Jamie Ritchie

Chief Strategy Advisor

Jamie Ritchie recently left his role as Worldwide Chairman of Sotheby’s Wines & Spirits to join BlockBar, an innovative new marketplace, where he will become the Chief Operating Officer this July.

BlockBar is a marketplace that maximizes blockchain technology by offering the highest quality wines and spirits, directly from producers to consumers, through redeemable NFTs. All bottles can be stored; shipped worldwide; picked-up (at 250+ duty free retail locations); or resold: 24/7.

Jamie had been with Sotheby’s for more than 32 years. He joined Sotheby’s in London in 1990 and was responsible for setting-up Sotheby’s wine auctions in New York in 1994, Hong Kong in 2009 and France in 2021, as well as Sotheby’s Spirits category in 2019. In 2010, Mr. Ritchie launched Sotheby’s Wine, a retail store and online wine business, located at their flagship headquarters in New York, with a second location in the Sotheby’s gallery in Hong Kong. A range of Sotheby’s Own Label wines was introduced in 2019. Mr. Ritchie also initiated Sotheby’s new auction partnerships with the Hospices de Beaune (2021), The Worshipful Company of Distiller’s (2021) and the Napa Valley Vintners (2022). Under his leadership, Sotheby’s worldwide wine & spirits auction business achieved record sales of $132 million in 2021.

Mr. Ritchie is one of the world’s leading wine auctioneers, having presided over many extraordinary and record breaking Single Owner auctions and holds the records for selling the most expensive bottles of wine and spirits: 1 bottle of Romanée-Conti 1945 for $558,000 in 2018; and 1 bottle of The Macallan Fine & Rare 60 Year Old 1926 for $1.9 million in 2019.

Mr. Ritchie is a respected authority on the wine and spirits market and has been regularly featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Financial Times, Forbes, Bloomberg and Wine Spectator.