The Drinks Business: ‘It’s us versus the red trouser brigade’

Full Article: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2025/09/its-us-versus-the-red-trouser-brigade/

For Callum Woodcock, founder of fine wine investment syndicate WineFi, it’s all about beating ‘the red trouser brigade’, as he employs nothing more than market data to trump the traditional human expert.

While the sartorial reference was made in jest, it was used to make a serious point about a data-driven model for wine investment, as Woodcock explained the basis for WineFi in a podcast with db – held ahead of his appearance at our conference on Wednesday 8 October, which you can sign up to here.

Turning his attention to what drew him away from a career in finance, Woodcock said that he was attracted to the wine business because he saw an opportunity, and loved the product.

“It didn’t take me long to look at fine wine as both a consumable and an investment,” he told db.

Continuing he said, “The characteristics of fine wine, the tax efficiency of investing in fine wine in the UK, makes it particularly interesting; and the thing that fascinated me about it, is that I built a small wine portfolio prior to founding WineFi and it was by far the most interesting part of my investment portfolio.”

“… And then when I started looking at the data side, we jokingly say in a trading perspective, it’s about us versus the red trouser brigade in terms of spotting what may or may not outperform, and that just made it way more compelling, because you cannot do that in traditional asset classes – those gaps have closed – and you can’t really do it in other collectibles either because the data is not there.”

Essentially, in Woodcock’s words, “we are applying cutting-edge quantitative analysis to an asset class that is unique amongst collectibles in that there is real time trading data going back 25 years that can be used to back-test different scenarios and understand what factors actually impact price appreciation in fine wine.”

The planned result for this start-up wine investment syndicate, which is backed by Coterie Holdings, is that WineFi “will over time dramatically outperform the wider market benchmark.”

While the investments made are based on “mathematical models”, Woodcock assured db that “We do have a head of investment who is a wine expert that backs anything that goes into a portfolio, but we use our cognitive models to narrow down the universe of wines.”