"It's a good idea. For others. Not for me."

I recently met, at a festive event, a fine wine merchant who deals mainly in Bordeaux and Burgundy.

The kind of encounter I love: a funny, sharp, passionate man.

The kind of person you are happy to listen to, glass in hand.

He kindly tells me: “I’ve heard a lot about you. Well done for what you’re doing, we need people like you.” Then, almost immediately: “But it’s not for me, because I don’t want producers to know who I sell to.”

I smile, and reply:

First: “You greatly underestimate your own value.

Your value is not just your address book. If that were all it was, you would have disappeared long ago. Your value is 25 years of intimate knowledge of the product, a sharp reading of the industry, and the ability to source, select, negotiate and deliver at the best cost.

A relationship built over time, with producers as well as with your customers.”

Second: before FIDEwine, I myself was a distributor for more than 25 years, and between two equivalent products, my sales team always preferred to sell a strong brand rather than a little-known one. And in the end, it is a false debate anyway: in the age of Instagram, LinkedIn and the rest, a consumer who really wants to get in touch with a producer does so directly.

So the real issue is no longer hiding the producer’s existence. It is preserving the value of the person who made that business encounter possible.

And that is where the conversation gets interesting, because I then explained that business confidentiality remains intact: with the FIDEwine digital passport, intermediaries stay anonymised.

He exclaims: “That changes everything, so why don’t you say so?”

So here is this post:

Merchants, importers, traders: traceability does not expose you.

It protects your business relationships, while giving the product itself, from origin to glass, proof that no one can dispute.

Business confidentiality stays with you.

Proof of the product belongs to everyone.

The market is moving: either you turn this into a competitive advantage, or you suffer it.

It’s up to you.