NFT winery Cellaverse seeks opportunities through metaverse

How long would it really take for the world’s love of wine to break through into the metaverse? Not for long apparently, as Italy-based Cellarverse arrived on the scene last year as the first metaverse winery to award each bottle of its custom-made wines with a non-fungible token (NFT).

The ever-expanding metaverse and blockchain technology has proven to be an attractive platform for experimentation for beverage companies looking to create new immersive experiences for their customers in recent years.

From Second vineyardwhich uses VR and AR technology to give people a virtual wine tasting experience, to Ivanco which functions as a Web3 member club that gives members the opportunity to invest in wines physically and digitally. Drinks in the metaverse are clearly here to stay.

Cellarverse claims it does something different than the rest, but combines wine’s digital asset and physical asset.

Wine and NFT go hand in hand

The premise is simple. You buy an exclusively crafted wine from the Cellarverse hub, which also gives you an NFT specific to that bottle. The physical wine is kept in a physical cellar, while your digital wine remains in your metaverse cellar. When you redeem your NFT, the physical wine is delivered to your door for you to enjoy.

“Every member of our community is able to check their digital cellar and redeem NFT whenever they want,” Paolo Angeleri, co-founder of Cellarverse, told research firm GlobalData in a recent podcast.

The idea behind Cellarverse is to combine the exclusivity that comes from owning a rare bottle of wine with the new technologies of owning a rare NFT.

All the bottles are characterized as a work of art thanks to exclusive contributions from emerging artists. Customers have guaranteed ownership of the digital NFT element as well as the actual physical resource of a specially made wine.

Angeleri says the company is inviting small wineries to be part of its metaverse platform for free, giving them an innovative alternative to marketing from traditional routes.

The only downside for winemakers is that they must sell “special bottles” on Cellarverse, meaning a limited number of specially curated NFT-branded bottles, to ensure maximum exclusivity for the customer.

The first ever sale on Cellarverse, 12 bottles of “LaLana” from the Campi Valerio winery, sold out in less than a week, Adnkronos reported.

More than anything else, Angeleri says he wants Cellarverse to be a true community. This is why the company invites its members to events, both in real life and in the metaverse.

In time, customers will be able to attend in-person dinners and then enter the metaverse to chat with the winery possibly thousands of miles away that supplied the wine for the occasion.

However, Angeleri admits that right now the company is focusing more on wine lovers than crypto enthusiasts.

“Our main focus is on wine lovers because the world is not yet ready for the whole web 4.0 experience,” Angeleri told the podcast.

“We tried to create a user experience that is accessible to anyone who may not yet know what an NFT and metaverse is,” he added.

In turn, this slowed the early stages of the company’s launch as the team spent most of its time explaining “how the thing works step by step”.

While the entire world may not be ready for a digital winery just yet, the company has big plans for the future — including building its own metaverse.

“We want to expand our wine list while expanding our metaverse to create a richer end-to-end user experience,” Angeleri said.