Full transcript: Louis de Bonnecaze on London Real
3:17 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Louis de Bonnecaze, the entrepreneur, blockchain innovator and wine merchants. You have become one of France’s leading voices in the world of wine and spirits by blending industry expertise with digital innovation. You are the CEO and Co Founder of Interstellar, A next generation Web 3 marketplace designed for the acquisition and exchange of exclusive bottles of wines and spirits. Interstellar offers wineries and luxury brands the opportunity to share their rich history and products with a younger digital native audience while building direct relationships with consumers.
4:07 You believe block chain technology is a game changer for the wine and spirits industry, allowing brands to regain visibility, improve their supply chain and guarantee the authenticity of their products. Your goal is to become the first Web 3 Unicorn in the wine and spirits sector by transforming this age-old industry into a digitally empowered ecosystem. Louis, welcome to London Real.
4:30 Louis de Bonnecaze: Hello, Brian.
4:30 Brian Rose: Great to have you here. I want to start by saying that Interstellar is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media powered investment firm, where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting edge Web 3 and AI companies while giving our partners media exposure and marketing across all of our academies. We heighten awareness, create customers and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network. Louis, we are super excited to be part of this journey with you.
5:02 So let’s jump in. What is Interstellar?
5:05 Louis de Bonnecaze: Thank you for the introduction and I’m. Yeah, I’m very glad to be here. Thank you for inviting us and for your trust. So as you said, Interstellar is the platform that is revolutionising a century old market that everyone knows, the wine and spirit market.
5:27 And it’s not only like a century old market, it’s also a global and a huge market in by 2031, it will be like a €400 billion market. So it’s like in France, for example, it’s the second biggest export market after aeronautics. But this market is struggling. I mean, when I’m travelling around the world because it’s my job and it used to, it used to be my job for 10 years as a wine merchant. I’m just talking with the wineries, with the brands and they’re always saying like we are in a crisis, we don’t know how to reach a new generation. And they have like 3 main and three major issues in their industry, the storage because wine and spirits take takes place, the traceability because there are a counter phase, counter phase in this in this industry. And the liquidity because wine, for example, is an alternative asset and is it’s called the red gold. And with Interstellar, we are simply solving those issues by creating digital twins of the bottles. So it’s in a way we embody the real world asset tokenization because everyone is talking about real world asset tokenization.
6:49 But there is no, there are no like tangible in use case because there are like some RWLA project in the finance for example, but not for tangible things. And this is what Intraclr is doing and the platform is running very well. And that’s why the best wineries and brands in the world are trusting us. So we already onboarding, onboarding, onboarding the like hundreds of wineries to gather them with the the 10,000 customers. And as you said, our goal, our goal is to became the first Unicorn in the wine and spirit industry. And it has to be a French company because the three or two biggest company in the world for wine and spirits are French. We have the best wines like Bordeaux, Burgundy, some of the best spirits also like cognac and also Champagne. So yeah, this is our ambition and I’m very glad to be here to talk about it with you and to talk about Interstellar, the background and how we are going to revolutionise the wine and spirit industry.
7:56 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s such an exciting prospect because there’s so much history and tradition, you know, in France when it comes to wines and you’re world renowned for these brands. And like you said, even some of the spirits, you know, people all over the world in China and these places, you know, they seek out these amazing pieces. But on the flip side, you know, it’s an industry that a lot of times hasn’t innovative much in a couple 100 years and let alone understood digital marketing, let alone understood Web 3. And so they struggle with a lot of these issues. You said the three biggest ones, what you said, storage, authenticity and liquidity, those are powerful. And also, they don’t know how to reach those, those new, new buyers because I guess every year your older customers die. You have to get younger people to take their place. And if they grew up on, you know, Bacardi spritzers or something, how are they going to learn about wines? And there is that trend like of to quit drinking, like quit smoking.
8:59 Louis de Bonnecaze: But smoking is not the same because there is no like this culture about smoking. I’m not talking about cigars, I’m talking about cigarettes. But for the one, it’s kind of the same. Sometimes people said, oh, you have to drink less, which is a good point, but our motto is like you have to drink less, but to drink better. And it’s not only about drinking some alcohol.
9:17 We were talking about this a little bit before, but it’s more like culture about a moment that you are sharing, sharing with someone else. I like to say that wine is the social lubricant, so it will help you in a way. I’m not making the promotion of alcohol, but it’s like the global moment. You’re sharing something. You can do business, you can do friendship.
9:40 You know, wine and spirits, if you see the movies, they’re always like for love, women in love or men in love. Like in James Bond. There is always in seduction a shoot, like a bottle of champagne, a vodka martini or something. In the friendship it’s also the case and in the business you share a bottle and then you make some business. This is how I’m doing business.
10:02 Brian Rose: Right, right. Very traditional in that sense. And you did, you said this before because I said, look, I stopped drinking seven years ago. And you said wine is not drinking, right. It’s like, it’s like accentuating an occasion.
10:14 And I think the French do it much better than the British do for sure. Where, you know, the wine can be drank in small amounts and paired with food and always for a certain occasion. You know you have your white wine sometimes, your red wine, your spirits, your Champagne, all for different times, different places, different foods, different occasions.
10:36 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, but I don’t agree with you because English are very mature in terms of in terms of market. When you are dealing with wines, you have to categorise your markets. There are some metro markets like Japan, like England, UK is metro markets.
10:51 You know how to do pairings, you know the wine, you know the prices. And there are like new markets like China. China used to be like 10 years ago. It’s evolving now. But yes, there are different kind of seeing the wine first you see, you see it as as a like a social marker.
11:06 So you buy the big labels you want to show to your friends that you are someone. So it’s also something to show a flex tool in a way that Chinese are using a lot. But after that, it becomes something else, like, yeah, sharing moments. Oh, you are going to discover this wine that you don’t know and there is a story behind. So it’s. Yeah, something like a way.
11:30 Brian Rose: Yeah, there is a way to drink wine and to appreciate it. Yeah. And again, I used to drink wine and collect wine and I went down the rabbit hole and I would travel to Europe and go to the vineyards and meet people and learn how it was made. I mean, it’s, it’s fascinating. You don’t have to drink it. You can speak the wine.
11:45 Louis de Bonnecaze: This is something that I’m doing because, you know, as a wine merchant, I’m tasting a lot of wines, especially in, in, in April. There is like what we call on primer. You have all the professional of the wine industry that are coming to Bordeaux, where I’m living and where the company Interstellar is based. It’s important because we are in France and you can taste like hundreds of wine per day. So you have to spit, of course, and you can feel the aromas. You can, yeah, just feel the vineyard. Yeah.
12:12 Brian Rose: And experience the the wine in in another way. But of course, at the end, normally it has to be drunk, right? But you can spit it and still get a lot of great enjoyment that. And so you just said something interesting. This company, in your opinion, has to be based in France and he more specifically has to be based in Bordeaux and has to be headed by a Frenchman. Tell me why that’s important.
12:34 Why can’t this be done by some tech geek in Ohio who bought, you know, some ETH back in 2016 and wants to put it on chain? I’m sure that’s attempt and attempted. Before.
12:44 Louis de Bonnecaze: No, no, no, yeah, yeah, of course. So it has to be in France.
12:48 But that wasn’t, that was not the case before, because for example, if you’re asking me, which is the, the biggest place for wine trading, this is not France. This is here. London is one of the biggest place with Hong Kong, of course, and France in a way. But the wine industry, the, the, the big platform, the big hub, hub is more in London. So that’s why I’m saying that, OK, we’re not going to miss this revolution.
13:13 And yeah, that company has to be in France because as I introduced, we have the best wine in the world. Of course there are some amazing wines in the Napa Valley in in the US, in Italy, of course in Spain, even in China, they have some good terroir. But yeah, it needs to be in France because we are in the Earth of the, the biggest appellation, big names, all the, you know, all the, the big Chateau are owned by Frenchmen or French big companies in the luxury industry like LVMH. We are working with them like caring also they own all the these Chateau.
13:52 So it’s, it’s not only like a standard product, it’s a part of French culture. And then we are very proud of it.
13:59 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about one of these problems with his authenticity. I read something somewhere that said if you take a bottle of Petrus, which I guess is one of the fine premier crew, maybe you can tell me exactly. You said in China, 60 to 70% of those bottles are fake.
14:16 I think you said in an interview one time. And I was like, wow, is it really that high? Is this really such an issue? Can you talk to me about counterfeit wine? And you know how you’re going to solve that problem, whether you’re a collector or a consumer, because it’s big business, right?
14:32 Brian Rose: These are these are expensive bottles of wine. And if you can copy those, then you can probably make a lot of money.
14:39 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, I think it’s natural when you have a high value product that is copied. I mean, it’s the same for watches, it’s the same for all other luxury products. And yeah, for the wine industry, when you are talking about like Petrius or a Hominicon tea, it’s like a €10,000 bottles, of course they are fakes.
14:57 And yeah, in general, globally, it’s like 30% of these big bottles that are fake in the world. And if you take the example of China, it’s around 60 to 70%. And there was like a lot of, you know, there, there, there, there was that guy Rudy Konerwan. It was the, the, the biggest faker wine faker. I don’t know if you can say faker. He faked wines.
15:20 He was like a, a €35 million scam. And he was in a way smart because he was using like some good wines. He was buying some empty bottles on the secondary market, filling them with some good wines because, you know, to make the difference between A5 euro bottle and a €100 bottle is very easy. But between a €100 bottle and 1010 thousand, it’s not so easy because it’s more about scarcity, about sometimes marketing. And yeah, he, he, he may like this big scam. So there are some issues and how with Interstellar we are solving this problem is very simple.
16:04 First, we are putting in in contact. We put in contact the wineries or the brands, the whiskey brands directly to the consumers, which is something very new because in this in this industry, there are a lot of intermediaries. There are some counter example, for example, if you go to Louis Vuitton, if you go to Bentley, if you go to Rolex, you are in direct contact with the winery, with the brand. Sorry, in the winery, in the wine, this is not the case. So we gather the customer and the winery 1st and then we create digital twins.
16:38 So every bottle of wine, I can now explain exactly how it’s working. You go on the platform and then you buy a bottle like on any other website. And then you have a digital twin of the bottle on your smartphone or on, on your, on your laptop and the physical bottle remain at the same place in like a big fork knocks of the wine and, and then it’s not moving. You can trade, you can exchange the the the digital twin. It’s an NFT and every bottle is backed by a physical asset. So we linked them to fight against a counterfeit. So when you buy a wine from Interstellar, you are 100% sure that it’s a real 1 and that’s it was stored properly, which is the second biggest issue.
17:25 Brian Rose: Yeah. Now you gave a demo of the site when when you had your call with our group and it was impressive. First of all, it’s very cool. You have these three-dimensional wine bottles that are spinning around and you can get a vibe for what it’s like. But that digital twin is interesting for a variety of reasons.
17:39 We can talk about it later, but it also means I can show off My Portfolio. I can flex it. Maybe I just want to look at it at home on a Friday night when I’m alone. I just want to look at My Portfolio. But like I said, that Digital Twin can follow me around and I always know that it’s being stored securely somewhere else. And whether I see it in 10 years or not, whether I trade it with someone else, that is, is something brand new that you’re bringing to the space.
18:03 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s on the blockchain. So there’s, there’s what we call provenance, right? And you can really prove that history. And that’s really powerful.
18:12 Louis de Bonnecaze: This is exactly the term provenance. It’s like, you know, it’s like for Pokémon cards when they are under a blister, they have more value. So when you are sure that you and, and the Pokémon card, they are less fragile than wine because you know wine, they are like some temperature, some humidity control that you have to to manage.
18:29 And when you do it at home, it’s not so easy. So we take part of all the storage part and if you want, of course to drink the bottle, you claim the bottle on the platform. But if you decide to transfer to resale because wine is an end spirit or kind of an investment, you can do it also and both will remain at the same place.
18:48 Brian Rose: That’s amazing. And I think you said if you look at one of these premier crew wineries, a lot of times it’s traded 6 and seven times before it’s actually drank.
18:58 And I’m guessing the higher end, maybe it’s even longer because sometimes it’s ten, 20-30 years even.
19:05 Louis de Bonnecaze: Even more, Even more. Yeah, it depends on the wine. But you know, at that point, I can tell you a story about why millionaires are buying wineries. You know, when you are like a millionaire?
19:18 I don’t know. I’m not yet a millionaire. I would like to be one time, but it’s not my main goal. But I know that those kind of people, millionaires are buying like a bar or restaurant to see friends, to share some moments. When you’re a billionaire, it’s something different.
19:32 You buy a winery, a prestigious one, but not only for having your own bottle of wine. It’s also because because you put your background and your history inside a bottle, it’s like a a time caps and it will you, you can, you can live longer with it. So because a bottle of wine, it was the beginning of the discussion can age like for 20-30, 50 or even 100 year and you can drink it after, depends on the wine, but all the wine, the wine that you can find on the platform that we are working with like Mutora Shield.
20:09 Like Chateau, Margot, all these big brands, they they can last like 100 years.
20:13 Brian Rose: Wow. And the storage, do you have locations, different places in the world? Is it in France? Because that’s not an easy thing to do.
20:20 How do you solve that problem?
20:22 Louis de Bonnecaze: So for now we are having like a big warehouse in Bordeaux at the same place so we can keep the, the, the, the storage safe. It’s like, you know, a big fork knocks of the wine. There are like millions and millions of EUR stored in that place. It’s insured, stored in pristine conditions.
20:39 But of course, as we are delivering in more than 40 countries in the road map, of course there will be some new warehouse around the globe on the major markets which are Asia in the US.
20:51 Brian Rose: Right, OK, that’s fantastic is I had a flashback. I used to buy wine and I used to kind of store wine in my house. And I remember 1 summer in England, it got really hot. It was like a 40° and I came back after a holiday and I went and my wine was all warm.
21:08 I remember I could feel it and I thought. Vinegar. Yeah. And so this is a real issue and you never know how that bottle has been stored. So it could be a €10,000 bottle, but if it’s been stored poorly it’s going to be vinegar.
21:20 Louis de Bonnecaze: You can expertise a bottle and say, OK, it’s a real one, but what happened inside you cannot know. And a worm is probably the biggest enemy of the wine. Cold is not so good, but warm and hot weather is not is not good. And the worst is like the difference of temperature. When you have like from cold to hot, the the wine will be will be killed.
21:44 For spirits like whiskey, cognac, it’s not exactly the case. It’s more strong so but it’s kind of the same, but not in the same way.
21:52 Brian Rose: OK. All right, so those are the two issues. The third is liquidity that this is interesting and this is a term it’s more of a Wall Street term, you know of and liquidity. And again, I I have a crypto and defy Academy and I tried to define that term.
22:07 I guess I would define liquidity as how quickly and easily and losslessly you can convert an asset to and maybe something equivalent in value, maybe that is EUR or pounds or dollars and how quickly and, and, and what’s that? Well, crypto or crypto exactly. So why is liquidity important in wine? Because a lot of people don’t even understand that concept. They’re just like, I want to store it, I want to drink it. Why is that important?
22:31 Louis de Bonnecaze: I would not say that it’s only liquidity because it’s also about transmission, because a wine as as I you told on the at the beginning, can be traded like six to seven time before being drunk because it’s like an alternative asset. If you take the, the, the the top 50 best wine in the world, you can have like a return on investment of 6 to 7% a year. So it’s kind of good, a good investment for the spirit. It can be even more like 15% for some of the best Irish whiskey, but it’s also like a pleasure investment.
23:05 And in a way I like to say that it’s a very tricky investment because I think this is the only one that you can consume. You cannot eat a gold bar or another asset so. It’s a coin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So it’s really a different asset, but it’s an asset as it’s like a high value and there are some liquidity, but not so much.
23:28 And what we are doing through the Digital Twin, the NFT is to facilitate this transmission. So of course, you can trade. Liquidity means that I can trade, but you can also offer, I don’t know, to someone else. We have a lot of companies that are offering some wines to their best employees to their customers. And it’s very easier when you just offer like when you transfer an NFT to a wallet and then we on board the, the customer of our customers.
23:57 So it’s like a good way. So liquidity is about how I can easily give my bottle, but not without all the, the, you know, the, the, the constraint like the, the storage. Because when you give a bottle to someone, say, OK, that’s great, but what I’m going to do with it? And even if you have a bottle offered from someone else, like a Petrius, for example, if you want to resell it, how can you do that on eBay or I don’t know, Of course it’s possible, but it’s not easy because in front of you, you will have a buyer that will say, OK, how was it? How was it stored?
24:29 Is it a real 1? So it’s liquidity is linked also to the storage and to the trash ability.
24:34 Brian Rose: OK. And right now it doesn’t really exist in the wine industry. A decent amount of liquidity.
24:39 Louis de Bonnecaze: No, no, no, no, it’s not. It’s not. It’s not the case right now because the market is organised with like a big negotiant and they are dealing in the old fashioned way. So I think that we have one of the perfect use case for real world asset tokenization because we have high value assets, we have an asset that can age with with time. So with the notion of storage and we have also something very easy to market and social media, they have a big place in our business because it’s not, you can do some great wine or spirits because it’s like the, the, the, the terroir or the climate that you have, but you have to to sell it. It’s like a business.
25:26 So you need marketing social media. So it’s like a interstellar is like doing all the same on the same platform.
25:33 Brian Rose: Right. I love this concept of being able to give somebody a bottle of wine without having to go shop for it, buy it, hand it to them. They don’t know what to do.
25:43 They don’t know how to store it. They take it home, they stick it in the closet. But if it’s on, if it’s on the website, they got the digital twin there, they can see it, they can feel it, they can touch it, they can share it on social media. And so I guess that’s my next question. Why Web 3?
25:57 When you looked at this business, why was it such an obvious choice?
26:26 London Real promo: You will never find a more genuine person like Brian. He is so transparent and passionate of bringing wealth to the masses through blockchain technology. Thank you, Brian. It’s a pleasure.
27:46 Louis de Bonnecaze: So I knew that there were some people wealthy in cryptocurrency. And at that time I was in China and one of my importer introduced me like a very rich guy saying, OK, you have to share a moment with him and so on. So we’ve been to the restaurant and I drank my first Petrus with him. So it’s like, I don’t know, in China it could be like €10,000 a bottle. So I don’t have the the, I can’t offer myself those kind of bottles.
28:12 So I was drinking it with him in the Chinese way, like one shot, like drink yeah, Gumby drink it like like this. So. One shot means like you finish the glass each time. The glass, not the bottle, but yeah. The glass.
28:23 So you don’t? Yeah, you don’t Take your time. Yeah, which is like kind of a it’s tricky. But anyway, I said OK, I’m I’m in China. Let. In Rome, do as the Romans do what in China, do as the Chinese do.
28:34 Yeah, we just deserve and. Yeah, OK. Let’s do it. But anyway, and at the end of the of the restaurant, I’ve been to that guy privately saying, OK, what do you do for a living? And he said and I had my ID in my mind because I was buying Bitcoin at the same time.
28:51 And he said I was one of the 1st miners of Bitcoin and that guy was very wealthy. And I was sure of two thing. The 1st is that my investment were a good investment. I still keep my bitcoins right now. And the second thing is that OK, my future consumers are from the, the tech and the, and the web free.
29:11 At that time we were not talking about web free. And that’s why I started my my journey between the wine industry, very old fashioned and the tech. And then I saw all the issues that I can solve with the NFT with everything like this.
29:25 Brian Rose: OK, that fascinating. I love that story. That’s super cool.
29:28 And so you found your niche, which was this younger tech savvy, crypto knowledgeable people and you thought, OK, that’s who I’m going to sell to, That’s who I’m going to focus on for this, for this future of wine. And that’s what you’re doing with InterCellar.
29:42 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, yeah, because in a way, you know, I’m, I’m fond of science fiction and if you see like the dystopic movies at the end when the machine get the power just before it was like the developers that are leading the the, the world.
29:55 So I said in my mind, OK, the future buyers are not from the old industries, they are from tech. So and, and I am selling high range round. It’s not only luxury, but it’s high range wine and and and and spirits. So that’s why yeah, I, I, I started to, to make my my business with those kind of guys. But for now, we are not reaching very, very wealthy people. We are also in Interstellar opening the investment with like €50 bottles because you can make money or make a good consumption seller with €50 bottles, so it’s the only luxury. OK.
30:30 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about this, the importance of a direct relationship between a vineyard or a spirit maker and the customer, because this is interesting. In the wine business, you said it doesn’t really exist because they usually sell to people who distribute etcetera. But not having that knowledge really hurts them. Now look at a Louis Vuitton or look at some of these other brands. They actually embrace NFTS and Web three. I think they embraced it because they want to have that individual relationship with a customer. You don’t sell them one Bentley, you sell them 10 Bentleys over the lifetime and then you sell the family Bentleys. And so you’re offering that direct consumer information to the vineyard.
31:09 And in Web three, that information is gold because it’s 10 times better, 100 times better than anything in Web 2. Because in that call it, you might see every single bottle of wine as an NFT digital twin. You might see the history. You might see there’s $2,000,000 of Bitcoin in that wallet. How do you, how do you quantify the value there?
31:31 How do you explain that to vineyards?
31:33 Louis de Bonnecaze: At the beginning this was very hard because they were saying, OK, you want to make some digital twins to sell in cryptocurrency. So we have to to, to change a little bit the speech and the the platform was evolving. At that time we were accepting also Fiat currency like credit cards. It’s very important.
31:51 But when they saw that we are solving also their problems, that is to say the data, the visibility on their distribution, they said, OK, let’s have a meeting and now we are onboarding like hundreds of them. And what they are looking for, as you said is data. And I think it’s even more the case for wine or for like a product that that is from the heart because there are, they are in a way, they are, you know, harvesting the the grape. So it’s like they are growing something like very special for us, for them. So they need to to know where the wine or the spirit is drunk. And we are offering them offering yeah, through the platform.
32:30 So they have like a subscription, this data and it’s very important. And also they need to reach some new customers and, and Interstellar, we are solving the problem as we said. And we are also having like a new user experience because the customer of tomorrow, not only in the wine industry, also in all the industry and especially, you know, when you buy something expensive on Internet, you need the wall experience. So that’s why we’re integrating like 3D bottles. You can touch the bottles.
33:01 We are going to have like a token, we can talk about it later and then a kind of 3D modelization of your seller. So you can have the visibility as you said at the beginning, you can flex. Oh, this is my, this is my wine cellar. These are my bottles. I can customise my wine cellar. So this is also important and this is how we are reaching new customers, which is the biggest point also for the wineries and the and the whiskey brands.
33:29 Brian Rose: Yeah, the the digital wine cellar flex is an interesting concept, kind of like my, my, my virtual metaverse wine cellar. And I think you allow people to build 1. You allow people to even customise the wine cellar and dress it up and make it look really cool. Yeah, because we really noticed this with NFTS in 21. We noticed that not only people wanted to own the crypto punk, but if they could show the world they just spent $1,000,000 on a rock or a punk. It was, it was.
33:57 I used to tell people it’s no longer about the Lamborghini, it’s about the picture of the Lamborghini on Instagram. That’s more important than a Lamborghini in the garage. And some people say that’s silly, but it’s like that’s the new world. And a lot of people want to show their collections to people. And you’re giving people an amazing opportunity to do that with that virtual seller.
34:17 What do you call it? Something like that.
34:19 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, Virtual seller, it’s the digital seller. It’s not the metaverse because I don’t trust people working in a big world. I mean, not in our industry, but it’s more like a microverse. So it’s a small place that you can design, you can spend your token.
34:32 It’s one of the utility to customise it. And then yes, you can flex because in our customers we have different kind of customers. We have like the, the, the strong believers in the wine. So they are just using the platform because they need trust ability. But you also have some people that needs to, to show that they are like new reach. So yeah, we, we want to yeah, to, to satisfy all the kind of customers.
34:56 Brian Rose: So I used to work in banking in the city and we would go to dinner a lot and we would order big bottles of wine.
35:02 Louis de Bonnecaze: And that’s probably why London is one of your big markets here.
35:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, because we have a lot of money in this city. And so it’s interesting because the the process of ordering a bottle of wine add an important business dinner is a mini flex in itself. Like you’re flexing in front of people. You’re telling people what you had the night before. You’re telling them the the Somalia where who you are. Yeah.
35:24 So that’s like an important thing to do and a lot of people do want to talk about the wines they drink or show the wines they drink, and this is another way of doing that.
35:32 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, but sometimes it’s too much. You know, you can be like afraid of this world. Like, OK, I don’t know so much about the wine. So I’m not going to buy a wine because I don’t want to go to the the wine centre or the restaurant.
35:43 I don’t want to talk too much because I don’t know. And this is also something that is wrong with this industry. It’s like something to to to difficult for people to understand. So we are trying in a way also to desacralize a little bit the access to the big bottles because it’s only like it’s only wine. It’s not like something so important.
36:07 Brian Rose: It’s just grape juice, right?
36:09 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, yeah. This is just a moment that you have to share. So we want to to, to give people access to this wine if they have, because you have a lot of people, they have enough money to buy some great wines. They want to drink, but they like, they’re like a little bit shy.
36:24 They don’t want to go. And so that’s something also that we are trying to in terms of tech, we are trying to to onboard most of the people like it’s mass adoption and all the people are understanding block chain through our use case because it’s easy, OK, it’s bottle and in a way it’s good. And also so we on board Web three people to the wine and we also on board wine people to the Web 3.
36:48 Brian Rose: I love it and I saw a demo of your site and something made me so happy. When you go to check out, you can pay with a credit card or with stable coins, and it just put a smile on my face because you just don’t see that very often. Yeah, it’s just really refreshing. It’s.
37:04 Louis de Bonnecaze: One of the main challenge because you know, mass adoption, as I was saying is something very important because if you only stay in the web three with gaming cards, video games, it’s like a niche. So we need some tangible product to to show the world that the blockchain is very useful for tangible industries. And this is something very important for us. So as you said, we’re accepting cryptocurrency, but also regular currency, Fiat currency. We don’t talk too much about NFT as you may see where I’m just using digital twin. So you know, we are accepting to a log with an e-mail address, not only with a meta mask or something. So in a way, we’re trying to avoid being so complex. You know, it’s like Internet today people, they are using Internet, they don’t give a shit about the technology behind or HTMLCSS.
37:58 They don’t mind. They just want it to to, to, to be like intuitive. So in a way we are trying to do the same.
38:04 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s super important. You mentioned, I think before that about 60 to 63% of your revenue is probably going to be B to B revenue and the other revenue being B to C revenue. So you’re thinking both sides really, one is to satisfy the customer and one is to satisfy the businesses?
38:21 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, this is how we are revolutionising the industry by only being like a platform to gather the brands and the consumers.
38:28 So we take some profits from both of them and it’s like a balance because the more we have wineries and brands, the more we have customers because the customers are looking for exclusivity, exclusive products. And the more we have customers, the more we have brands because they are looking for new customers. So it’s something that we have to balance. And of course we take some profit on both of them because you have like from the brand side, the subscription fee to access the data and also we take of course on the primary market percentage.
39:02 And from the consumer side, they spend money on the storage because we don’t take the, the, the storage in charge and they also spend the money on the platform of course. And we make revenue also on the the Digital cellar and so on.
39:16 Brian Rose: It’s a beautiful model. I like that. Let’s talk about real world assets, OK?
39:21 This is one of the big narratives right now in Web 3 and we believe this bull run, it’s going to be even bigger. But I’ve been looking at RWA plays for the last two years and a lot of times it’s a lot of talk and more talk and less assets and people don’t really know what they can tokenize. Like you said, now everybody has a story that maybe the one building they tokenized, but there’s not a lot of buildings. They’re doing some securities tokenization and BlackRock is doing this and and Frank Franklin Templeton is doing that. But those are, you know, tokenizing government bonds and things like that.
39:57 And then there’s a few people trying to do the same with art, but there hasn’t really been a breakthrough of mass quantity. Not only real world assets, but but real value, you know, real applications of tokenizing those assets. And you think that you’re going to be one of the first to do it, and it’s going to be through wines.
40:19 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, I guess so. I guess so because yeah, as you said, you can tokenize almost everything.
40:25 And that was like the trend like OK, I’m tokenizing it. I’m tokenizing the, the, the, the real estate I’m talking. And what I trust is that if you fractionalize like in the real estate, sometimes it is with art, you don’t, you don’t have the final process of the, the purchase. Because in the wine industry, we could have fractionalize a bottle, for example, like I don’t know, €10,000 bottle, you fractionalize with 10 people. But the fact is that our product needs to be consumed at the end. So if you, if you have nine people that agree to sell or to drink the wine together, it’s, it’s complex. And if you just have one that say, OK, no, it’s like a problem.
41:03 So I trust in an asset that you can tokenize in a wall, like we tokenize an item that you can get delivered. So and the wine industry is yeah, yeah, a perfect use case for all the, the, the, the reason that I mentioned before. So we really trust that we have something in mind and we trust that, you know, when we are meeting people, this is something that talks to people like in all the different background that I’m visiting. Like it can be a doctor, it can be someone in the business. Everyone knows about the wine and the spirit. So it’s a case that is talking to to people.
41:41 Brian Rose: It’s like the perfect case for RWA, isn’t it? Because you said each individual bottle can be significant. You know, you, you couldn’t really, you know, turn, you know, Coca-Cola into RW as because you know, the value of each one is so small.
41:57 But since wine has a significant value, it’s something everyone knows. It’s something that’s consumable and the end of the day has a half life. It’s it’s really one of the perfect examples, right?
42:08 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, and it’s not a niche market because some people sometimes said, OK, it’s a niche market, but it’s a huge market. You know, in France it’s bigger than so I said it’s just beside below aeronautics, but it’s before cosmetics.
42:21 So for example, L’Oreal or the big groups, they are like under the one in spirit industry in France. And the the market is huge in the US, the market is huge in all the countries. So, yeah, I think we are participating in a way with the mass adoption of the blockchain. And This is why also not only our investors, because we raised €3 million through some big companies, big business angels like Swiss Borg, like some founders of Ledger of Sandbox, the biggest casino group in France, Partouche Casino Group, some vinyls. But not only that, it’s also because we have the government that is trusting our business model and we have some help, some subvention.
43:04 So that’s why it was also important to be in France. But yeah, we, we have something, we are revolutionising our industry and we really trust, Yeah. And this is our ambition, that we will be a Unicorn, yeah.
43:16 Brian Rose: Do you think one day you might fractionalize bottles? There might be like a fund or maybe in the future though you might fractionalize some really high end bottles and allow people to own a piece of it or not.
43:29 Louis de Bonnecaze: It’s not something that we want to do because as I told you, it’s an investment, but it’s not only an investment. We need people to drink the wine at the end because it’s a product that needs needs to be shared, not only to put in a in a cellar and also because this is what the wineries want. If you say, OK, it’s going to be fractionalized and people are not going to drink it, it’s like a terrible for for them. So no, no, it’s important that. But of course there are a lot of different application. We can tokenize barrels, we can tokenize vines. We could do some some big things, but step by step we’re starting with the with the bottles and then yeah, we will see after.
44:09 Brian Rose: Yeah, the problem with Web 3 is they usually put the tech before the innovation, they put the tech before the demand, and sometimes they go and try to do all these crazy things before anybody really wants it. So it’s good not to get distracted with things that aren’t applicable. Talk to me about the token, because the beauty of Web 3 is that you can introduce a token. Of course, you don’t want to introduce a token unless it has real utility. So can you talk about that? And even if some vineyards are listening here, can you explain like what is that token and how that works?
44:42 Louis de Bonnecaze: So we are talking about Web 3 and I think that there are a lot of similarities between the Web 3 and the wine industry and especially the the fact that this is kind of a community when you, you know the power of community in the Web 3. But there is a real community in the wine industry. It’s still a club.
44:59 It’s like, I mean, you, you met someone, he drank the same bottle as you. Oh, you drunk a Chateau Margot 1990. OK. We are part of the same club. And there is a problem of access in the wine industry. If you want to be part of the club, you need some access, you need allocation, as I said.
45:17 So for example, a winery is doing like a small amount of bottles. If you want that those bottles you need to have an allocation. So our token for consumers is a kind of allocation reward programme. The more you have the token, the more you will have early access of the bottles that we are proposing on Interstellar. This is the main advantage for consumers and we have some of the best wineries and we signed I think like 300 or 400 new wineries that are going to be launched in January at the same time as the token step by step of course.
45:51 So we have this access and we give this access to the token holders. They also have some discounts on the the storage on the primary market, on the secondary, secondary market fees. And what is completely amazing with the token is that there is also utilities from the brand side. So the more the, the, the wineries and the brands are selling on the platform, the more they will get token. And this token, they can use it for marketing purpose, for example, to buy for a banner, to have access to some data to have, I don’t know, a post on Instagram. So they don’t feel that they are spending money. They, they, they, they are incentivized to, to sell on the platform.
46:37 They earn tokens that they can use. So it’s like useful for customers and for brands and brands are spending the the token for visibility and users. As we said for the digital seller, they can spend it to customise their experience. And on those two spending, we burn 50% of the supply to have like the Fashionista. Curve
47:02 Brian Rose: Okay, excellent. So everybody wants to get that token for extra benefits. It’s a bit like a loyalty for both sides and then I can also use it for extra perks, customise my wine cellar, all that good stuff.
47:18 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, when you invest in the set our token, you can be a passionate like okay, I want to have this advantage and you can also trust in the fact that we are building the world biggest token in the wine and spirit industry and it has to be in France as I said at the beginning.
47:34 Brian Rose: Of course it does. Yeah. I wouldn’t imagine anything different. That was one of the big reasons that we’re in with you guys, cuz I was like, yeah, first of all, it was your experience.
47:44 That’s huge because you come from this business. Second of all, yes, you’re French and you’re in France and you live in Bordeaux. That was powerful. And then the fourth thing, your business model is unique. A lot of people, Louis, would have just focused on the retail.
47:58 I think a lot of people, I’m just going to sell wine to people and let’s just focus on that. But I think because of your background, you could see both sides. So it’s a really thought out model and you’re right, it has to be in France.
48:10 Louis de Bonnecaze: It’s a long way to go there. I mean, I was starting like selling fine wine in cryptocurrency.
48:15 It was in 2017 and then in 2021 during the bear market, 2022, beginning of 2022, I launched an NFT collection, a club. So at that time we were launching like A1 NFT was a membership club. This club still exists and has some advantage on the platform. Interstellar we made €1,000,000 and now there is this Interstellar. So it’s a long way. And yeah, people, they say, OK, you raised €3 million with the 3000 investors.
48:46 Brian Rose: So I think when we, we, we, we watch you on the social media. It was, it was easy.
48:51 Louis de Bonnecaze: No, it was like very hard to convince. And we are still working on this to convince all the the industry.
48:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, the overnight success story is never an overnight success story. Yeah, exactly.
49:03 Brian Rose: Louis, tell me, what do you think is your single biggest challenge for the next 12 months? You’ve obviously got a token generation event coming up, which is always a challenge for any protocol. So talk about that and what else, what else is on your radar as things that you have to be concerned about that you have to worry about?
49:24 Louis de Bonnecaze: So the biggest challenge for next year 2025 will be of of course the the launch of the token on January. And at the same time it will be to give more value to the advantage of this token and how we can do that. It’s just, it’s very simple when you say it like this, it’s to onboard new wineries.
49:42 So that will be my job. That was my job to deal with the wineries and that will be the job that I have to make. So first it’s to it’s to onboard wineries, brands. We have some big surprise because we are onboarding some of the best wineries and brands in the world. And at the same times we have to educate people because they, so through social media, through our Twitter, we have a lot of followers and we need to teach them because we have two kind of customers. We have the current customers.
50:15 That’s why we are using credit cards talking about. So we have to educate them to the Web 3. And we have also the new buyers that these are the best buyer for us because we, we can teach them everything. It’s very interesting. And we have to make a lot of education about the wine and everything around surrounding the wine, the wine industry. So onboarding people and onboarding. So onboarding customers and onboarding wineries. This is as simple as it.
51:40 Brian Rose: What’s your plan with the education? I mean, I heard you guys talking that you’ve got a studio and you might be interviewing the vineyard heads and you really want to create a lot of home grown content and and how else can you educate people and how important is that?
51:55 Louis de Bonnecaze: There is like a blue ocean in the in the wine and spirit industry as it is like a old fashion industry. I’m not saying that it’s going to be easy to have some customer acquisition because it’s always difficult.
52:07 But for example, I made my personal community. A personal brand is very useful for our platform, Interstellar, and I became the biggest content creator and Kol in France in wine and spirits. So of course we’re going to use social media to do that and also like regular media, like a podcast, because in the wine industry, you cannot imagine all the stories that we heard like from the owner from for example, I have talked with a billionaire guy that become billionaire in the, in the, in the meat industry anyway, and he survived a, a, a Falcon crash. He had a, a massive stroke.
52:49 So there are a lot of stories behind the, the wineries, of course, about the wine, but also about the people. So that’s why we’re also going to give the, the, the speech to the, to the, the wineries. And this is something completely new. So and yeah, when you link social media media to a platform, you have like a good cycle to to sell. And yeah, that’s what we are doing.
53:11 Brian Rose: I love that.
53:12 I mean, the stories that must be in that, you know, Chateau Margot over the past 100 years or 150 years must be crazy. And I’m sure if you’re a connoisseur, you’d love to hear about, you know, the summer of 1967 and what happened and how they saved the vines and then made the greatest bottle of wine in 68 or whatever. I’m sure people would love that. I’m sure the owners would love to talk about it. And yet that probably doesn’t exist right now.
53:38 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, because, you know, there are too much focusing on how we make the wine. But you know, the people, they get rid of it. They they want to know stories. People connect with people. Yeah, exactly.
53:47 So we are also teaching the wineries to say to the people, okay, the customers, they want to hear that, okay. But I thought it was not important. For example, we have one of our partner that was drinking wine with Scarlett Johnson and they, I said you should start with it. Like, yeah, I share my wine with, with Scarlett Johansson and she said that this is her favourite wine. This is something that the new generation want to hear, of course, after you talk about the wine.
54:15 But yeah, this is like a good way to, to talk about the, the, the, the wine and the spirits. And also I, I’m doing it myself. My channel is in French for now. Maybe I’m thinking about doing, doing it in English for reaching more, more people. But here I’m just talking about wine.
54:33 Very. And this is how it’s working and this is the work that we are going to do for the brands.
54:40 Brian Rose: What do you think the biggest percentage of your customers are going to come from in the next year or two? Is it going to be in Asia, is it going to be in America? Or is it just the classic regions just coming online or coming onto Web 3?
54:56 Louis de Bonnecaze: That’s a good question because you know that the the wine actors, they are waiting for some specific region. There was like a boom from China in the beginning of the, I think the beginning was like 2005 or something. And now they’re waiting for India or something. That’s and I said no, no, the next big market is global. And for me this is like people that won their freedom through cryptocurrency.
55:23 So of course from now we are not only focusing on this because I told you they are like regular customer, they just want to buy bottles with EUR or or pounds or something. But the next generation we need some user experience. They will need some, of course, good wine and good wine education, yeah. Right. And they want it on the blockchain.
55:48 They they want to have the property of their wine and what what the blockchain implies. They don’t mind about blockchain, but you know what I mean. They want all of those perks that they have because of Web three.
56:00 Brian Rose: You said that you’re signing up some really exciting wineries. What’s it like having that conversation now when you go into a big name?
56:08 Brian Rose: Because it seems to me like that would be a difficult conversation, you know, What do you tell them and what gets them excited?
56:16 Louis de Bonnecaze: 1st, I’m just asking them what are they needs and we have different kind of wineries or spirit brands. It depends on the if they are like very well known or not. For the top, top range they are more looking for traceability. They don’t mind about the marketing side, the user experience, because they think that they have enough visibility and poor and they are wrong.
56:39 But yeah, there are those kind of brands and you have some the second range, you know, like leak 2, like it’s like the second, you know, the yeah, second range of wine. And there are more interesting also about how to reach these new people. So they use of course the the blockchain for the technology, but also for the community part of the Web 3. So they are interesting in new customers. This is what they are looking for. OK.
57:09 Brian Rose: And how do you make all of this happen as a leader and as the CEO? How do you surround yourself with amazing people to get this job done? Because there’s there’s nothing easy about building a business.
57:22 Louis de Bonnecaze: I think first it’s like, because it’s a passion, I mean, when you leave like your job, like a passion, it’s easier to communicate with people. And also I guess because I’m, I know how to talk with the tech guys and with the, the, I’m in the middle of it since a couple of years.
57:41 So this is the the biggest challenge to know how to talk with both worlds because they are so different and I have to adopt my my speech when I’m talking to a winery and when I’m talking to a launchpad or a platform to lease my token, it’s not the same speech. So I think this is like the best skill that I need to have is like being like a chameleon.
58:07 Brian Rose: And do you like to surround yourself with different types of people with different ideas?
58:14 Louis de Bonnecaze: Of of course, I, I trust that, you know, ACEO needs to be good enough in every, not every, but a lot of things, but I need to be surrounded with experts, with people better than me. So CEO is like you have to manage people that are better than you in their field.
58:33 Brian Rose: What do you think intracellular looks like in five years time? Five years? So it’s 20-30. What do you think it looks like? What do you want it to look like?
58:43 Louis de Bonnecaze: In 20-30, we have maybe 10 or 15,000 of wineries selling the platform and they are just using the platform because this is normal or you’re not listed on inter seller. Why not?
58:54 I don’t understand. And then we have that big community that we are doing now that is growing to 100 of 1000 of customers or maybe billions, I don’t know. And of course we are Unicorn because this is the the main challenge. It’s not about figures. Unicorn is more like a for the vision.
59:12 I don’t mind if my company is not value 1000 million, but it’s just the image. So my main challenge is this to finally have a latform that is like just a normal platform. It’s not exactly the same but like when you are renting your flat you’re using Airbnb like it’s just normal. I want to do this for the B2B and the B2C in the wine and spirit industry.
59:36 Brian Rose: To where it’s just a household name, Yeah, everybody uses it, yeah.
59:41 Brian Rose: Do you think it’ll be acquired one day by a big LVMH or do you think it’ll just can stand on its own?
59:49 Louis de Bonnecaze: I, I, I, I don’t know exactly, but of course you know, those big groups like, I don’t know, yeah, LVMH, like Pernod Rica, Diageo, they are observing what we are doing. In fact, we already discussed with some of them. And of course, they enter this market at the beginning, the Web 3 just for. You know, research and development purposes now they see that there is like that.
1:00:18 They are like a lot of issues of the industry that are solved by our platform. So maybe in a few years we can have some further discussion. We’ll see. Yeah. But it’s of course it’s a possibility.
1:00:32 Brian Rose: What I found fascinating is that these 200 year old fashion brands in France were embracing Web 3 and NFTS and all these things.
1:00:41 And I just did. For me, I, it was always a disconnect because I never would have thought, you know, a Louis Vuitton would have embraced something as esoteric as an NFT or a blockchain. And, but a lot of them really were early adopters. And I guess it’s probably because they understand that relationship with that individual customer is really important, but they are further ahead along than a lot of other a lot of other companies, aren’t they?
1:01:06 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, and, and NVMH is not the most surprising because you have some tiny, you know, wine more than maybe cognac and champagne. I mean, it’s all the same.
1:01:14 They’re like, it’s like 15 people, 20 people, 50 maximum. It’s like small luxury. I don’t know how to say like small companies. Yeah. So yeah, that’s for us. It’s, it’s better because we have like the direct the direction, which is not so far They, they can make some decision very quickly.
1:01:35 But yeah, no, no, they, they, they really trust in, in what we are doing. And I have a good example that I’m very proud is that we have some wineries that invested in our preset of token. I don’t know if you can imagine what is it because they are like, yeah, they are wine makers. They are like gentlemen farmers and they invested in a token because they said OK, what you are doing is going to be like a massive progress to our industry. That’s huge.
1:02:04 Brian Rose: Yeah. All right. So you know you’re on the right track.
1:02:07 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, we hope so, of course, but we know that we are on the right track. Of course, when you are on boarding the the those wineries, it’s like a big success.
1:02:15 Louis de Bonnecaze: It’s something that you don’t see on the platform, but for us it’s like a big battle.
1:02:21 Brian Rose: How does this all play into what could be the biggest bull market in crypto we’ve ever seen? Does that affect your business? Does that help your business? Or in a lot of ways, do you still have to go do what you have to do anyways?
1:02:36 Louis de Bonnecaze: Our business is not directly linked to the, the, the the cryptocurrency, the web 3 because our main, the main issues that we’re solving or the wine and spirit industry issues, storage, traceability and liquidity. But of course, as a part of our buyers are from the crypto space.
1:02:55 When you have like a massive Boo run people, they want to cash out. So they go from a faecal asset to something more tangible. So if you made a lot of money, you’re going to cash out. Of course you’re going to buy some real estate. And what do you do when you have real estate? You buy a car, maybe a watch.
1:03:12 And then if you drink some wine, you said OK, now I just want to drink some good wine. So of course it will affect positively our marketplace, but this is not the main point.
1:03:23 Brian Rose: OK. But also real world assets is a real narrative. We’ve actually seen a pretty big rally in a bunch of real world asset tokens and layer ones even in the last few weeks. You know, I see a few verticals as like real estate, art, you guys and wine.
1:03:39 But if people are going to bet on that sector, you’re a good way that they can do that.
1:03:44 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah. And you’re right because there will be more liquidity, so more research and we’re going to have like a faster chains. For now we are on the platform is on Polygon, the token will be on Polygon and a bridge on Solana. So of course with the bull run you have more liquidity on the market, you have more development and then the the platform itself will be better. So yeah, you’re right.
1:04:05 The we are in a way linked a little bit to the to the future bull market.
1:04:09 Brian Rose: Yeah, let’s speak on that Polygon and Solana choice there, because it’s a very important choice as well. Why have your token bridge to Solana? Why is that an important thing to do right now?
1:04:21 Louis de Bonnecaze: So before Polygon and Solana, we were on Ethereum. So we moved to Polygon because of the fees, because at the beginning we said, OK, we’re going to launch the platform on Ethereum because it’s a high range product. So even if there are some fees people are going to buy. But we experience like some very high, high fees like for a 200 bottles of EUR of bottle, €200 a bottle of wine, we have sometimes like a €50 of fees.
1:04:46 So we moved to Polygon. So the platform is on Polygon and the token will be on Polygon and Solana of course, because of the community and the community of Solana is I think one of the best. So that’s why we are also moving to Solana and also because the token will be listed on some famous centralised exchange, on Swissborg also, which is one of the best platform in my opinion and on decentralised exchange using Solana. So that’s why we moved also to Solana.
1:05:17 Brian Rose: I love that.
1:05:18 And yeah, we’re huge fans of Swissborg. You know, we’ve had Alex Fazelle on the show many times and we’re actually equity investors in in their incredible company and they’re really trying to, you know, they’re trying to probably put centralised exchanges out of business at some point. You know, they’re trying to cut out that middle man that really is an anachronism. It’s kind of like a stockbroker 100 years ago and try to really introduce passionate community members with amazing projects. Yeah, yeah.
1:05:46 Louis de Bonnecaze: And so in a way you were already investor and Interstellar because they invested in and are supporting us for the beginning Swissborg. So you didn’t know that, but you are. Yeah, you were one of the the first investor of Interstellar. But yes, they’re, we like their vision. We have kind of the same values of ownership of, you know, they’re they, they don’t have like a feapers or a pure trading platform.
1:06:11 It’s more like wolf management for cryptocurrency. And this is also the kind of customer that we are looking for people that understands what we are doing. The token that we’re going to launch is a massive revolution and it’s very useful to an industry and we need people to understand at least OK, I know in what I am investing. It’s not like a man corn. So yeah, it’s important for us to work with such a platform as a squeeze board, yeah.
1:06:38 Brian Rose: Perfect customer for you. They sound like the people that also want to buy and hold wine as well. Talking about Solana, I went to my first Solana break point when I was in Singapore and I was blown away because I went from Token 2049, which was a great conference with 20,000 people. But you go to Solana and it’s like a whole different vibe. It’s like you’re in a club and it’s just a vibe and everyone’s all one. And I used, I used to joke like that the, the, the president or the CEO of a, of a Dex at Solana comes on stage and he gets like a standing ovation, you know, because everyone’s like, hey, that’s our guy from Jupiter.
1:07:15 And it’s just a really good vibe. All the customers are there. I read an article yesterday that said now in the App Store, the Apple App Store, the phantom wallet is now number six and the Coinbase app is now still down here at 20. And that’s wild because obviously Coinbase app was number one back in 21. But it shows you that a lot of people are probably onboarding to Solana and buying things on Dexes as opposed to setting up an account on Coinbase. So it’s an interesting change and I think it’s why you really need to be on that network.
1:07:50 Louis de Bonnecaze: Being on on Solana is like a spirit. You’re part of the community, as you said. And we have some products also for the Solana community, which is more digen. Of course, our goal is also to onboard them because they are like normal people, but they think in different way. So we have some dedicated product for them, like for example, just before the token and at the same time also we’re going to launch a special wine, Bitcoin wine, a limited edition that is more, yeah, dedicated to the Solana and more Digen. So what we want to have on the platform, and this is what I said at the beginning, we want to desacralize. So we’re gonna have like very classic wines, but also at the same times we give the opportunity to some digit brands and we’re going to have some vodka, some jeans and some other brands that has another community. So we want to to give people the possibility to invest in all these kind of assets.
1:08:49 Brian Rose: Good. I like that. When are you going to move to California and sign up everybody in Napa?
1:08:55 Louis de Bonnecaze: This is on my plan on the road map because, yeah, we have some very great wineries to visit in Sonoma and Napa and yeah, that’s a good place. So we’ve been one of the beginning of, of intracellular was in Vegas and it was not so far from the, the, the Napa Valley. So next time, yeah, we we go there definitely. It’s gorgeous up there.
1:09:17 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well, in these days, a lot of places are making good wine. I mean, including England, right? They’re making a sparkling, some decent, you know, sparkling wine down in the South. You’ve obviously got, you know, all the Argentina and South America, Australia, California. There’s a lot of places now not as good as France, you know.
1:09:38 Louis de Bonnecaze: You know, it’s like Bitcoin and Alcoins. There are some good alcoins, of course, but there is Bitcoin and there is France in terms of wine and spirit. But I’m, I’m joking.
1:09:49 Brian Rose: You know you. Want to offer both?
1:09:51 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Of course we have to offer both. I don’t know, I’m joking. But you know, this is a question of climate. So for example, you were mentioning the the the English sparkling wine, which are very great with the climate change. They have kind of the same terroir as champagne. So that’s why they are producing very great a sparkling wine. And I used to invest in a, in a, in a winery in England, which is a good point because they are doing great wines. They are sparkling wine consumers. And with the Brexit, you have less tax on the local products. But it’s also a question of geography. If you take the 4540 fifth Sparrow, you have the best wine. So on the, on that line, you have of course, France, Burgundy, Bordeaux, but you also have Napa Valley in the US and it’s crossing like China, of course. So the, the wine is something about climate terroir and know how.
1:10:44 So that’s why the Chinese, they are not, they are far from doing the same one as in France because it’s something that you you transmit to the generation. But yeah, there are some good alt coins.
1:10:54 Brian Rose: OK, good alt coins, all right. So all that’s coming Alt. Wine OK all that’s coming up in the future and any anything else any other innovations that are on your mind or do you want to stick with the basics for the next 12 to 24 months
1:11:06 Louis de Bonnecaze: no they. Execute, you know, we, we have to execute everything about the promise of the token.
1:11:11 So this is a lot because we started with the next in the next 12 months onboarding wineries and customers and offering customers also what we promise with the token. So it’s going to be like a big development, the token will be ready on January, but for example, for all the stuff from the microverse, it will take some months more. So yeah, the you can have some good plans in the road map, but we are, you know, for our customers, investor, we prefer to have like a 3-6 and nine months road map, then a five years road map. Of course in five years I want to have like my upper vision and to have my own wine tasting with the wine maker, which is something that we want to do, of course, but it’s not now. But it’s it can be very simple.
1:11:59 You know, you just have your bottle inter seller, you get delivered before and then you have a meeting with the wine maker or something or someone else around the globe and you taste at the same time. So of course there are a lot of things to do in the gamification of this old industry.
1:12:14 Brian Rose: That could be cool. So everybody could have their bottle delivered to them and then you could have a virtual tasting with the guy from the actual vineyard, walking people in places all over the world and they each one drinks their wine and.
1:12:26 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, you don’t have to go there. It’s eco friendly, like like our interstellar marketplace, I need not mention that.
1:12:32 But when you have a wine which is exchanged six to seven times, travelling to London to Hong Kong, first the the wine can be damaged and also the Echo footprint is terrible. So yeah.
1:12:43 Brian Rose: Got it. Keep it in one place.
1:12:44 Louis de Bonnecaze: Exactly is the way forward.
1:12:46 Brian Rose: What’s the best way for people to learn more about Interstellar? What’s the best way for people to get involved? Buy wine, by the token, all that good stuff.
1:12:57 Louis de Bonnecaze: Very simple. So the the website is interstellar dot IO interstellar like inter like exchange and seller like the wine seller.
1:13:05 So interstellar dot IO you can follow us, of course on Twitter, we have a very active and huge community. So yeah, of course people can know a lot of on this on X now, sorry. And on Instagram, of course, you can follow Interstellar main account and my account also also as ACEO, we’re always working together, which is Louis Dubancas. If you write my name, you can see it somewhere. You can find on on Instagram.
1:13:35 We also have a discord. So you have many ways to to follow Interstellar.
1:13:40 Brian Rose: And I can go right now to interstellar dot IO and buy wine with stable coins.
1:13:45 Louis de Bonnecaze: Of course, it’s very important to to, to, to to know that the platform is live. You can go there.
1:13:51 We have a bunch of amazing wines, great selection, some of the best wine in the world already. And of the best whiskey we have Dalmor Whiskey, which is one of the best Scotch whiskey and one of the best whiskey in the world. So yeah, the the platform is active. You can buy your first bottles with Stablecoin with YEAH with credit card so it’s pretty easy now.
1:14:15 Brian Rose: I love it and you have that kind of like 3D bottle going on in there you.
1:14:20 Can touch the bottle.
1:14:21 Louis de Bonnecaze: This is the next Gen experience. When you are buying a bottle of wine on Internet, like especially if it’s a €1000 bottle and you just like AG Peg pixelized and just a short description. This is not for me an experience on Interstellar. You can touch the bottle, you will have the possibility to customise your universe. So of course it’s a world experience.
1:14:40 Brian Rose: Yeah, we noticed.
1:14:41 We noticed they’re like the spinning bottle there. And those touch points are really important because like you said, this isn’t like buying a treasury bond or even buying an apartment. Like it’s a, it’s an emotional relationship with an asset that is still an investment asset and it’s a high price point real world asset. It’s very unique in that sense and it’s consumable.
1:15:02 Louis de Bonnecaze: Exactly the best way normally is to go to the, to the winery so you can feel the ground, you can feel the, the, the vines, everything. But we’re trying to do it like in distance. And the best way here is to, to see the balloon in 3D to, to give the, the, the speech to the wineries, as I said, so you can learn about the stories.
1:15:21 And then you say, OK, I want to buy that one. And then, you know, in the future travel to France or the other countries, you can visit that winery because sometimes and some bottles on top of the of the physical asset of the bottle which is behind the NFT, you can have some advantage like a winery visit for free or something. So yeah.
1:15:40 Brian Rose: And probably the more tokens you have, you’re probably going to. Yeah, you got it, You got it.
1:15:45 You pay experience with the token. Amazing. And I love the fact that you’re trying to do, you say de sacrilege, de sacralized. So the sacrilegious version of the wine industry, you want to take that away? Not completely right.
1:15:58 Louis de Bonnecaze: There are some stuff to make it. Accessible. But exactly more accessible because we. Yeah, that it’s like, you know, wine was drunk by the kings of France, by the church. There is like a lot of flings.
1:16:12 So I want to keep that, of course, history. It’s important. But for the access, yeah, why not tasting wine in a bar with music? It’s not like something like, OK, I taste it. It’s like, no, it’s something accessible.
1:16:25 I like to say that it’s only a fermented grape in a way. Yeah, of course it’s more than that, but yeah, you just have to enjoy it. I.
1:16:32 Brian Rose: Think that’s super important because I think a lot of people are intimidated by wine and they go out to order and they feel, you know, they feel silly or they feel stupid, but there’s no need to feel that way. A great sommelier can be amazing and can educate you. I mean, all the sommeliers I’ve ever met are incredible. They’re super passionate.
1:16:49 They want to teach you these things. They want to help you make the right choice. They want to bring you up the curve, and it sounds like that’s what you want to do too.
1:16:57 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, but the and, but the, the only thing is for me, the the best advice that I give is that you only have to enjoy the wine. We don’t mind if you know the, the different kind of grapes, the taste, the aromas on the nose. We don’t mind if you like the wine you like the moment it’s enough.
1:17:12 But yeah, yeah. Enjoy the experience. Yeah, and this is maybe when I I give the disclaimer like you, you have to drink responsibly. And as I said, as an introduction, Interstellar is promoting some organic wine, high range wine with passion. So it’s more like I prefer people that they can drink less but better.
1:17:35 I’m not encouraging people to binge drink and those stuff, even the the the young generation, they can share some moments with dinner or something, drinking less, but yeah, some very good things.
1:17:47 Brian Rose: It’s interesting to see the younger generation drinking less. I never thought that would happen because in my generation it felt like we were all trying to drink more. It’s very interesting to see.
1:17:59 Louis de Bonnecaze: Because it’s trendy also, you know, you know, you have the the non, non alcoholic wine, which is for me like kind of stupid because you don’t call it wine.
1:18:08 You know, it’s like a vegetable vegan burger, vegan vegan milk vegan burger. It’s not a burger. It’s like, or a vegan sausage. It’s not a sausage. Call it a different way. I mean, I don’t have any problem with that. But yeah, the the the younger generation, of course, and it’s a good way not to drink too much. But you have those two extremes.
1:18:29 You have the people that don’t want to drink and you have the people that binge drink, which is not a good point. I think there is something in the middle.
1:18:37 Brian Rose: Right. Do it really high quality to enjoy the moments. Yeah.
1:18:40 And and that’s what you’re promoting.
1:18:43 Louis de Bonnecaze: Yeah, to, to, to share some moment. You know, it was I think a few weeks ago sometimes ask someone asked me, OK, what was the best profit you made on a bottle? And I said I made 120 K EUR on one bottle. It’s not by selling it, it’s by sharing the moment it was with an Asian investor. We share an amazing bottle and at the end of the moment we were showing we were talking of anything except the platform in Interstellar, of course, at the beginning. But the wine allows allowed us to talk about some private things and so on.
1:19:21 And at the end of the dinner he said, OK, I want to put 120K in Interstellar. So yeah, it’s not only about drinking, it’s about the discussion that you can have around this bottle.
1:19:34 Brian Rose: I guess this has been working for centuries and centuries, right?
1:19:39 Louis de Bonnecaze: You know, it’s a secret. I don’t tell you my secret, but yeah, a good bottle sometimes can, yeah.
1:19:46 This is how Europe was made, right? More bottles of wine, maybe.
1:19:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, probably right. Yeah, Yeah. It’s probably not going to change anytime.
1:19:55 Louis de Bonnecaze: During Yalta, they were drinking wine, wine, smoking cigars and say, OK, let’s yeah.
1:20:00 You get that part, I get the border. Here and something, but no, I’m joking, but you know why? Yeah, it’s a good, good thing that to.
1:20:07 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah, that’s fantastic, Louis.
1:20:09 We’re really excited to be part of this journey with you. I still remember you come in on that call with your team that night and I told my team afterward, I’m like, this is just as just fate. You know, this is the perfect business model with the perfect people that if I could have just designed it, then that’s what you guys are. You know, and again, it’s not somebody who’s just all into web three that wants to put one on Web 3. It’s someone who understands this industry, who’s passionate, who’s done the time, but also understands the tech OG Bitcoiner that’s going to bring them together.
1:20:40 And so I’m really excited to be part of this. And man, I love what you’re doing so.
1:20:45 Louis de Bonnecaze: Thank you. And you know, we are proud to have you as an investor for true reason. First, of course, because of your community, because of the visibility that you are giving to us.
1:20:56 But for a second reason is that you are not drinking alcohol anymore. And you are not the only one of the investor of Interstellar. We have some other investor that are not drinking. And yeah, it’s like saying to people like, yeah, we have investors in our wine and spirit industry and wine and spirit business that are not drinking is for me like, yeah, a big success. So it means that you understand what’s is what is behind.
1:21:20 So thank you for that.
1:21:21 Brian Rose: Yeah. And we have a few members, you know, in our team that don’t drink. And we had this discussion. We said, well, look, I don’t drink, but you know, this is this is, this is solving a problem.
1:21:34 You know, this is a real world asset business. This is a huge industry. Like you said, 430 billion by year 20/30/21. We can’t ignore this and these guys are doing it right, so we all just want to be a part of it and I feel great. I don’t feel any hesitations and.
1:21:50 Louis de Bonnecaze: And you were right.
1:21:51 Brian Rose: Yeah, it was. I was right. So I’m excited again. Interstellar dot IO is the best way. Follow you on Twitter for all the updates and keep eyes out for January for a token and a.
1:22:02 Louis de Bonnecaze: Lot of things are going to happen till January, so of course you can have all the information on the social media, on the website and and yeah, through London Real also very proud to be here to discover this amazing studio And you’re happy to be in London because yeah, I I love that city not only for wine business, but also the atmosphere and yeah, you embodied us, that atmosphere and yeah, thank you for hosting this amazing. Episode.
1:22:30 Brian Rose: My pleasure, man to the future. Thanks, Lou.
1:22:33 Louis de Bonnecaze: Thank you, Brian.
