Wine is one of the more secure, long-term alternatives to investing in the stock market. It has traditionally been employed as a hedge against losses and a diversifier alongside stock and ETF holdings.
Thanks to services like Vint, investing in high-quality vino no longer necessitates a sommelier’s degree or a specially built wine cellar. Instead, you can invest as little as $25 in a portion of a wine collection. Anyone can join Vint immediately; there are no membership fees or accreditation steps involved.
When you open a Vint account, you can invest as little as $25 in shares of premium wines from around the world. It’s great for first-timers who want to test the waters with alternative investments because there are no membership fees or certification prerequisites.
What is Vint?
Vint is a digital marketplace for buying and selling wine collections, which allows even non-accredited investors to participate.
Vint allows you to invest in wine for as little as $25, whereas many other platforms require you to invest in wine by purchasing complete bottles or cases. It is a public corporation subject to oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission; it’s initial offering to investors occurred in early 2021.
Vint is perfect if you want to diversify your portfolio with wine but don’t want to deal with the hassle of buying and storing wine yourself. The low required initial investment on this platform makes it ideal for swiftly diversifying your holdings across multiple collections. Vint’s team manages the entire process, from initial sourcing and market analysis through the use of secure, high-quality storage facilities.
One of the newer and smaller organizations in the alternative investment industry, Vint has only been offering wine investments since 2021. However, it has many benefits that make it a better option for investors than its rivals, especially if they only have a modest amount of money to put into it.
Wine collections can be purchased in the same way that fractional shares of stock are purchased thanks to the securitization of wines by Vint. And with a minimum share purchase of only $25, investing in Vint is feasible even with a limited budget.
The fact that it does this is what makes Vint special. Liv-Ex, short for the London International Vinter’s Exchange, is a trading platform for wine. By contrast, rivals like Vinovest avoid securitization by investing directly in the underlying assets. This means you’ll need to make separate purchases of wine, with a minimum investment of $1,000 for the Starter portfolio. Since you can’t invest in fractional shares, regular investments are more expensive.
Vint does not impose yearly management fees on its investor base. Instead, the corporation takes a cut of the final offering price, usually between 5% and 10%, in order to turn a profit.
This is a huge difference, and it’s a bummer that Vint doesn’t provide its pricing details in the same place where they’re expected to be paid attention to: on collection pages. However, the plus is that the only cost is an initial investment, and the owner keeps all of the proceeds from the collection’s eventual sale, regardless of how much the collection has appreciated in value.
About every two weeks, Vint launches a brand new collection. Furthermore, collections feature wines from all around the world and provide extensive background on each bottle.
At now, the Germany Collection is one of the Vint collections available for purchase. This collection includes 1,000 total shares at $53 each for a total collection value of $53,000. It has a projected sell date of between 2024 and 2027, is traded under the ticker symbol GERM on Liv-Ex, and consists of 58 individual bottles.
When Vint purchases a wine, it collaborates with its partners to keep the wine in a safe, climate- and humidity-controlled environment. This saves you the time and money of buying a wine storage system for your own home.
Vint’s storage partners include Domaine and Octavian, two experienced wine storage organizations. While Octavian is located in the United Kingdom, Domaine is an American firm. These partners store hundreds of millions of dollars worth of exquisite wine, so your collection is in good hands.
Another advantage of investing with Vint is that you can use a self-directed IRA to invest. Good news if you’re saving for retirement and interested in diversifying your portfolio with wine, as many alternative investment platforms only accept taxable accounts.
Vint’s recommended IRA custodian is Alto IRA. Vint does not charge any fees for contributing to a self-directed IRA, but other services, such as Alto, do. Their fees range from $10 to $25 each month. Alto is one of our favorite alternative investment providers for self-directed IRAs, and it has 75+ partners for asset classes like artwork, wine, real estate, and even cryptocurrencies.
There are no yearly or monthly account maintenance fees with Vint. Instead, the profit margin is 5%-10% of the total amount donated for each collection.
How to Open an Account
By submitting your name, email address, and phone number, and creating a password, you may create a Vint account. After confirming your email, you’ll be directed to a brief investor profile to fill out before you can begin making investments. Given that Vint is now only available to U.S. citizens, you will be asked to verify that you are a suitable investor. This also requires providing your U.S. home address, date of birth, and Social Security number.
Wine may be the appropriate asset class for you if you’re looking to diversify your portfolio and provide some downside protection to your traditional stock and ETF holdings. Additionally, due to Vint, you may include wine as an asset class without spending tens of thousands of dollars or constructing a climate-controlled wine storage.
However, Vint is a very new entrant, and it’s somewhat different from the industry standard, Vinovest. When starting out in the wine investment market, we recommend Vint since in many cases you may get started with as little as $25. If you have at least $1,000 to invest, though, Vinovest’s automated portfolios are enticing.
There is, in the end, a wide variety of wine investments to consider. You should never invest money you can’t afford to lose, and unless you’ve thoroughly researched the dangers involved in alternative investments, you shouldn’t make any.
Investing In Fine Wine: Everything You Need To Know About Vint