Cru World Wine celebrates its 10th Anniversary in July 2023.

Cru World Wine was conceived in 2013 when two fine wine collectors met by chance and discovered a shared frustration.

Jeremy Howard (former investment banker) and Simon Farr (industry veteran and serial wine entrepreneur) resolved to fix the three major problems they faced managing their fine wine portfolios: i) accessing all the best products from just one place, ii) the lack of secondary market liquidity and iii) the absence of decent portfolio management tools.

After ten years of intensive development Cru World Wine now provides:

- 25,000+ of the best fine wines & spirits available for (guaranteed) purchase, across six webstores;

- the world’s most advanced secondary trading platform (Cru Markets), boasting 3,700 two-way trading markets and US$35 million of bid and offer liquidity; and

- a range of portfolio management tools on a par with financial services platforms.

We are resolving the serious challenges which have plagued fine wine & spirits for decades; and top collectors are responding.

Our client base has swelled to almost 40,000. Our revenues have risen much faster than comparable companies (since 2013).

Our portfolio management service has grown to over US$140 million in custody across facilities on three continents.

Every day more collectors move inventory to Cru, taking advantage of our low storage rates, low selling commission, deep liquidity pool, and state-of-the-art portfolio management tools.

Technology can deliver services, but only values deliver lasting success. Our guiding principles are not those of the traditional ‘merchant’. We believe that:

- clients should come first, at all times;

- democratization and empowerment are key;

- ease of use, with no minimum spend and no membership fees, are critical.

We are not a shadowy ‘investment company’. Trust, security, and visibility are critically important to us.

On Cru, inventory is held in third-party warehouses, labelled with independent and individually assigned case or bottle identification numbers. Our clients always know what they own, where it is, what condition it is in, and they are in full control at all times.

Our emphasis on technology does not come at the expense of human support, however. Far from it. All our clients, regardless of size, are assigned a dedicated account manager trained to advise on all aspects of fine wine & spirits ownership.

The past decade has been any amazing journey, but our mission isn’t complete.

Version 2.0 of our Mobile App is about to launch, bringing all our desktop innovation to the mobile for the first time. It will, we feel sure, be the world’s most advanced app for buying, selling, and managing fine wine & spirits.

We will continue to expand to new locations, giving our internationally mobile clients a ‘local’ service in more and more financial centres.
The very best wines & spirits have become completely inaccessible to financial mortals, we are looking at whether secure fractionalization could democratize their ownership once again.

Fine wine & spirits indices are not fit for purpose. But these are increasingly important as long-term fine wine & spirits ownership expands and more people wake up the possibilities of this product as an alternative asset class.

In short, the infrastructure supporting fine wine & spirits ownership is still not fit for purpose. And so our work must continue.

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