wine-and-spirits
(6)
Treasury Wine Estates
The company behind Penfolds spent a decade buying wine brands. Now it is cutting three quarters of them - and betting the whole business on the bottles people are willing to pay the most for.
Biltmore
America's largest privately owned home survives because the family behind it built a business around the visit - then kept finding reasons for guests to stay, dine, drink, shop and return.
Steric
Steric is a Culver City, California technology company that uses low-energy electromagnetic fields to adjust wine and spirits at a molecular level in seconds - improving flavor, aroma and mouthfeel without adding, filtering or aging. Its patent-pending, software-driven systems let distillers and winemakers rescue flawed batches, lock in batch-to-batch consistency, and polish premium products while preserving ABV and color. The company won the 2023 DISCUS Innovation Showcase and closed a $3.5M seed round in October 2025.
Pam Dillon
Pam Dillon is the co-founder and CEO of Preferabli, a sensorial artificial intelligence platform that teaches software to taste. A former senior technology banker at Goldman Sachs turned serial inventor, she and co-founder Andrew Sussman launched the company (originally Wine Ring) over a decade ago on a hunch that smartphones would change how people discover wine. Today Preferabli pairs the world's largest assembled group of Masters of Wine and Master Sommeliers with machine learning built by PhDs in physiology and applied mathematics, cataloging more than 800 sensory characteristics to power personalized recommendations for the wine, beer, and spirits industries. Dillon holds 11 patents in AI, was named by Goldman Sachs among its 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs, and calls this 'the most fascinating work I have ever done.'
Tzvi Wiesel
Tzvi Wiesel, who also goes by Todd, is the co-founder and CEO of BAXUS, an on-chain marketplace for rare wine and spirits built on Solana. A former fine-and-rare bottle and cask trader, he set out to fix what he calls an antiquated, broken secondary market for collectible liquids by giving each bottle a tokenized, tamper-proof record of provenance and ownership. Under his lead BAXUS acquired the collection-tracking app BoozApp, raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital, and now connects thousands of collectors, brands and institutions worldwide. He is also a working whiskey reviewer, heading the US reviews team at The Whiskey Wash.
World Market
World Market (legally Cost Plus World Market) is an American specialty retailer that has sold globally sourced furniture, home decor, gourmet foods, wine, coffee and gifts since 1958. From its first shop on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, it grew into a chain of roughly 240+ stores across the United States plus a fast-growing e-commerce business, built on the idea that a shopper in suburban America can fill a cart with hand-picked goods from dozens of countries at affordable prices.