Digital Label Art, First-release Rights Elaborate Magnums. Has the Emperor Got Some New Clothes?

Digital Label Art, Firstrelease Rights, Elaborate Magnums. Has the Emperor Got Some New Clothes?

NFTs might be all the rage, but should they have a place in your cellar?

Words: Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen Illustration: Celyn

PRODUCED BY HUMANS for around 8,000 years, wine is slow to change. That said, there has been a lot of innovation recently. Low-sugar wine is a fast-growing category, production of rose Prosecco is now allowed, canned wine is crazy popular and wine releases paired with NFTs are exploding. Ever since that last item caught our attention, we have replaced checking vintage charts for best qualityto-price ratio with finding out what Ethereum is worth in US dollars, as many wine-NFT release prices are quoted in cryptocurrency. That said, most of the offers we’ve seen will accept traditional currency as well.

We’re familiar with NFTs by now, right? If not, a quick recap: a non-fungible token is essentially a rather clumsy term for a digital asset representing a real-world item that can include music, art or video. Non-fungible means that it can’t be traded for or replaced by another item of equal value. Any one bitcoin is worth the same amount as any other bitcoin. And while two US$50 bills can be traded for a US$100 bill, NFTs are one of a kind. All NFT transactions are recorded on a blockchain, creating an inexpungible record.

For authentication purposes, wine NFTs actually make sense, but wine brands’ initial forays into the non-fungible realm have included enough gimmicky offerings to obscure any real value.

Take an NFT drop from British chat-show host Graham Norton’s He-Devil, which included annual first release’ rights to He-Devil wine (hmm, sounds like a typical wineclub allocation) and a physical print signed by the winery’s co-founders. Or Sarah Jessica Parker’s Invivo X brand’s NFT, which featured digital art representations of two of her wine labels. (Meh.) Even the highly regarded Bordeaux house Château Angelus offered 3D label art along with a barrel of its 2020 Angelus. Robert Mondavi Winery pivoted to a hybrid model, making both the wine and the art something unique. It created a limited edition of three special wines, putting them in commissioned porcelain magnums handcrafted by French porcelain house Bernardaud. The price at the time of writing was 1.20 Ethereum, or approximately US$3,510.

Other recent wine and NFT releases of note include former professional basketball player Yao Ming’s Yao Family Wines offering 200 bottles of its 2016 The Chop Cabernet Sauvignon along with an NFT. These bottles could be bought only with Ethereum, and 137 have sold so far. No gimmicky art attached, just the wine, albeit with a splash of buzzy cryptocurrency.

Australia’s Penfolds released two NFTs, one in November featuring a barrel of its 2021 Magill Cellar 3 Cabernet Shiraz, which sold in 12 seconds for US$130,000. Again, all wine, no digital label art. Perhaps this sold so quickly because it was offered in dollars; potential buyers may not want to embrace using a currency they don’t fully understand or trust. A second release in January offered 300 bottles of Penfolds Magill Cellar 3 2018 via BlockBar, an online marketplace for wine and spirits NFTs, and all 300 sold within 10 hours.

If you look past the buzzwords and art projects, attaching an NFT to a bottle or barrel of wine seems like a smart move, especially to fight counterfeiting. As Guillaume Jourdan, a consultant for the luxury and wine industries at VitaBella Paris, told us: “NFT tokenisation of the digital identity and real-time tracking of wine bottles are possible. The integration of these solutions into mainstream trade and commerce is a way of eliminating counterfeits. With an NFT, a bottle of wine becomes phygital, meaning physical with a digital identity: for every single bottle, a unique NFT is created to provide authenticity and verification.”

NFTs also allow the winery or original issuer to continue to make money on the secondary market, something that hasn’t really been possible before. The highest price a bottle of wine fetched at auction was US$558,000, for a bottle of 1945 Romanée-Conti sold in 2018. However, the winery did not make any money on that sale – but the reseller and auction house sure did. If NFTs had existed 77 years ago and the winery had attached one to that bottle, Domaine RomanéeConti could have had a share in the profit. As Jacob Ner-David, co-founder and CEO of Vinsent, a digital marketplace for fine wine that has pioneered the tokenisation of wine, explains: “With many blockchains such as Ethereum or connected chains like Polygon, the NFT can be programmed to continue to pay a percentage of each secondary-market transaction to the winery or NFT creator. This is programmed into the NFT itself and cannot be changed.”

Where that doesn’t necessarily hold true is with a barrel. If the whole barrel were later sold at auction, Chateau Angelus or Penfolds, for instance, would be able to have a share in the profit if that was baked into the code (which it wasn’t for the 2020 Angelus). But once the liquid within the cask gets poured into bottles, the ability to validate it evaporates, unless the winery does as Penfolds did, where the single-barrel NFT will be converted into 300 bottle NFTs at the date of bottling in October 2022, with each vessel then being identified with a barrel and bottle number.

It’s easy to see the advantages of NFTs for wine, especially expensive, rare bottles, the kind that are often counterfeited and later go to auction. But what’s the deal with wineryreleased NFTs having digital artwork attached? It may have something to do with the fact that the first generation of NFTs were linked to digital art, so wineries (rather unimaginatively) simply continued that trend. One wine CEO pointed out that limited-edition artwork provides something of lasting value to the buyer because the wine will eventually be consumed.

Sure, but for wine-based NFTs to have lasting momentum and worth, winery executives may want to remember that the liquid itself should be considered the work of art. Also, most tangible art does not have a shelf life. Wine does. Unlike an oil painting, once a vino deteriorates, it can never be restored. Eventually even the most highly rated vintage will decline in quality, making wine a limited-return investment vehicle. If there is to be value in wine NFTs beyond authentication, someone needs to come up with an idea more compelling than a byte-sized bit of art. Anyone?

When they are not at home in Manhattan or Spain, Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen, also known as the World Wine Guys, chase the grape harvest around the globe.

PRINT IMPERATIVES

Following the opening of the Singapore Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, we catch up with artist Shubigi Rao on her love for books and why print is (still) not dead in the digital age.

Words: Joel Chua Photography: Alessandro Brasile

CONTRARY TO POPULAR opinion, print is not dead. At least not to Shubigi Rao, the first solo woman artist to represent Singapore at the ongoing Venice Biennale. Tracing the trajectories of book and library destruction, Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book – part of an extensive, decade-long project – delves into “the dichotomies of human stories and erasure”. The exhibition comprises three elements: a paper maze, a book documenting contemporary language loss and a multivocal film elegising the waning communities of print. Not content to let the atrocities committed against “the languages, books and cultural repositories of others” go unseen, Rao testifies – in a personal yet profound manner – of “the inherent power of the written and spoken word”; and in doing so, stands in solidarity with all those who will continue to defend it.

Books have immense power. The loss of books is related to the loss of language and that is how silencing and erasure happens. When a language erodes, we lose all the knowledge, ways of thinking, culture and philosophy accumulated across generations.

The best gift I have received was a set of encyclopaedias my parents bought for me as a child. The set was so tattered they had it rebound in blue leather, with my name etched in tiny gold letters on the spine. It was whimsical, (mis) informative, wildly unfashionable and crammed with everything under the sun. Those volumes changed my life. I fell in love with discredited and outdated knowledge, with the energetic zest of human curiosity and endeavour. I still keep them and read them from time to time.

I was fairly young – a pre-teen – when our house was burgled and robbers took hundreds of books from my family’s library. What they could not take with them, they vandalised. For several years after that, my family and I would visit the Sunday book market in Old Delhi, spotting our lost books among the wares on the pavement and buying them back if we could afford it. We experienced multiple forms of loss, but that was possibly the worst.

People sometimes ask me: “Your project is about books. But we are past books now, aren’t we?” I don’t privilege books above the virtual, nor do I think technology will save us. Technology is quickly obsolete. There are many examples of this: microfiche, floppies, VHS tapes, DVDs, Bluray... In the rush to digitise, we’ve relied on file formats that will not last as long as the physical book – which in some cases, has lasted hundreds and even thousands of years. The Internet is incredibly fragile too, with content disappearing all the time, problems of link rot, paywalled information, punitive licensing and so on. I believe in redundancies and back-ups of back-ups – and often, the best back-up is the physical copy.

Anger and humour are the best bulwarks against the bedfellows of apathy and despair. I’m trying to find my place in the world – or what it is I can say and do about the injustices that make me angry and upset.

STOCKISTS

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Ferrari

Ital Auto 30 Leng Kee Road 6475 1118 www.ferrari.com

Gaggenau

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Grohe

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Harry Winston

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Jaeger-LeCoultre

#02-08 Ion Orchard 6509 1010 www.jaeger-lecoultre.com

Kettal

Xtra #02-48 Marina Square 6336 0688 www.kettal.com

Land Rover

Wearnes Automotive 45 Leng Kee Road 6378 2626 www.landrover.com.sg

Louis Vuitton

#B2-36 The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands 6788 3888 ap.louisvuitton.com

Miele

#B1-01 Winsland House II 167 Penang Road 6735 1191 www.miele.sg

Minotti

#02-10 Raffles Arcade 328 North Bridge Road 6338 2822 www.minotti.com

Montblanc

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Okha

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Parmigiani Fleurier

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Patek Philippe

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Poltrona Frau

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Porsche

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Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

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SieMatic

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Sub-Zero

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Tiffany & Co

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Volkswagen

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THE URGE TO SPLURGE

This summer might be the first time in a while that you get to think big and make it happen. Two recently revealed hospitality heavyweights will offer very different takes on the luxury experience: Raffles Doha in Qatar will have the bold architecture, style and service that have turned the Middle East into a top travel destination, while Xigera Safari Lodge in Botswana is everything you’d want for that once-in-a-lifetime safari experience. So which will it be?

Raffles Doha VS Xigera Safari Lodge

DEFINING ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE

The hotel’s extraordinary curve looks like something from the props cupboard of the Avengers – perhaps a device that opens a wormhole to the next galaxy – but it actually symbolises the crossed scimitar swords on Qatar’s national seal.

ACCOMMODATION

suites on the Doha waterfront along with butler service, shopping, restaurants, cinemas and a cigar lounge. 132

BUT THE ROOM YOU WANT IS

The two-storey, 929sqm Royal Duplex Suite has its own gym, plunge pool, billiards table and hammam. And a private butler, of course, in case you have no one to play billiards with.

WHAT MIGHT KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT

Doha’s all-hours nightlife at the city’s rooftop bars and clubs, located in the international hotels.

BEST AMENITY

The Royal Duplex Suite has its own hair salon. Which you’ll need before heading to the suite’s private cinema.

YOU’LL BE EATING

Italian, oddly (though peppered with local produce and spices). The hotel’s main restaurant is run by Michelin three-star chef Enrico Crippa.

AND DRINKING

The Royal Duplex Suite has a private wine cellar that will be stocked in advance with your requested selections.

YOU’LL BE WEARING HEADPHONES FOR

Paratriking, where a small dune buggy with a giant fan and parasail slapped on will surprise you by actually flying – up to 305m high.

WHAT’S THAT IN THE WATER?

That’ll be Privee, the hotel’s 2,230sqm private floating island, complete with a saltwater pool, sundecks, a bar and a restaurant.

DEFINING ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE

Suites and walkways are built on steel stilts, raising everything above ground and preserving the ecosystem of the delta. It also means you won’t step on the hippos (or vice versa).

ACCOMMODATION

suites with private access to 6,070 hectares of the Moremi Game Reserve.

BUT THE ROOM YOU WANT IS

To access the baobab tree house, you must climb up to the open-air bedroom and observation deck, where you can watch wildlife and sleep under the stars. It’s like your childhood dream tree house, but with actual giraffes.

12

WHAT MIGHT KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT

Just those lions. But they’re miles away, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

BEST AMENITY

Human-sized woven nests on the decks, by South African artist Porky Hefer, that you can sit in and channel your inner weaver bird.

YOU’LL BE EATING

Outdoors. Enjoy bush breakfasts and al fresco open-fire spreads at The Boma with a menu that would inspire any Michelin-star chef. Think tamarind fish curry and rooibos panna cotta.

AND DRINKING

This is a safari lodge with wine game. Enjoy classic Bordeaux from Xigera’s cellar – Château Pétrus 1998, anyone?

YOU’LL BE WEARING HEADPHONES FOR

Helicopter safaris, where you pay a lot to make all those huge, majestic creatures look really small – but the vistas are worth every cent.

WHAT’S THAT IN THE WATER?

That’ll be a crocodile. Hop into a glass-bottomed mokoro (a dugout canoe) and get (uncomfortably) close to the aquatic party that’s happening beneath the surface.