Bordeaux Index’s LiveTrade platform was already the busiest trading venue in the fine wine market – and now it’s expanded to cover just about every wine – and whisky – you can name. Richard Woodard finds out more. Tried and trusted as it may be, the traditional method of trading wines on the secondary market – via merchants and brokers – comes with inherent limitations. “The majority of people sell to the company that they store their wines with,” says Matthew O’Connell, CEO of Bordeaux Index’s Livetrade platform. “And, if they sell elsewhere, they are normally asked to move the wine before it can be listed for sale.” LiveTrade aims to cut through the restrictions of that narrow and outdated trading model. Rather than selling on a smaller scale – say via a UK merchant to its core audience of UK collectors – the now expanded platform opens up wine trading to a global B2B and B2C audience. The model will be familiar to those who have already used the original LiveTrade platform. That spanned about 1,000 wines from Bordeaux, Champagne and Tuscany, with Bordeaux Index injecting liquidity by ‘making the market’, and showing buy and sell pricing on each and every wine, 24/7. Crucially, this was a ‘pan-market’ platform, open to everyone, everywhere – from producers to wholesalers and retail merchants, as well as private collectors and investors large and small. Nor did the wines have to be stored with Bordeaux Index; as long as they were in bond
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Fine Wine
