In the mood for wine: The Business of Wine
Sep 3, 2026 · 38 min · 10 segments
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Four years ago, you founded Devon Labs.
Can you explain to us exactly what you do there? Yeah.
I, because of my tech background and because I'm friends with a lot of winemakers back in 2020, 2021, a lot of my winemaker friends started getting proposals from blockchain companies and they would call me and say, you're a tech guy.
Can you tell me what this is? And I didn't know, I didn't know anything about blockchain.
I knew a little bit about crypto, but I didn't really know very much about blockchain.
But enough people were interested that I started a What was really just a working group.
Once a month, we would get a bunch of winemakers on and other wine industry professionals.
And then I would try to find a guest that could talk intelligently about blockchain and how it could be interesting for the wine industry.
And that working group went for more than about a year and a half until probably the end of 2021.
And then we can go around the circle and everyone can tokenize some wine and sell it to the rest of us.
And that way we can see internally how it works without having to trust some third party.
And so we started off with an NFT wine club that was mostly winemakers in the beginning and is now like 1,200, 1,500 people around the world.
One of the winemakers would say, okay, let's tokenize three cases from my library.
And then we would just do that and test it out, see how it worked, learn how the tech worked.
And it started off as a working group and then became a NFT club and then became like a garage project.
Because what we learned over time was that while there were a lot of individual blockchain projects, they weren't solving the big problem.
Four years ago, you founded Devon Labs.
Can you explain to us exactly what you do there? Yeah.
I, because of my tech background and because I'm friends with a lot of winemakers back in 2020, 2021, a lot of my winemaker friends started getting proposals from blockchain companies and they would call me and say, you're a tech guy.
Can you tell me what this is? And I didn't know, I didn't know anything about blockchain.
I knew a little bit about crypto, but I didn't really know very much about blockchain.
But enough people were interested that I started a What was really just a working group.
Once a month, we would get a bunch of winemakers on and other wine industry professionals.
And then I would try to find a guest that could talk intelligently about blockchain and how it could be interesting for the wine industry.
And that working group went for more than about a year and a half until probably the end of 2021.
And then we can go around the circle and everyone can tokenize some wine and sell it to the rest of us.
And that way we can see internally how it works without having to trust some third party.
And so we started off with an NFT wine club that was mostly winemakers in the beginning and is now like 1,200, 1,500 people around the world.
One of the winemakers would say, okay, let's tokenize three cases from my library.
And then we would just do that and test it out, see how it worked, learn how the tech worked.
And it started off as a working group and then became a NFT club and then became like a garage project.
Because what we learned over time was that while there were a lot of individual blockchain projects, they weren't solving the big problem.
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