News Partner content

LiveTrade 2.0: a new era in fine wine trading

30 October 2024 By Richard Woodard

Bordeaux Index’s LiveTrade platform was already the busiest trading venue in the fine wine market – and now it’s expanded to cover just about every wine – and whisky – you can name. Richard Woodard finds out more.

Wine bootles from cellar in selective focus

Tried and trusted as it may be, the traditional method of trading wines on the secondary market – via merchants and brokers – comes with inherent limitations. “The majority of people sell to the company that they store their wines with,” says Matthew O’Connell, CEO of Bordeaux Index’s Livetrade platform. “And, if they sell elsewhere, they are normally asked to move the wine before it can be listed for sale.”

LiveTrade aims to cut through the restrictions of that narrow and outdated trading model. Rather than selling on a smaller scale – say via a UK merchant to its core audience of UK collectors – the now expanded platform opens up wine trading to a global B2B and B2C audience.

The model will be familiar to those who have already used the original LiveTrade platform. That spanned about 1,000 wines from Bordeaux, Champagne and Tuscany, with Bordeaux Index injecting liquidity by ‘making the market’, and showing buy and sell pricing on each and every wine, 24/7.

Crucially, this was a ‘pan-market’ platform, open to everyone, everywhere – from producers to wholesalers and retail merchants, as well as private collectors and investors large and small. Nor did the wines have to be stored with Bordeaux Index; as long as they were in bond and in pristine condition, they could be located at any warehouse in the UK and across Europe.

The success of the venture – O’Connell reckons it lists up to about 40% of the total stock of Bordeaux in the UK marketplace, with total transactions topping US$100 million a year – made its expansion a no-brainer for the company.

“The new LiveTrade is ultimately a completely new platform,” explains O’Connell. “It builds on the lessons and feedback from the old platform, and in technical terms it’s built for today’s world. Now almost any wine and most whiskies can be offered, either stored with Bordeaux Index or stored externally, as long as the stock is pristine and held in bond. There are just a few exceptions – for instance, very old and rare wines that would require inspection before being offered.”

The new LiveTrade also offers a “much improved” user interface, O’Connell adds – an important factor for non-professional private collectors looking for a hassle-free trading experience – and he describes the platform’s portfolio management tool as “best in market”, while the valuations offered are “highly sophisticated and accurate”.

“You can just log onto LiveTrade and go into the marketplace, and buy and sell a wine – it’s very easy to do that. If there’s a bid or an offer, you can interact. You can say: ‘I’ve got 10 wines on my wish list’ and put an offer on all of them. The platform will suggest a price, so you have a realistic expectation of doing business.

“But a lot of our clients prefer to have their portfolios or collections on LiveTrade, and to interact directly from them. For clients who store their wines with Bordeaux Index, this is all set up and updated automatically. But if your wines are stored externally, you can send us a list and we can create a portfolio for you.”

For trade customers, an added attraction of LiveTrade is API (Application Programming Interface) connectivity, allowing businesses – once integrated with LiveTrade – to automatically list wines for purchase or sale on the platform. “Most commonly, this works by companies taking stock from the platform and showing it to clients,” explains O’Connell, “or they could list their wine, or their clients’ wine, for a much broader trade opportunity. And it’s all constantly updated, so you can be confident that the stock is there, and there’s no duplication of trading in the same wines.”

Whether private collector or wine business, confidence and faith in the system are key – and here, says O’Connell, Bordeaux Index’s scale, experience and market knowledge are crucial. “If you don’t have someone in the middle overseeing transactions, it’s hard to have that confidence,” he points out. “And you have to have the wherewithal and ability to do that.

“We are primarily a market-focused business, buying and selling fine wine in the market, so we have the ability to resolve any problems or issues with stock when they come up.” A dedicated Bordeaux Index team is also on hand to offer support, assist with uploading portfolios and answer questions about the new platform.

In addition, the ‘old’ LiveTrade lives on in LiveTrade+, a selection of about 1,000 wines with continued market-making by Bordeaux Index on all of them, mostly involving wines from Bordeaux, Champagne and Tuscany.

The new, expanded LiveTrade also encompasses whisky, in recognition of the rising importance of the category to collectors and investors. “We have significant activity in the whisky space nowadays as well, so including that in the scope of the new platform was very important,” says O’Connell.

Fine wine is a notoriously fragmented and complex marketplace, involving a multiplicity of individuals, businesses and trading networks. In that context, a platform that offers a trading experience that is at once user-friendly, constantly updated, transparent and secure – and with a global audience to boot – could be a game changer.

“This breaks down the final barrier in the global fine wine market,” asserts O’Connell. “We believe that the new LiveTrade makes fine wine more accessible, and more tradeable. And it really is for everyone.”

SWR: lighter bottles for entry level wines is 'the wrong message'

Ribera del Duero challenges 'out of date' perceptions in UK market