Bored Grapes: A virtual world of wine and NFTs
A winemaker and a digital team want you to imagine a virtual world where you are a vineyard owner: growing and harvesting virtual grapes and digitally filling up bottles of wine. Then redeem your digital bottle for real wine – that you can drink – delivered straight to your home. This venture is part of a new project called Boring grapes.
Oregon-based Nicholas Keeler, the winemaker at Authentique Wine Cellars and co-founder of Bored Grapes, has teamed up with a group of wine and technology experts led by Robert Haleluk. They have developed a wine approach to the world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), creates an online wine-centric metaverse.
The project has been evolving since its launch in October 2022. Keeler and his team are charting a course to launch the first NFT model that could usher in an advanced new digital future concept. Or at least provide an exciting new platform for consumers to buy and collect wine.
Bored Grapes launched its first NFT collection last year, offering 5,555 virtual empty bottles. This issuing process is often called a “mint”, where users interact with a smart contract to issue an NFT token.
The Bored Grapes team announced the first “drop” to their 31,000 Twitter followers and 26,000 members Discord Community – an online social network. Interested users can then create their empty NFT bottles for free. All 5,555 bottles were snapped up within half an hour.
“The process allows us to bring together special digital opportunities and unique wines from my network of winemaker friends in the industry,” said Keeler. “For example, I plan to work with Chris Peterson at Avennia Winery for one Bordeaux mixed offer, and we are looking at curating wines from Italy, France and California,’ he added.
The next step is for people to take the empty NFT bottles and redeem them for actual wine that Keeler and his network have produced. Over the Easter weekend, Bored Grapes will release a new NFT collection to kickstart the next phase of their project. This new collection will allow members to mint 5555 grape vines.
Users who have purchased grape vines will begin the experience of growing grapes at Bored Grapes’ metaverse vineyard, Vinum Estate. Each vine will grow a certain amount of grapes daily (these will vary). They will produce up to 112 grapes per vine at full maturity.
“Once completed, users will be able to harvest their grapes and combine them with the empty bottles to produce a full bottle of wine NFT,” explained Keeler. “Then they can redeem that NFT for an actual physical bottle of wine that I produce,” he added.
The cost per vine is 0.10 Ethereum (ETH). However, users can pay in traditional currency (USD) by credit card. The amount charged will be based on the current value of ETH, which at the time of writing is $1,872.50. This puts the coin price at: 0.10 ETH or $187.25 per vine.
In many ways, buying grape vines on Bored Grapes is like paying for wine futures, which is the practice of selling wine before it is bottled.
While in a physical marketplace that a first, where you’ll buy wine futures, Bored Grapes is taking “an exciting new approach to doing this digitally,” Haleluk said. “While these terms – NFT, mint, metaverse – can be complicated, this new technology is exciting. This enables creative teams to build unique experiences around products, brands and exciting opportunities, he added.
“We’re trying to make this a fun, new experience for buying wine,” Keeler said.
