A pre-owned luxury watch sells for more with its certificate than without
By Louis de Lambert · published on
A bottle of wine from an old vintage, on the other hand, is only worth what people are willing to believe.
Yet wine is the most counterfeited luxury product in the world. According to several industry experts, up to 20% of fine wines traded on the secondary market could be counterfeit.
And while watchmaking and leather goods have taken a ten-year lead on digital proof, wine still runs on declared trust. We trust the label. We trust the seller. We trust the appellation.
That worked when the bottle stayed in the same hands, in the same cellar, or just a few kilometres from the estate.
It no longer works when it changes owners five times before reaching a collector in Hong Kong, a restaurant in Singapore or a consumer in New York.
The day luxury digitised proof, it did more than fight counterfeiting. It turned trust into a selling point.
Wine can do the same. It even has a head start: no one tells a story as well as a winemaker talking about their land. All it lacks is proof that lives up to that story.
That is exactly what we are building with the FIDEwine digital passport.
