Vinovest Reviews 254

Poor management of funds coupled with dishonest asset valuations make for a deeply disappointing experience. What was put out as a managed account ends up being more work than it's worth when Vinovest screws up and leaves you to clean up the wreckage. Stay far away.

I invested in Vinovest's whiskey casks and it has been a bad experience. Twice they have charged hidden fees that were not shown upfront and customer service is terrible. The purchase total on one cask showed $1,650 and the rep emailed and said that was the actually total including all fees, but then my credit card showed I was actually charged $1,699. The purchase price shown before you hit submit on your payment is not what you are ultimately charged and they don't show your true total BEFORE they charge you. Use a credit card that makes it easy to dispute charges in case it ends up costing more than you are OK with being charged. They advertised a whiskey cask that I wanted and told me it was available and to deposit the funds in my account to purchase it, then they used my money to purchase a completely different lower quality whiskey that won't earn as much, without even asking me! Your account portfolio will show purchase prices but not all the hidden fees that they are charging you. I gave them a second chance and the company proved its just a bad company.

Hey, everybody. I feel bad to say this, but it seems to me that this site has stopped cooperating with me and does not want to withdraw money.

Earlier, in January, I made a deposit and traded. In March I wanted to withdraw my funds, but problems started. Support has been silent for several weeks. At the moment I do NOT recommend this site.

I signed up to Vinovest in Dec 2021 and this is my ongoing feedback over the past 2.5 years.

1) They will utilize all your monies to purchase the maximum amount of wine. This will leave you with very little liquid fund.

2) Thereafter, they will bill you a high % as monthly fees, thereby forcing you to top up more into your account to avoid incurring additional % as late fees.

3) The value of the wine indicated on paper is never truly the amount you will sell it at. The "last sold prices" is often much lower than even your purchase price.

4) The statement that they "typically take 6-8 weeks to find a buyer" is probably false. My wines have been listed for months and nothing is moving.

5) If you any express interest in WhiskeyVest, they will immediately take your funds to "purchase barrels", thereby locking you into a 3-5 year period where you are unable to liquidate any funds. This is done without any of your consent.

6) The website makes it easy to put your money in, but extremely hard to take it out. It is designed to frustrate you so that you give up.

7) Support is extremely minimal and hard to reach out to. In the event that they do respond, the messages are generic. Should you reply them within minutes of receipt, you will not get any further replies.

In short, this is probably a scam, and if it were a "legitimate" business, it is an unethical one designed to extract as much funds from you without returning you anything. You will definitely be poorer "investing" with them. This is a costly lesson that I rather not learn.

Vinovest is scam. When you ask to close your account, you have to liquidate your assets but after 2 months of my wine not selling, will I ever see my money? I put in enough to buy a case with some leftover and without consultation or auto invest set up they bought another case of wine with my money. Also, I haven’t made any money but lost money so I would like to get out before I lose more money but you can’t get your money back.

THEY HAVE STOLEN FROM ME, SOLD MY WINE AND KEPT THE MONEY! STAY AWAY ITS A SCAM. NOW I HAVE TO INVOLVE THE LAW FOR THIS AND IT MAKES ME SICK!

I have been with vineovest since past 3 yrs. definitely this is shady and scam business. I m figuring out if is there a legal way that can be proceeded with this compnay as whatever they have advertised and practices they are carrying are shrewd and customer support sucks.

Do not invest with this company! I have been contacting support weekly to try to liquidate my "managed portfolio", and have not gotten a single response. What good is an investment if you can't liquidate it, or even contact the people who hold your investment. I 100% regret investing with Vinovest.

I previously wrote a review on 29 Jan. Vinovest has actioned my complaint. A company operating to good procedures doesn't need bad reviews to get favourable responses. I don't know even if any notice is taken of these reviews by the current members. Certainly are though by prospective members doing there research. For me I believe there are better ways to invest, however for those of you who want some excitement, go ahead and experience wine investment. To describe it in another way, it's like the stock market in slow motion.

I received an email with an offer to get started on investing in whiskey barrels. I made some deposits to start and wasn't sure what happens after that. Hunter responded to an email I sent and helped ensure everything went through and took time to respond to additional questions as well. He was clear and made sure I understood the process fully and helped my transactions go through. I look forward to seeing how these invenstments pay off.

I appreciate the ability to be able to invest in whiskey lots. The platform to check on investments is a great tool as well. Looking forward to continuing the journey.

I first opened my Vinovest account in August of 2020 with ~$5,000 in deposits. About a month ago, I decided to add another $5,000 to my existing Vinovest account in order to expand my wine portfolio. Three weeks later, Vinovest moved the money out of my wine account and used it to buy Whiskey investments without my knowledge or consent. I had not made any investments in Whiskey prior to this and had no intention of doing so. I sent three messages to Vinovest customer support asking that this transaction be reversed but have not heard anything from the company in weeks.
I am now trying to liquidate all assets I have with Vinovest and have discovered that there is no option on their site to sell the whiskey they purchased with my money. My wine portfolio has now been listed for sale but the estimated value of the wines (in my portfolio for the past 3.5 years) somehow mysteriously dropped within an hour of listing them for sale. It remains to be seen if I will ever get any money back from this company...And wouldn't you know it, Vinovest has no posted phone number to reach out to when multiple messages are ignored.

If you haven't given your money to this predatory company yet, don't.

Great whisky cask.

All managed wine in my account was selected by Vinovest. The value of this wine was significantly below the value posted by Vinovest on my statements. I tried to sell the wine on their account (sold most of it at a significant loss). Although I've asked Vinovest to forward all cash in my account to me, they failed to do so. When I complained (via email), the value of my account went to zero (and showed no activity to bring it to zero) and no funds have been remitted to me. I've sent several emails to customer support and senior executives but have not received any responses or acknowledgements to any communication.

I’ve been investing with this company for the last couple of years and have been very happy with it. I’m up reasonably well, well diversified, and it’s an asset class I normally wouldn’t have access to.

I have been working or investing with Vinovest for the last 2-3 years. Reading through the reviews on here we see a mixed bag of very good and very bad, as well as some in betweenness.
I can say that almost all of the bad reviews seem to come from those who have no clue about wine investment and are simply greedy individuals looking to make a quick buck.
Wine investment does not work like that and if you expect to make a lot of money in the short to medium term, then you really have no place investing in wine at all. You would be better off buying Crypto or gambling on the horses maybe. (I am not qualified to give any investment advice so do you own due diligence)
I want to set the record straight here but I don't have enough space to try to educate those that appear to need it, which would be almost every bad reviewer on here. Fact is if you actually put some effort into researching wine investment before you commit funds then you might think again or at least be well informed enough to not come on this platform and write belligerent and ignorant negative reviews that clearly demonstrate your lack of understanding as to what wine investment is all about.
When I first came across Vinovest and its idea to allow people, who would not normally be able, to invest into actual physical bottles of wine, I thought (and still do) what a fantastic idea.
So, I went ahead and invested a fair sum. I can report that my portfolio did go up in value a little, but this was no surprise as it is clearly written all over the Vinovest platform that this is not a short or even a Medium term investment, it is a long term investment, maybe 10 years or more. Its a place where you invest money you can afford and then just leave it there for more than 5-7 years before you look at it again. If one of your wines happens to reach its "Drink Now" window, you will get an alert and you can then sell your case and cash out or plough it back into another promising vintage.
In fact you can sell all your wine anytime you like, but like any trading market, all sellers need buyers and all buyers need sellers. So the selling process does take some time.
The Vinovest Concept is quite simple really, but for some on here it appears to be quite complicated, which signals to me a big red flag that such people are way out of their depth of understanding of how wine investment works.
Anyway, it so happened that for unseen reasons I had to sell my portfolio (not practicing what I preach, yes I know, but I had no choice).
Vinovest did mention that it was not a good idea as all of my wines were very far away from their ideal drinking window, but I simply explained that I had no choice and we listed about 69 Bottles of fine wine on the market.
So it must be understood that I was offering my wines on the open market to potential buyers which are independent of vinovest. Vinovest have no control over who bids for a for sale wine. It did take time. Its a bit like lugging cases of wine to a wine and cheese fair and setting up a stall. People come and bid, if its not enough you reduce your price by 5 dollars and see what happens, then over the course of lets say 3-4 weeks I had sold enough and stopped the listing. So I had a decent cash balance plus 21 bottles left. I decided to leave enough of cash balance in there to cover my monthly fees for 24 months. Then I asked the support desk how to withdraw my money and I was promptly sent an online form where I simply put my bank details and it arrived within 4 days. Job Done. So please, no more silly bad reviews because the reviewer doesn't know how wine investment works.

No, I do not work for, or in anyway, have any special arrangements with Vinovest. I am just an ordinary customer explaining and sharing my experience with Vinovest to you. God blessings upon you if you have reached the end of this tome of a Review.

Always looking for alternatives...whiskey barrels seems to be a reliable alternative and this company makes it very easy to invest in that asset class

If you want to sell your wine, you have to auction it off YOURSELF! And the value they say your account is well above the value people are bidding for your wine. DO NOT INVEST HERE!!!

Where do I begin?

I invested $10K 2 years ago over several installments. I'm currently down ~11%, which is very underwhelming for an investment that was supposed to be uncorrelated with the stock market. The figure with -11% unrealized loss is the supposed "market value" of my vines (whatever that means), not the value that I can sell it for. I've been trying to liquidate for 4 straight months, and the best bids I've gotten on their "marketplace" lowball by 20-30%, so I'm essentially stuck unless I'm willing to accept a 40% total loss. Not at all what I was expecting.

Secondly, and more importantly, the company's ethics are highly questionable. When I signed up, they advertised on their website that customers are never charged any fees for selling 60 days after their purchase date. They changed their terms *after* I invested. They are now charging a 1.5% selling fee and refuse to honor their original terms to me, which further increases my losses. They also promised that selling on reasonable terms would always be possible and that they personally hand-hold customers through liquidations. They even used to have a marketing punt on their website saying "your investment is liquid (pun intended)". Turns out all of that was a lie too.

I understand the business landscape changes and have a lot of sympathy for startups creating brand-new products, but there is no excuse for pulling the rug from under your users, especially your *early* users. Vinovest is an unethical company and I don't recommend anyone use their product. I will update my review if I receive any meaningful response from Vinovest.

I started to invest with Vinovest about 1.5 years ago as a mean of diversification, and based on the claim they had better performance than the S&P500. As of today, my portfolio is down 8% against the inital value in dollar. As a matter of fact, it is down 18% if you factor in the depreciation of the dollar during the same time. I invested to fight inflation and it went the opposite direction; my investment got depreciated against a highly depreciating currency. If I wanted to sell right now, by looking at the comments, I could expect to get 75% of the price displayed by Vinovest. That means if I would sell now at these conditions, I would have lost 43% of my investment, and this in a matter of 1.5 year... This is a complete fail, what else can I say. I believe Vinovest is over-paying the wines that they buy for their customers, and I believe their selection is not very good since most of the wines they selected for me lost their value. Obviously it does not make sense to sell now before the selling window, so I will wait, but the experience so far is painful.