronged approach to investment rooted in a tech-rich approach, crunching huge amounts of data on potential investment wines, coupled with an affordably low financial bar for investment entry.

“We spend a lot of time on asset selection, we’ve consciously got a very data-driven process that is then overlaid with our investment company’s expertise,” says Thorpe, divulging an impressive breadth and depth of data sources drawn from past, recent and current market performance.

He adds: “We can put a list of 3,000 wines through our model, and then it will spit out a ranking of them within five minutes or so – is it fairly priced right now?

“And then the other side to it is we’ve got 20 years of investment data or pricing data online where basically you can look at the trends, the drawdowns, the volatilities, all of those sorts of things; then you feed those two things in on a vintage level, and it gives you this wine investment score (WIS). This is obviously then sense checked by our investment committee, just because there are sometimes anomalies.”

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Unique structure

So far, so impressive, and the WineFi systems also ensure that investors can wholly keep track of the physical wines in their portfolio and their actual location, not just names on a virtual spreadsheet assigned to some unseen bonded warehouse. But it’s the aforementioned democratising of the point of entry that really stands this company aside from its competitors.

“We also developed a unique syndicate structure, which allows investors to co-invest, so jointly own a portfolio from as little as £3,000,” says Woodcock.

“So, if you imagine, you invest £3,000 pounds and you get exposure to a Burgundy portfolio worth, say, £300,000, and suddenly that means that fine wine can feasibly form a part of pretty much any portfolio for the very first time.”

An early upshot of this, says Woodcock, is that it is changing how clients and prospective clients are approaching wine investment, with a younger generation, especially, “who are familiar with crypto and being able to place a trade online at the click of a button”, now taking an interest in the capabilities that WineFi offers.

“I think that the wine investing world has been very much based on ‘trust me, this is a good case of wine, it tastes great and it’s a great investment’,” he adds.

“But I think people today expect the kind of rigour that they get with other investments, because these are not insignificant amounts of money. I would say most of our clients are interested in wine, but they can’t imagine spending

ten grand on wine to drink, [however] they can imagine spending ten grand on wine to invest in, assuming that they’re going to get that money back.”

And that last, with all the usual provisos and caveats that the market can go down as well as up, is very much WineFi’s tech-assisted aim.

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