Strauss & Co Announces The Launch Of Africa’s First NFT Wine Auction
Strauss & Co Announces The Launch Of Africa’s First NFT Wine Auction. Strauss & Co has announced the launch of Africa’s first NFT wine auction. Strauss & Co has partnered with five of SA’s most respected fine wine producers to offer Africa’s first fine wine Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) on auction.
Each NFT holds between 20 and 50 vintages, with collections from 66 to 288 bottles. Strauss & Co Fine Wine Auctions is a joint venture between leading fine wine merchant WineCellar.co.za, sommelier Higgo Jacobs and leading auction house, Strauss & Co. “We are beyond excited to be launching Africa’s first NFT auction online which we believe can play an important part in generating awareness for South African fine wine internationally,” Roland Peens WineCellar.co.za Director and Strauss & Co Fine Wine Specialist said in a statement.
He continued to say, “Various fine wine NFTs have become available over the last 2 years as the NFT market has boomed. Strauss & Co Fine Wine NFTs, however, offer a unique iconic South African industry collective of verticals direct from the producers, providing unprecedented ownership of vintage wines and futures to the collector and investor.” Non-fungible tokens are a highly efficient way to package a collection of wines for trading and investment. The digital contract, stored on the polygon blockchain, includes all the provenance, pricing, transaction, sensorial and aging information. This importantly authenticates the bottles within the NFT since all the wines were selected from the estate’s library stocks, corresponding to each bottle’s seal-code. The transactions are extremely cheap and fast, and don’t add any marginal energy cost.
Each bottle within the NFT is also minted as an NFT, allowing for drinking or trading of single bottles at any time. Strauss & Co will coordinate the NFT through to maturity, making sure each vintage is added, as well as ‘burning’ NFTs when stock is withdrawn. This likely constitutes the first fine South African wines to be transacted on the blockchain.
