Mike Barrow
CEO Open Vino Project
“I am from the United States and spent many years working in technology until, in 2003, I started a wine project in Argentina, from which in 2007 I took the first wine. Now in 2018 I am merging both worlds, that of technology, cryptocurrencies and the "Blockchain" with something as ancestral as wine. I am an outsider in the world of wine, because I do not come from tradition or family and this joining both worlds, which is fun. ”
He speaks a Spanish fluid, not only because since 2003 he is based in Mendoza (Argentina) where he has a five-hectare vineyard, which he cultivates in organic, but also because between 1992 and 2003 he lived in Spain, specifically in Barcelona, where he worked in the Technology sector He is a computer and winemaker (or vice versa) and has managed to unite both passions in a project, called Openvino, in which technology (cryptocurrency included) floods his lands and is used to sell his wine. What is Openvino? A free, open source project. My company is called Costaflores, I make a wine called MTB and Openvino is a project that I invented to digitally transform my company to make it the first Open Source winery where there is extreme transparency and extreme traceability using cryptocurrencies to make it the market the one that sets the price of my product. This is a project in which any other winery or other company can copy the ideas, criticize them, copy them, steal them, because everything that is intellectual property development is open. I believe that the world of wine is a closed and not transparent world in which the technology of the world of free software can be applied to the world of wine. He has launched a cryptocurrency associated with a bottle of wine In 2018 we made 16,384 bottles of wine. That wine has to spend a year in the barrel and two in the bottle before selling it, but the wine is already wine, it already exists and we already know its quality. So on May 6, 2018 we launched the first wine-backed cryptocurrency. And we threw 16,384 coins, because each one corresponds to a bottle. As the wine is called MTB, the cryptocurrency is called MTB 18 and this year's is MTB 19 and so on).
