Noir is both a sparkling wine and a digital token. This NFT project is powered by Soramitsu, a Japanese company for global blockchain solutions. Recently, Noir’s co-founder Ann-Marie Paz talked to GBBC Virtual Member Forum, let’s see what we can find out about the project.
Let’s start with a bit of background of the co-founder and creative director Ann-Marie Paz. Ann-Marie told in the interview for GBBC Virtual Member Forum that she studied industrial design at the Pratt Institute and designed for Nike Lab. She had always been into art and innovation, drawing her biggest inspiration from the new-futurist designer Syd Mead, who worked on the “Blade Runner” movie. The aesthetics of noir, based on sci-fi films, had always attracted her and was the inspiration that gave the name to the Noir project.
When working at Nike she saw the amounts of waste and chemicals the industry was producing and tried to make her own designs as minimalist as possible. On visiting Tokyo, she was greatly impressed by the combination of craft and technology in Japanese production, so upon returning to the US, she started exploring the local organic produce and small-batch craft beverages. Ann-Marie was already a great wine connoisseur when she met the other co-founder in Los Angeles, and they started a bottled wine start-up together. Around the same time they met Makoto Takemiya, CEO and co-founder of Soramitsu, and convinced their winemaker to accept XOR (SORA project tokens) for payments.
Soramitsu helped Ann-Marie and her partner build the community around Noir from SORA members by sponsoring events with their bottled wine. Once their wine was at the NFTNYC event they started thinking about how NFTs could help break the traditional walls for young artists, and this could also apply to the rare wine market as well. NFT concept is great for the wine industry as it helps verify authenticity of the product in a market full of fake wines.
For the official launch, Noir produced 777 bottles of champagne made from grapes harvested on a full moon. Each bottle was tied to a digital token, a bonding curve determined the price for each bottle sale - every digital token sold increases the price of the next one. The Initial Noir Offering (INO) included 77 tokens with Noriko Soramoto, a really cute female anime character.
After buying the token with SORA, you could then redeem it and get a physical champagne bottle delivered to you as well as becoming a member of the Noir Society with access to special events. Noir is planning to hold quite a few of them across the summer. There is a lot in Noir’s pipeline besides parties: the luxurious packaging and other wine varieties are coming soon, and more importantly they want to expand their vision by launching the first NFT marketplace on SORA network and further expand to other alcoholic drinks and beverages.
NFTs are already changing the fashion industry (like Prada Time Capsule project): they provide an opportunity to learn how much of something is desired and make the exact amount, in this way they could avoid overproduction and improve the global ecology. Ann-Marie Paz thinks that NFTs are much more than profile pics, they could change the way we trade, making it more efficient and less dated.
The wine market is also changing with the help of NFTs as Noir is not the only one on the NFT marketplace (yet to be launched) of alcoholic beverages. Metakask project is another shining example of a marketplace for spirits-backed NFTs. Although it looks a lot more amateurish compared to Noir’s visual image, it is still a sign of the new wave of NFT wine start-ups.
Noir seems like a promising project with ambitious aims and solid technical backup, let’s observe and see what happens in the near future.