NEW WEALTH

Then there’s the fact that NFTS themselves are a marketing device with the potential to attract a non-traditional market for wine. How non-traditional? Compared to today’s crypto millionaires, even the nouveau riche is old money, given that the person eyeing a wine NFT might just be a 19-year-old making sevenfigure sums flipping Crypto Punks – an NFT collection featuring computer-generated, pixel art characters – in their parents’ house.

Cryptocurrencies, the best-performing asset class in the past decade, have minted more millionaires than the gold rush or the dot-com boom. The price of Bitcoin has increased 80-fold in the past five years, and according to Bitcoin wallet tracker Bitinfocharts.com, there are currently over 103,000 Bitcoin (at its current price of US$58,626) addresses with a valuation of over US$1 million, and just under 10,000 addresses with over US$10 million.

Throw in the big earners holding one or more of the multiple altcoins, and you’ve got an entire generation of newly rich under-40s looking to spend their newfound wealth. Chances are, these are millennials more used to the idea of drinking craft beer than first-growth Bordeaux; so NFTS would be – or so the wine industry hopes – what wine sellers are looking for with a younger, techfocused crowd.