Tokenizing Fine Wine: An Exclusive Interview with Savea’s Sam Mudie

Founded in 2022 in London, Savea uses blockchain technology to renew the process of wine investment. The company’s main product is the SAVW token, designed to track the Liv-ex 1000 index, comprised of 1,000 of the world’s most sought-after wines. Sam Mudie, Savea’s founder and CEO, walked us through the details of tokenized wine investing, how it works, what it offers, and what Savea does in the industry. 

Tokenization Is a Feature, Not the Product: Sam Mudie Notes 

An extensive background in alternative investments and business development eventually led Mudie to found Savea. Since November 2024, he has also served as a Board Member of the Tokenized Commodities Council of New York, USA. Mudie’s experience includes various roles at Cult Wines, ranging from Senior Portfolio Manager to Director of Southeast Asia. In his LinkedIn bio, the Savea founder states that he believes the next decade belongs to companies that build trust rather than hype.

We asked Sam about his experience at Cult Wines and the mistakes he believes wealthy investors make.

GNcrypto: You managed $360 million in wine assets at Cult Wines. What’s the most expensive mistake you’ve seen wealthy collectors make that tokenization could have prevented? 

Sam Mudie: Tokenization is infrastructure. It enables index-like investment structures that lower entry costs, improve liquidity, reduce fees, and remove human bottlenecks. Instead of leading with emotion (like buying wines you love to drink), tokenization supports disciplined, scalable, data-led exposure.

It’s important to acknowledge that tokenization is not a silver bullet that, by itself, completely removes a single, major inefficiency from the legacy system. Tokenization is just the process of converting rights in a physical or traditional asset (debt, shares, property, art) into a unique digital token recorded on a distributed ledger. In the case of ‘tokenizing wine’ it means creating a digital twin for each bottle or case. This digital twin (usually an NFT) can include as much or as little data about the physical wine as preferred – production, provenance, or just basic information on the wine – but crucially, and not accomplished by most ‘tokenized wine’ projects, it must have embedded and enforceable legal rights over the physical wine.

It’s what you do next with the tokenized wine that makes the difference. Another way of saying this would be, ‘tokenization is a feature, not the product’. Instead of trying to sell individual tokenized wines, which just adds a layer of complexity to the process, use the tokens to structure scalable investment products, in the same way ETFs did for equities 30 years ago. Creating an ETF-like structure on a blockchain, backed by tokenized wine, means vastly improved scalability, cost efficiency, security, and liquidity.

Emotions Over Logic: The Pitfalls of Passion-Driven Wine Investing 

Mudie explains that nearly all investors, if left to their own devices, tend to pick wines they love to drink. But following their emotions instead of logic often leads to poor investment returns. He shared a story that paints the picture clearly.

“An investor came to me for help, whose £1m+ portfolio consisted of 80% Egon Müller, a German Riesling producer, with some individual bottles worth as much as £20k. Loving the wine himself and knowing that they were constantly ranked among the best wines in the world, he assumed that they would automatically make a good investment. He did not know until 20 years down the line that there was no secondary market for these wines, and the merchant he’d bought them from would not be able to sell them. On paper, worth £1m, in practice, maybe £500k.” 

According to Mudie, although tokenization alone wouldn’t have solved this problem, if the client had invested in a wine ETF backed by tokenized wine, he would have earned a reasonable average return of 8% per annum and been able to efficiently realize his gains.

Mudie compares the investment market before tokenization with the new possibilities, saying the technology reduces many inefficiencies in the legacy system.

• Before, a sufficiently diversified wine investment needed £50,000; now, we offer it from £100.
• Before, onboarding was done manually via a relationship manager within office hours, taking weeks; now, it’s automated and can be done 24/7, taking 15 minutes.
• Before, annual fees were ~3% and exit fees were 10%; now, they’re 1.5% and 2.5%.
• Before, wine investing had to be actively managed portfolios, with 70-80% underperforming the market; now, we have the world’s first index-tracking, passive product.
• Before, liquidity was totally uncertain – 6-12+ months, haircut from 5-15%; now, liquidity is available via Savea, or across the whole crypto ecosystem.
• Before, wine investment was unregulated; now, we have consent to issue SAVW and publish our 50-page offer document under the JFSC.
• Before, security was reliant on trust; now, all assets and transactions are verifiable on-chain.
• Before, trading only occurred in local office hours; now, 24/7/365 and borderless.
• Before, you could only drink your investment or sell it for fiat; now, you can exchange it directly for any digital asset across the $3.5tn crypto market (stablecoins, cryptos, any of the tokenized RWAs I mentioned above), peer to peer or via exchanges.
• Before, ultra-high-net-worth individuals and Family Offices could not efficiently invest in wine; now, they can get economic exposure as easily as exchanging GBP for USD.

Investing in SAVW vs Physical Wine Collections

The SAVW token, launched in July 2025, offers investors exposure to the global wine market. It’s backed by physical wine stored in warehouses and verified on the blockchain.

We wanted to understand Savea’s vision for investors and when they might prefer investing in SAVW over traditional wine collections.

GNcrypto: Why would an ultra-high-net-worth individual invest in SAVW over a managed collection of physical wines?

Sam Mudie: It really depends on what their objectives are. If they want to build a unique collection with the finest and rarest wines in the world, for passion, pride and pleasure, then they should do so through a few trusted relationships with wine merchants.

But this model is:

• Not scalable: it would take over a year to build up a well-curated collection of over £1m, with a concerted effort.
• Expensive: expect to pay 2-3% annual fees, and 5-10% fees to sell. A lot of manpower is required for sourcing, transporting and managing the wines, and a lot of manual, time-consuming processes.
• Unlikely to outperform the wider market in the long term: as with the stock market, actively managed portfolios underperform passive index trackers most of the time.
• Not liquid (excuse the pun): the rarer and more expensive the wine, the smaller the secondary market is. The investor will also normally be limited to trying to sell those wines through the merchant they bought from or store with.
• Not THAT safe: most of even the ‘top’ merchants do not truly segregate their clients’ stock from their own in storage. In the event of damage/loss of the wines, or liquidation of the company, it’s extremely difficult to say who owns what.
• Not regulated: caveat emptor.

On the other hand, if their objective is to get the most cost-efficient, secure and liquid exposure to wine as an asset class, without the bells and whistles, then Savea’s SAVW is it.

Also, why should investing in wine be reserved for billionaires or even millionaires? There are ~150 billionaires in the UK and 3 million millionaires – less than 3% of the adult population. The other 97% can invest in SAVW from as little as £100 and get the same returns, security, protection and exit strategy.

Tokenization: Not a Threat but a Tool for Traditional Companies, Says Mudie

GNcrypto: Traditional wine brokers, auction houses, and storage companies may see tokenization as a shift in their role. How do you see modern and traditional industries working together and coexisting in this reality?  

Sam Mudie: Tokenization is just a piece of technology. Like an Excel spreadsheet or the internet, some companies will adopt and evolve; others will not and will become obsolete. It shouldn’t be seen as a threat, but a tool.

Traditional players are already adopting it where it adds value, but they can’t build the infrastructure themselves. Savea bridges that gap by enabling institutions to offer tokenized products without reinventing their core. Traditional wine merchants are already trying to sell tokenized wines. Christie’s and Sotheby’s have already invested millions into their tokenized infrastructure. We’ve built the layer for storage companies to incorporate tokenization – and management of digital assets – natively. Winemakers are exploring using blockchain for securing data. The supply chain is using it for provenance and improving processes.

What we do is bring fine wine to a new customer demographic: the tech-savvy, next generation. This is the profile that the traditional wine industry is struggling to understand and engage with the most.

All Fine Wine Will Eventually Be Tokenized, Mudie Predicts

GNcrypto: How do you see traction in this space evolving over time? What do you think the biggest hurdles for existing wine collectors will be as you scale?  

Sam Mudie: Collectors and investors have different goals, and trying to serve both often leads to underperformance. Savea is designed for investors: delivering passive, index-like exposure to the fine wine market using the same tokenization trend transforming bonds, credit, and real estate.

Investing in wine for capital growth and collecting it for pure pleasure are different objectives, calling for different strategies. Traditional service providers try to do both at the same time and end up doing neither as well as they could.

Existing buyers should decide, are they investors or are they collectors? If an investor, it might help take stop thinking of it as wine. Treat it like you would your share portfolio, looking for the most user-friendly experience, that generates you the best net returns, safely.

Tokenization is happening across the board with traditional assets, from private credit and treasury bonds, to shares, ETFs and gold. It’s not a competitor; it’s just a much more efficient way of doing it. The same can be said for the tokenization of wine. Eventually, all fine wine will be tokenized at source, because it improves every step of the supply chain. The hurdle right now, is implementing the technology in a way that does not require customers to change their existing habits.

Tokenization Doesn’t Create Liquidity – Smart Structuring Does

GNcrypto: How does tokenization deliver on the promise to create ‘instant liquidity’ for wine assets? Say I need to sell $100K of SAVW tokens tomorrow during a market correction, who’s actually buying them?

Sam Mudie: Tokenization alone doesn’t create liquidity; the structuring matters. By tracking the broad Liv-ex 1000 index and enabling 24/7 peer-to-peer and exchange-based redemption, SAVW makes wine exposure as tradable as currency. No more waiting 6–12 months to cash out 150 cases.

Again, it’s vital here to clarify that tokenization itself does not improve liquidity. Tokenization just means creating a digital asset that has legally recognized rights to the physical asset. But by using these digital assets as reserves to a tokenized ETF-style product, you change what the definition of liquidity actually is.

If you had £100k of wine invested in the traditional method, you might own 50+ unique wines, maybe 150 cases in total. When you want to get your cash out, your merchant’s trade sales team has to manually sell those 150 cases for you, and some of those wines will be very hard to sell quickly. That’s potentially 150 different transactions, to 150 different buyers and you’re limited to the capacity of that sales team, who are trying to do the same for 100 other clients – and 15,000 other cases – at the same time. And they’re limited to office hours. Some will sell quickly but the whole process will take up to 12 months.

SAVW tracks the Liv-ex 1000 so represents ‘the wine market’ in a broad sense, and the technology of the token means its fully interoperable and exchangeable with the rest of the financial ecosystem, 24/7/365 and without borders.

Instead of needing investors specifically for your cases of Lafite 2010, Sassicaia 2014, Armand Rousseau 2008 and Screaming Eagle 2019, you just need investors ‘in the wine market’, which is a much larger segment.

Instead of being restricted to selling through the merchant you bought from – and the numerous limitations that comes with – SAVW tokens can be redeemed directly with Savea, or with exchanges and trading platforms, or even peer-to-peer, from one side of the planet to the other, in the time it takes to send an email.

Effectively, it makes buying and selling exposure to the wine market as easy as exchanging currencies.

How Reliable Is Savea’s Infrastructure

To tokenize real-world assets, Savea uses DESAT (Decentralized Storage & Asset Tokenization). This Ethereum-based network provides physical storage solutions along with asset digitization via NFTs. Circle’s USDC stablecoin is used within the Savea ecosystem for payments. Savea also complies with UK and EU regulatory frameworks and is authorized to issue tokens under the Jersey Financial Services Commission (JFSC). Despite these strong fundamentals, all investments carry risks. We asked Mudie about Savea’s strategies and contingency plans in the event of a partner failure.

GNcrypto: DESAT handles your physical storage, Ethereum handles the blockchain, Circle provides stablecoin rails. If any of these partners fails or gets regulated out of business, what’s your backup plan?

Sam Mudie: We’re not reliant on any single partner. Storage can be migrated, tokenization can be brought in-house, Ethereum is decentralized like the internet (not a company), and stablecoin rails can be switched at the protocol level. USDC itself is fully backed, ringfenced, and now protected under new U.S. legislation.

Our tech infrastructure is designed to be not dependant on any one partner, regardless of the service they provide.

• Storage is actually provided by London City Bond (LCB) with DESAT as the account holders, acting as custodians for, and tokenizers of, the wine. If LCB ceased to be the most attractive company for warehousing, there are other options.

• If DESAT stopped providing tokenization and custody services, we already have the tech designed for inhouse tokenization – we were the development partners for DESAT so it’s been designed around us – and a contingency plan for long-term custody.

• Ethereum isn’t a company that can be shut down; it’s more like the internet itself. No single firm owns or operates it. ~10,000 independent computers (called nodes) keep identical copies of the ledger, validating every transaction. If one node, or even a couple of thousand, switch off, the rest keep running – in the same way emails keep flowing even if one server goes offline. Since launching in 2015, Ethereum has settled trillions of dollars in value and gone through major upgrades, without a single day of unplanned downtime. This is why BlackRock Visa and almost all other major financial institutions use this infrastructure. Also, regulators focus on gateways, not the protocol, i.e., they regulate ‘things’ built on the Ethereum network, in the same way they regulate ‘things’ built on the internet, but don’t regulate the network/internet itself. That being said, if somehow the Ethereum network did fail, or get regulated out of business, there are other developer networks that support smart contracts where our code could be migrated to.

• Circle does two main things for us:

• 1 — acts like a bank account that can hold and convert fiat & USDC at favourable rates. We have multiple other rails already set up in all of our operating jurisdictions to switch to in the event of a Circle ‘failure’.

• 2 — mints/issues the stablecoin USDC, which is how our users buy SAVW. Users can already transact with fiat, or other ‘tokens’ such as USDT or Ethereum. It’s just a click of a button to say what currencies we can accept. But to explain a bit why USDC – it’s extremely hard for USDC to fail or be banned: it’s regulated like a payments firm (supervised more like a bank); it’s fully backed by cash & T-bills, held in segregated and audited accounts; it’s protected by new U.S. legislation (GENIUS and CLARITY acts were passed in July); and reserves are ringfenced (even if Circle fails, the funds backing USDC are legally separated and claimable).

Sam Mudie on the Future of Tokenization

GNcrypto: If by 2030 traditional auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s launch their own tokenization platforms, does that validate your model or threaten your market position? How do you see the future of the sector and the competition between different markets and product types? 

Sam Mudie: It’s not ‘them vs us’; it’s ‘them with us.’ These institutions can’t build token infrastructure themselves, so they’ll plug into, partner with, or acquire those who can. We’re building the layer they’ll need, and their investments into blockchain only validate our direction.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s don’t run fully vertically integrated infrastructure – not even close. They focus on what they do best (ownership, provenance, trade) and plug into trusted third-party rails everywhere else. That being said, both auction houses are already investing a lot in tokenization (or blockchain more broadly), directly or indirectly. Sotheby’s launched its Metaverse as a curated NFT marketplace and piloted a ‘digital twin’ project in 2021. Christie’s has a Venture arm which has invested directly in companies building different pieces of the wider Web3/tokenization puzzle: LayerZero, Conserv, LUXUS, Manifold, among others.

This is 100% validation of the underlying technology and 0% threat to our market position. It signals that the old guard recognizes the shift. But they’re not structured to build it themselves. These are vast, operationally complex institutions with decades of legacy tech and process. Internally led innovation on this scale isn’t just difficult, it’s structurally near-impossible. Just like big banks didn’t build their own blockchain rails, they’ll turn to specialists who can do it better, faster, and with deep domain expertise. That’s where Savea fits in. They’ll either plug in to what we’ve built, use it as their tokenization layer, or, eventually, acquire some or all of it. That’s the usual path when a specialist solves something the generalist can’t.