A winemaker’s life is pretty much all risk: every step of the process could quite feasibly go wrong. The end product takes months, if not years, to make and is expensive to store and transport. You need plenty of liquidity: wine – especially from a new vigneron – is rarely considered a sizeable asset, meaning finance is pretty scarce.
Founded in 2008, Naked Wines’ insight was to apply the principles of modern publishing to winemaking, as TechCrunch explained back in 2016. As a subscription service, its customers (known as Angels) receive access to the company’s cellars and roster...