Why this wine NFT club takes its sustainability cues from Napa Valley

Presented by Libation Labs

Wineries understand sustainability. Making grapes into good wine requires a specific set of special environmental conditions. Maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem and keeping the soil healthy means higher quality grapes.

“For owners of wineries and grape growers, sustainability is a key principle in running a winery,” said Andrew Allison, CEO and founder of Libation Labs. “Good sustainability practices allow you to not only increase the bottom line, but also increase the top line by giving you a better product. You can see the direct result in the fruit of how well you treat the country and your sustainability practices in general.”

Allison’s company, Cuvée Collective, launches a wine NFT member club at the end of July, and takes a traditional, luxury product into the very modern digital space. But why marry wine and NFTs when a large part of the conversation around blockchain is the dubious environmental impact? The energy-intensive process of blockchain transactions and cryptocurrency mining generates an extraordinary amount of carbon dioxide. By 2020, Bitcoin mining in the United States alone produced nearly 40 billion pounds of carbon dioxide. But Allison tackles the reputation challenge head on by building a sustainability strategy into Cuvée Collective’s mission and NFT design from the start.

“We make wine NFT collections for iconic wine brands and collectibles from Napa and the Sonoma Valleys,” says Allison. “For them, sustainability is a core value. We want to make a positive contribution to the wine country, and ensure that family-owned companies can stay for several generations to come. We need to take the same level of effort and thought around the environmental impact. “

His team is working with Kevin Wilheim, CEO of Sustainable Business Consulting, to develop and create an action plan. The key concern: choosing which blockchain to build the Cuvée Collective business on. After a search for a company that assesses and reduces its carbon emissions, they eventually entered into a partnership with Flow Blockchain by Dapper Labs.

Less energy than a Google search

Cuvée Collective offers a tool NFT, where members get access to experiences in the Napa Valley: access to private wine allocation, tailored visits to partner wineries, curated events and so on. A review of Deloitte’s energy consumption found that on the Flow blockchain, mining each of these luxury NFTs uses less energy than a Google search or an Instagram post. This is because Flow ensures the validity of its transactions with the proof of stake model, which requires significantly less energy and is less carbon intensive than the proof of work model, such as blockchains that Bitcoin uses. Proof of work is a consensus mechanism that asks users to validate cryptocurrency transactions by tackling a complex mathematical problem. Cryptomines throw a huge amount of computing power into mining, so the carbon footprint of proof of work is huge and increasing.

Evidence of effort, on the other hand, is basically automated. Miners buy into a chance to be selected as the validator of the next currency block, and are rewarded with transaction fees from the block if their efforts are chosen, in a random sample.

In addition, Flow’s unique network architecture is also more efficient. Due to this, the total energy consumption will not increase significantly, even if the activity increases by 100 times or more – which means that the energy footprint per transaction decreases over time.

“It’s important for Cuvée Collective to work with a blockchain that has assessed sustainability first,” says Allison. “It is crucial for the overall winemaking partnerships that we bring the best Web3 sustainability plan to the table, to ensure that we match the winemaking’s sustainability plans in their vineyards and on their vineyards.”

Connects the old world and the new

Sustainability was the key in their choice, but several other things stood out when they contacted Dapper Labs, the owners of Flow, says Allison. For example, ease of use in a notoriously high-tech area is important. They saw that in the company’s NFT project, NBA Top Shot. Dapper Labs designed it to be easily accessible to people who were completely new to cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Sports fans do not need to know anything about blockchain or crypto investments to use the marketplace.

The parallels there to the general wine consumer audience vote for Allison. “I do not think that the wine consumer in general is likely in Web3 today – it is still relatively small compared to all the people in the world who use wine,” he says. “Flow blockchain is going to be the easiest, safest and most sustainable place for us to bring in new consumers in Web3 who are not there today.”

The ease of ramping up is another way of addressing the education curve that many winery owners face – the unfamiliarity with Web3 that is common to the industry. The opportunity feels incredibly new for wine brand owners – and especially exciting as a way to reach a younger demographic.

Wine clubs, especially for more established brands, are aging. Reaching the part of Gen Z that has come of age, or wealthy millennials, is something they still have not cracked in scale. But with a curated NFT collection, they not only get a source of increased revenue, but also a direct to consumer channel for the demographics that they are struggling to reach, or have not yet reached.

“They are excited to collaborate on a new initiative that packs unique opportunities in a way that their current customers will understand and new consumers can discover,” says Allison. “And being able to talk about sustainability, and the choices we have made around sustainability, is very important for these conversations.”

Gen Z and millennials are particularly aware of how the brands they interact with affect the environment – and they use their purchasing power as part of their commitment to these values. They want to support companies that put their money where their summary is.

Looking forward

The ultimate goal, says Allison, is to become a carbon-negative business. The company will start generating revenue in the third quarter, with the pre-sale registration ending on July 15 and the launch scheduled for the end of the month, and from there the goal is to start investing in the carbon compensation that they aim to have as a key foundation of the business. .

“From an ambition perspective, we hope to be the place that brings the wine industry into Web3, even though we believe there is a lot of education and evangelism that needs to be done,” says Allison. “We have to get rid of the assumption that people do not care about sustainability, because total sustainability actually increases business. Sustainability elevates all aspects of your business. ”

For more information, visit www.cuveecollective.com.

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