I asked ChatGPT “How can you pay for something and it still not be yours?”
It replied: “If you pay to buy it and it’s still not yours, it’s a gift.”
Not quite.
What I was referring to was a scandal in the wine world that unfolded a week before Christmas, the Oeno Group scandal, that is agitating the wine world and has struck at the roots of one of the most crucial, least regarded issues: ownership.
On 19 December 2025, London-based wine investment firm Oeno Group published a notice at the request of the City of London Corporation’s Trading Standards Service warning that “Oeno has recently ceased trading.”
While there is suspicion of foul play, what has left many customers most perplexed is this: despite receiving invoices and certificates of authenticity and ownership, the City of London Trading Standards Service wrote on Oeno’s website that “only 20% of client wine is held in individual customer accounts that the customer will be able to access.”
So, how can you pay for wine and it still not be yours?
To answer that, I sat down with Vincent O’Brien, Managing Director of Octavian Wine Services, one of the world’s leading fine-wine storage providers.
We discussed what “ownership” actually means in practice; how to verify your wine is held in your name; why unique case identifiers and customer portals matter; what documentation you need if a merchant or investment firm collapses; and how weak record-keeping can blur provenance and destroy value.
But I am still left with one question: why does the market have so much faith that the wine is actually there?
Is it blind trust, naivety, or ignorance of how custody works? A belief that an invoice equals ownership? Or simply that checking feels like too much effort until something goes wrong? Before visiting Octavian last November, I was the same.
Happy listening!
Here’s the transcript of the conversation.
Thank you as always for being here!
Sara
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