1275 Collections: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Wine Bank 🍷🔒

There's a lot of questions in your question. Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, Dennis, thanks so much for having us once again. It's great to return. Robert, always a pleasure to have you here. I would love if you could provide an introduction about yourself, what got you into wine, and also about 1275. I'm an engineer by training, turned into a wine entrepreneur. I have been an entrepreneur for the last 20 years. First, it was an events business that I was doing for about 18 years. I did 300 dinners with the world's most famous wineries and Michelin star chefs. And I realized by doing these dinners that there were other people that didn't collect at the level of which they could have collected their wines. So in 2018, I started this business, 1275. And the idea really is to create a sanctuary for our generation's best wines. We have never had so many great wines produced all around the planet. Probably the best wine humanity has ever produced. And the idea here is to create a sanctuary to keep them for us to enjoy in the future, but also for the future generations. I realized that the thing that I really love about wine is to keep it, and to keep it for the future. For me, every single bottle of wine that you see around here is a promise of a happy moment. Yeah, like a very special moment. Sometime that you're going to be spending, you know, wife, girlfriend, you know, boyfriend, whatever, with your parents. With people that, with whom you're going to take a very particular time and write, you know, a page of your life. And a bottle of wine that has waited for such a long time in order to be opened is going to give you a pleasure. They are like pieces of art. They really deserve to be kept before they can be enjoyed. Tell us a little bit more than about 1275, and also how, I guess, you guys are differentiated in terms of other, maybe, you know, fine wine advisors. We like to think of ourselves as, you know, really the epitome of the private banker in Switzerland, with just one asset class, which is fine wine. So we really want to work with very strict Swiss standards. I mean, we are in Geneva, we're based in Geneva. We're very proud of our Swiss heritage. We particularly think that in a world like the one we live in today, being in Switzerland, particularly for a precious asset like wine, is important. It also happens to be at the epicenter of all the great vineyards of Europe. So it's actually the way to minimize transport and risk with the wine. So, yes, we think of ourselves really as a private bank, as a place where we can advise private clients. We don't work with institutional money. We don't want institutional money. We don't want people that just want to speculate with wine and money. So it's not a philosophy, because effectively what we do is to select the right products and then put it into the right hands. Everything that we have, all the cases of wine that you have around you, today, or in 20 years, will have a full documented history about where have they been since they left the estates. For me, it's the minimum we should be asking for any great bottle of wine. It's very sad that today in the market, when you buy a nice case of wine, you have no idea where it's been. And very often it's been damaged in transport, in storage, or maybe it's a fake wine. Have there been any studies done in terms of what percentage of the fine wine market might be tainted? If you listen to someone like Maureen Downey, who probably has a vested interest in her answer, but she was the lead investigator with the FBI, so she was the advisor to the FBI in the famous case against Rudi Konyawan, the famous foster who put more than $100 million worth of fake wines into the market through auctions. She would say that there's about 20% of wines that are fake. I think it's very skewed towards certain brands, certain vintage, particularly the old format, the old vintage and the big formats. The main issue for us, and the one that we want to combat the most, is tainted wines, as you say, the ones that have been damaged. What are your perspectives around how the wine industry is changing? The way the wine market has evolved is really over the last 20, 30 years. And thanks to the transparency that internet brought, in particular to pricing and volumes available in the market, that was really the big change. Internet has definitely changed the game, and that's from the moment internet arrived until today, in 25 years or so, 30 years, we've seen prices of wine going six or eight folds. Yes, there is a generational change, but let's not forget that we've been enjoying wine as a civilization for 12,000 years. I have a pretty strong level of comfort to the fact that in 100 years we'll still be drinking wine. We have great wines coming from all over the place. And that combined to a new generation that is indeed distracted by a lot of other things means that there's basically an oversupply for a demand that is diminishing, even though we have more and more potential customers, the younger generation, but they're a bit distracted. And it's really the oversupply of great wines that is creating this imbalance. So what we do is that we work in the very sort of fine layer of investable, investment-grade wines that is just above that. I'd say 20 years ago, that would be 5% of the market, 10% of the market. Probably when we started this business, so we got funded in 2019, 20, it was 1%. In conditions like today, we are only looking at, you know, not 0.1%, 0.1%. We're now here with the lovely Chloe Ashton, also with 1275. And Chloe, we'd love to hear from you now a bit about your background as well. What kind of drew you into wine and also this wonderful business? Well, it starts quite early for me. I think I'm probably quite a cliche story for a lot of young British people. My father was really into wine, and I grew up kind of running around vineyards as a kid and running through cellars, learning about wine. And I've always been in the wine industry, and I have worked a lot in the UK, particularly in the secondary market. So seeing a lot of trading that goes on and seeing wines being moved around. I guess a few years ago, I had a very fateful meeting with Denis, which, you know, was supposed to just be a coffee and turned out to be something that, you know, brought my whole life to Switzerland. I think on the consumer side, so I joined the industry, I suppose, my first proper year. I was selling Bordeaux and Prima 2013, which is basically one of the worst vintages in the last decade. And since then, what's really happened is an incredible diversification of taste. So a lot of people going for where once people were buying 60%, 70% Bordeaux, people are now very comfortable dipping into Bordeaux, into Burgundy, into Champagne, into all these different regions. So I think on the positive front, that's a trend that I've lived through and that I've seen like big, strong vintages of Barolo 2010, 2016, that have been huge successes. From now and the next sort of 5, 10 years, it's almost going to do the opposite and maybe start focusing much more on producer. You know, you want the stories of producers, right? You want to know about the person or the people behind the wines. And it's not necessarily like, I drink Bordeaux, I drink Burgundy. It's like, I drink Chalets Blancs or I drink Foyer. What could be some interesting, say, you know, wine regions where you would say, you know, 20, 30 years from now, you know, there could be, you know, wines that you could start investing in now that, you know, could actually have, you know, significant value. I have a really love-hate relationship with this question because I think there are two parts. You've got the investment side to like, what are going to be the Burgundy Grand Clou of tomorrow? And then there's, you know, what are going to be the amazing drinking wines in the future? There's obviously an overlap between the two, but I think the example of South Africa or like loads of emerging regions where it's with technology and advancements of all kinds, you know, you're able to make much better wines than you could 10 years ago. There are so many places on this planet that you could put in there, like even Turkey, you mentioned China. The map is vast for that kind of thing. A hundred years from now, where are we going to make the best wines in the world? Well, actually the UK, potentially. There's great sparkling wines being made there today, but you know, as the temperatures rise, the terroir is there to make actually some great Pinot, some great Chardonnay. I guess the middle of the road answer is probably anywhere like micro-terroir where climate is going to be an advantage. So five years ago in Burgundy, where it was perhaps like on some of the northerly slopes more difficult to ripen grapes, they are now becoming more and more the places. Piedmont as well, probably something similar with the like micro-climates. I have my little secret, which I'll give to you is Couteau Champenois. It's the red, well, it can be white as well, but mainly the red Pinot Noir from the Champagne region that I think, you know, are already faring really well against some great Burgundies. And I think that's probably just going to continue. In the tech itself, it's actually really simple. We just make sure that we do all of the shipments properly as in 12 degrees, 75% humidity. And we just have these little trackers that go onto each pallet of wine. We basically just get all of the information downloaded into our own proprietary database. And that gets linked to a case of wine with one of the little black labels. And it gets linked to the person who owns it as well. All of the bottle's history from when it leaves the domain to when it gets here and then in real time once it's here to the person who's bought it. And then eventually, if one day it's sold to someone who buys it, you'd then have that history of it's moved to a different owner as well. We have full data of the last five years of wine shipments. So everything in this place is completely documented without a shadow of a doubt. First of all, you were talking about numbers and whether it's 10%. Our usual rule of thumb is about 2%. And then beyond that, what is key is why. Why are you bothering? Is it you just want to drink really well in the future, which is a totally legitimate investment? Is it because you want to create a legacy collection to leave to your kids as part of their estate? Is it because you want to look and think, well, maybe if I sell a small portion off in the future, I'll be able to rebuy things at the time and it will have been a good investment in the long run. The objectives of why you're buying it are really key. Wine trading is almost a bit of a myth. And if you do that, you will only catch the alpha of the asset class, which is about 8-9% per annum. You're not going to be able to benefit from the premium. And this premium is going to grow over time and that's what is going to give you either a magical moment or a huge premium to resell the wine. Because in the future, you will have two markets. Secondary market, where you don't know where the wine has been coming from and the market where you know where the wine is coming from and it's going to be a premium. We go to the chateau, we lay our hands on the wines there at the estate. We put our chips, we put our GPS temperature trackers and then we keep them within our ecosystem. So long as it stays with us, we know where it's been and we can document it. But as soon as you start to put this wine in the secondary market, the problem is that then you have no idea what happens with it. In 2020, when we started, we definitely started to invest in the technology, in the team, all the infrastructure. Today, we have around €40 million worth of inventory around you in the heart of the three ports of Geneva. So we are not a small wine merchant for making a few pies of wine. I mean, most of the wines that we have here, if not all of the wines that we have here, are actually wines that would have a very long lifetime. In times like today, where we have obviously a market that is a bit more complicated, it's easier to go around and ask for things that are usually not available. So these, for instance, are 1953, 1958, eight chateau bottles for a particular client. And then obviously tapping into the 2009, 2010, the vintage that are going to start being ready. So here we have the stash with all the Harlan. Petrus, obviously, is a must-have. We have a few pallets in the back of Chateau Latour, which is, you know, without any doubt. These are treasures of humanity. 2016 is probably one of the latest vintages, pre-climate change, from the golden era that we've grown into. Fast forward 30 years, they're going to be of a different nature. They're going to be much warmer. I love Imperials. I think they are a wonderful format. It's six liters, so the equivalent of eight bottles. So you were asking about mature. We also get some 1995 Cheval Blanc. And the noise that you're hearing is a machine. Actually, it's interesting. It's a fixed schedule. And so this machine has more than half a ton of active charcoal in it. And what we're doing, even though you cannot see a carton around here, it's only wooden cases, and the pallets are all brand new and treated. This is to treat the air, just in case. And we do air analysis as well to make sure that everything that we have here is in perfect environment. What's the difference between having it in wooden box, and wooden crate somewhere? Carton, you can smell. This logo here, it means it's been heat treated. This case is not going to rot and create any off smell. The idea is that you want the wine to age in a place where you're sure it's going to age in the best possible condition. 12 degrees, 75% humidity that we ensure here is the best condition for long-term aging for wine. Amazing. Thank you so much. You're welcome.