Vinovest: Bottle your wealth

Very poor returns over a three year period. IMPOSSIBLE to withdraw money and sell your wines. I’ve been attempting to do so, offering big discounts for months. Avoid this app like the plague.

Not only is their investment strategy overly hyped and misvalued, their management fee is absurdly high. I have lost 10% of my portfolio value over the last 3 years due to the continuously falling wine value and expensive management fees eating into the non-existence product. In hindsight, I would've made 25%+ on S&P alone and Vanguard's management fee is 0.07%. Decided to cut loss and liquidate my account 3 weeks ago and mentally prepared to take a bigger hit to sell my wines 20% below market (what they claimed to be at least) for a quick exit. It's been a month and one of the wine just wouldn't sell. Not sure if this is their tactic to not let customers cash out, because they have a term for full refund ONLY if ALL wines are sold. I asked for a partial refund on 16 May, got their customer success team, Robyn, to help and connected my bank account to my Vinovest account and said the refund will take a week to execute and someone from accounting will make it happen. 2 weeks later, nothing, and Robyn stopped replying. This is not very confidence inspiring and absolutely not OK. Dodgy business practice. Wondering if there are any class action lawsuits happening. If so, I will join the bandwagon if I don't get my money back by mid-June. Invest with them if you don't like your hard-earned money.

Awful experience. From the get go, app does not work well, logs you out every time. Fees are so high that any gains you see are used to cover them. I finally listed my wine for sale. Wine was put in pending sale status in February. Two and a half months later no update, no money. Customer service can’t give any timeline, just a copy and paste response. Customer service has no telephone number. TAKE YOUR INVESTMENTS ELSEWHERE.

I understand wine is long term and values fluctuate. However closing the account seems impossible. They charge fees originally from a cash balance and then charge an overdraft fee without warning that you need to add to the cash before charging it. No way to pause while you sell. Predatory way of charging and do not have customer in mind. Good way to lose a few thousand.

I started investing in high-end wines using VinoVest and so far my return is a lot better than my 401K. I like that I don’t have to store the wine myself and risk bottle shock (or bottle consumption).

I ask to close account nothing in they took 160 dollars I’m glad it was just a small amount and you cannot get ahold of anyone

Hello. I just downloaded the Vinovest app (version 1.37.0) on an iPhone running iOS 17.4. The app is crashing 100% of the time after I select the “Transactions” option under wine. I posted this using my @RandomiOSBugs Twitter account. Please investigate if you can, makes it very hard for new users to browse the app.

Save yourself a headache and don’t use them. You will absolutely loose your money. Wines are inherently a long-term bet, and I’m not sure Vinovest will be around for that long (judging by the public reviews here and elsewhere, things aren’t going great for them). Even if you do manage to invest in a winner, their marketplace has poor liquidity. Nothing ever sells at the “market” price. You have to accept a lowball offer if you want to sell anything at all.

It’s easy to buy wine using this app! It’s nearly impossible to sell wine here, or get your bottles shipped to you! Terrible to non-existent liquidity. Huge bid/ask spreads. Intractably awful customer service. You can buy wines here, in theory. But you can’t sell them, not really. Do you like taking a 20% haircut on wines you’ve owned for 6 months? Do you like listing wines bought on the same platform, recommended by the platform, that receive ZERO bids when listed for sale? If so, enjoy Vinovest. When asked to have the wines shipped to you, you get an excuse about the “extensive preparation” that will take 9 - 12 weeks at a minimum. To ship seven (7) bottles of wine worth $1,000. In my opinion, this operation has all the appearances of a Ponzi scheme. Avoid at all costs.

I appreciate the democratization of wine and whiskey investing. But the inability to transfer money out without contacting customer service is a big red flag. Feels like Hotel California. You can check in but you can’t check out (or it is very hard to).