Behind the Scenes: Creating the Bordeaux Legends NFT

Last month, I re-released my book Bordeaux Legends as a limited-edition ebook (using epub3 technology). I chose a strategy of producing just 100 digital copies, packaged as part of a bigger Bordeaux Legends NFT that was minted via the carbon-neutral Polygon, and sold through my site using the shoot.to content distribution platform.

This was the first time that I had created an NFT, and I was releasing it against a backdrop of an NFT marketplace taking a serious battering from its recent highs. But there remains a huge amount of interest in the technology, so I hope it is helpful if I share my experiences here.

For a start, I knew that doing this would open me up to criticism, because there is so much distrust around the technology, but I wanted to explore a new method of content distribution as an author, and to understand for myself what NFTs could offer.

Bearing this in mind, I chose to do it in a limited, practical way that would harness the idea of ‘utility NFTs’ that are essentially a way to create community and offer enhanced access to an area of interest – so in this case an NFT that would offer lifetime membership of my site, plus an updated ebook version of an award-winning (and out-of-print) book, together with a piece of digital art created by my friend and brilliant digital artist Ian Padgham (also his first NFT) – all for €500, with clear real-world benefits that were not limited to ownership of the NFT itself. Choosing to release only 100 copies, and with a one-week window for purchase, also meant that it remained manageable from my side in terms of tracking and time.

I could have re-released Bordeaux Legends simply as a normal ebook but with the method that I chose, there is proof of ownership through the blockchain technology, which is not the case with normal purchasing of ebooks (buy through Kindle, for example, and you are only purchasing the right to read to the book, not the book itself), so the buyer can resell it as with a traditional book. Importantly, an ebook attached to an NFT also means the content creator will get royalties on future sales, which is not possible for authors via traditional resale channels. In this case, we have set resale royalties at 10%, to be split between myself, the book photographer Isabelle Rozenbaum, and digital artist Padgham.

I also wanted to ensure that the mechanism for purchase was simple, with no need to use crypto currency, or an NFT platform. I chose to use a proof-of-stake NFT platform that would minimise environmental impact by reducing the energy required to run the underlying Blockchain.  (I was also avoiding reprinting the book using paper and traditional distribution channels, and I will still be donating 1% For the Planet for all the new lifetime subscribers).

To keep things simple, the whole thing was purchasable directly from my website, using either FIAT (normal currency, with a traditional bank card) or crypto, with no need to set up a crypto wallet before purchase (although you can download the assets to a crypto wallet if you don’t want to just view them through the shoot.to platform). In the end, only five people chose to purchase through crypto (all using Ethereum, although they could have chosen other coins), and the rest were purchased through FIAT currency. I was also paid in ‘normal’ money, not crypto.

Going forward, if anyone wants to resell their Bordeaux Legends NFT, they can do so via NFT marketplaces such as Rarible and Opensea – but I wanted to ensure that the point of access was a set fee, not the usual supply-and-demand pricing of NFTs that rise and fall depending on interest.

Having said all that, my tip is that Ian’s artwork (he works under the name Origiful for any of you that want to check his Instagram) will be the real investment potential for purchasers, because he is immensely talented and growing in renown with every piece of art.

Why this book?

The original Bordeaux Legends book was published in 2012 in French, 2013 in English, and sold out within six months in the English version (helped no doubt by having the foreword written by Francis Ford Coppola). It was shortlisted for a Louis Roederer Wine Book of the Year, and won the OIV Jury Prize, the Best Book in the Gourmand Book awards and was awarded the Baron Philippe de Rothschild Prize by the Académie nationale des Sciences, belles lettres et arts in Bordeaux. But the French version (under the name Elixirs) did not sell out, and as Edition de la Martiniere was the main publisher (based in Paris), they never saw the need to reprint.

Prices climbed on the secondary market for the English version up to US$3,000 at one point (today it is back down to around $200 – still extremely unusual for an out of print book to sell above its original sale price), and it has also since been translated into Chinese and Korean. Of all of my books, it is probably the one that I get asked most often where can people track down a copy – I only have a handful of original ones myself, and only a single copy with the US cover, which I prefer to the UK cover (it’s the one I used for the ebook).

Cut to 2021, and the launch of my website janeanson.com. I wanted to do something to mark the occasion, and by this point the copyright of Bordeaux Legends had been returned to me and to the photographer Isabelle Rozenbaum, which meant we had a content asset that we were able to repurpose.

Getting Coppola to write the original foreword was a huge deal, and the first thing I did, after getting Isabelle’s agreement to reuse her photographs, and finding a designer to turn the book into an epub3 file, was contact Coppola to check he was happy for it to be reissued. He went one better and updated it slightly. I then asked Ian to create a specially-commissioned artwork to celebrate the relaunch, essentially making a new digital art cover. The results are brilliant.

I originally intended to do all this for the website launch, so September/October 2021 via a specific NFT sales platform, or via a wine NFT platform that was in the process of being set up at the time. But every partner I spoke to ended up disappearing, or proving too complicated, and in the end lots of different discussions came to nothing (I have since learnt that this is all-too-common in the NFT space).

In the end, a few months ago I met the team at Club DVin, the NFT wine club, and they put me in touch with Embershot in LA, who are the owners of the shoot_to content distribution site that is brilliant for content creators. They create content tokens that are simple to use, accessible for everyday users but also blockchain compatible. Purchasers of the NFT would be able to view the ebook, and the artwork, via this technology, or download it to their own crypto wallets, depending on their own level of interest in the technology. We then set up a separate system for recording the NFT Membership of the site, via a simple code sent by email (another benefit of having this limited edition approach).

Club DVin didn’t take a financial stake in the NFT, they simply put me in touch with the right people – who I believe are fellow founding members of the club – and gave me great advice, helping to work out pricing strategy, which again in the end we decided to just keep as simple as possible. They also came over to Bordeaux for a very small launch event on the day we dropped the NFT, where we opened two bottles of First Growth wines from my cellar, issuing for each one a digital tasting token that was distributed to the 12 people present at Le Chapon Fin that evening (a restaurant in Bordeaux that features in the book).

And that’s it. After the week of sales was done, I closed down the offer, having sold a good number of NFTs, although still with a few left that I am selling to existing subscribers who have requested them as gifts for their own clients, with the remaining few to be released just before Christmas.

It has been a fascinating experiment. My main takeaway is that we are needlessly over-complicating NFTs, and right now the negative reaction to them is as out of proportion as was the feverish hype of last year. At their heart, in my opinion, they are simply digital files with verifiable ownership, and offer a way to build community. They don’t need to be more complicated than that. They have huge potential for content creators (whether authors, artists, musicians or wine producers) to retain a stake in their intellectual property, and they provide a way to reach a new audience segment. Anyone who bought the Bordeaux Legends NFT has got a great deal, and I hope have had fun doing so. The best feedback I got was from someone who said, ‘Honestly this whole process has been easy. Nice job!’.

And finally, why write Bordeaux Legends in the first place?

And finally, I’ll just back up a little to talk about Bordeaux Legends itself. Once I thought of writing a book on the first growths, I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been written before. Google searches, Amazon listings, enquiries around Bordeaux all turned up nothing. There was no book that told the story of Châteaux Haut-Brion, Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux and Mouton-Rothschild. These are the most talked about wine estates in the world, which have been at the heart of Bordeaux for centuries and which – certainly at the time of my starting the research, in September 2010 – were seeing the prices of their wines shoot up higher with every passing week.

I had no publisher in mind at first, and no advance, but I knew it was the right time to write this book. The first person I approached was the late Paul Pontallier, director of Château Margaux. We met, as we usually did, in the calm, smartly upholstered salon in the main building of the estate. I had no idea what he would say.

‘I would like to follow all five first growths for the next year, from harvest 2010 to harvest 2011, to understand what it means to be a first growth and what it takes to keep the estates at the top of their game,’ I opened. Pontallier asked what the other châteaux had said (a question that all five of them asked me, and would do for all key questions during the research). ‘You’re the first one I’ve asked,’ I replied. He didn’t hesitate for long: ‘We have no secrets here, there is nothing to hide.’

As the weeks progressed – next up Jean-Philippe Delmas at Haut-Brion, then Hervé Berland at Mouton (now at Montrose), Charles Chevallier at Lafite and finally Jean Garandeau, marketing director of Latour – I started to realise why perhaps the book had not been written before.

I did not want to write a standard history of the estates, in which each was treated separately. I wanted to write an overview linking all five, to understand the moments when they became more powerful by working together and to trace some of the more difficult moments in their histories. It was going to be a delicate political dance.

It quickly became clear that following them for a year, looking at what it takes to run a first growth, would only work if it was put within the context of how they became what they are. To really understand them, I had to follow the whole sweeping saga, from their early days as Seigneuries owned by some of France’s most powerful families, to the dramas of the French Revolution, where three of the châteaux’s owners would lose their heads on the scaffold. And a key part of the book would be a retelling of the events leading up to the 1855 exhibition in Paris, where four of the five were crowned as first growths, and the determined efforts which resulted in Mouton-Rothschild joining them more than a century later.

I hit the archives in the châteaux themselves, in the Bordeaux municipal archives, and headed to London, where so much of their history is found, to Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses, to the historic wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd, and even the Royal Society – the fellowship of science, engineering and medicine which plays a significant role in the early years of Haut-Brion. And, inevitably, I headed to Hong Kong and China, where so much of their modern history was being written at the time.

I spoke to the owners and directors, but also the staff working in the cellars and vineyards, and to former directors, from Jean Bernard Delmas of Haut-Brion to Jean-Paul Gardère of Latour and Patrick Léon of Mouton. Some of my warmest insights came from the men who had spent so much of their lives at the heart of these estates, and who keenly conveyed to me the sense of pride and humility that comes with the job of maintaining them. Gardère, in particular, demonstrated that it was not just about success, but about staying true to the spirit of the first growths during difficult years. He lived through the privations of World War II and the years that followed, when supplies were scarce and the wine could barely be sold even at rock-bottom prices.

Christophe Salin at Lafite echoed the same words you hear from staff, directors and owners at all five first growths, past and present: ‘Beyond everything else, there are the estates. They were here before us, they will be here long after us. You become a better person by working with them, but you are always aware that you are just passing through. These pieces of land will outlive us all, just as they should.’

One of the most striking things I learned was just how much these five properties have played a role in the creation of Bordeaux as it is today. Haut-Brion began the revolution by creating New French Claret, the first truly ageworthy style of wine. The four original 1855 first growths led the way into the English market, the most important of the 17th and 18th century world, and so established Bordeaux as a wine to be sought out by the most powerful drinkers of each generation. The owner of Mouton in the 17th century, Jean-Louis de Nogaret de la Valette, was key to the growth of viticulture in the Médoc, asking Dutch hydraulic engineer Jan Leeghwater to draw up plans for draining the marshes that had submerged the fine gravel soils of the peninsula. A later owner of Mouton, Baron de Branne, was largely responsible for introducing the widespread planting of Cabernet Sauvignon to the Médoc. And the five estates worked together to introduce château-bottling, an initiative which transformed the wine world by assuring stability of quality and control over adulteration of wines. Time and again, where the first growths led, other estates would follow shortly after.

Ten years on, and I knew that Bordeaux Legends remained a book that deserved a richer life. To have the ability to turn it into an NFT with true utility has been brilliant.

Further info:
Shoot To
Club DVin