Wine Owners (www.wineowners.com) is doing for wine collectors what the iPod did for music lovers twenty years ago. It immediately simplifies life for those looking to build a wine collection, or to efficiently manage an existing collection. The system was created by Nick Martin – an avid wine collector and investor with a background in data. Now anyone with a wine collection, and particularly those interested in wine as an investment, can simply email a spreadsheet of their wine collection to the Wine Owners team and have it automatically uploaded and organised.

The need for a system like Wine Owners is clearer today than when Nick Martin originally created it. Passion assets are ever-more attractive and necessary in the unstable financial landscape post-2008, and wine is confirmed as the best-performing of all passion assets (Knight Frank Wealth Report 2017). Wine Owners’ success at supporting the needs of wine collectors and investors has been confirmed by strong growth, and a second venture capital raise in late 2017, to support further growth.

Two distinct halves make up Wine Owners. First, its collection management system, which neatly catalogues wine collections of all sizes. At the time of writing, more than five million bottles of fine wine are logged in this system. Second, its trading exchange – a busy marketplace for fine wine collectors and investors. Thousands of pounds worth of wine are listed, bought or sold on the exchange every hour. These two halves plug work seamlessly together; when a trade is made on the exchange side, an automatic update is made on the cellar management side.

Underpinning both halves of this system is a custom-built database of fine wines and prices, which has tracked the wine market’s every move for over a decade. This data is drawn from the wine world’s most trusted data sources, supplemented by Wine Owners’ own data. Every trading decision – buy, keep, sell – is supported by solid data, clearly presented in charts and graphs.