Crowdfunding in wine business as financing opportunity for smaller wineries

Abstract

Crowdfunding is an innovative form of financial support for enterprises, most of all when smaller and engaged in ethical/sustainable issues. This is true also for wineries: in fact, they are ideal subjects for crowdfunding experiments, especially if active also in vine cultivation. Very few platforms, however, are currently available especially for wine crowdfunding: one of the most important is Fundovino, whose so far accomplished projects provide no recourse to dividend from equity, but recourse to in-kind return (above all wine, of course). In other platforms, wine crowdfunding could find attraction also in equity (e.g., WineFunding), but in every circumstance of wine crowdfunding a sentiment of involvement/engagement/commitment of the backers seems present, as clearly emerges from the investigation on Fundovino as case study. The research, with exploratory nature, analyses the possible mix of reward (how), together with the presumable expectations of the backers (why), for wine crowdfunding projects with non-equity finality.