[jcampbell1]

You need a hedge-fund billionaire that is obsessed with wine to back you. He would own, (or have a perfect lean) on all the inventory allowing him to buy $10M in wine as a business investment. He would get the satisfaction knowing that he was arbing the wine market as a side project, and if it failed, he would be "stuck" with a bunch of inventory that he liked.

[kriro]

I think this is actually a decent idea worth testing. Not as the typical startup but more as a one customer at a time but big customers sustainable business.

The warehouse situation seems like it needs solving. I don't quite get why someone that buys 5k of wine wouldn't pay for a good warehouse. High tech new age warehousing for wine seems to be the in.

With some big customer that loves wine you'd basically switch to building and running his warehouse and then see how you can scale that to warehouses that store wine for multiple people.

Premium wine is pretty much comparable to art imo. Show effect and "because I can" are big drivers for buying. If you successfully run the warehouse for one rich guy you can leverage that as marketing.

Either way: Very fascinating article. Thanks for posting it.

[jmaskell]

Exactly. There's a wine trading company called Wine Networks - a branch of SK Group (huge South Korean conglomerate).

They're relatively successful, but are hugely inefficient (no tech).