(TechCrunch) - If you’re a big fan of wine but still want to run a startup, there may not be that much innovation you can get away with on the product side. Wine, when all is said and done, is still wine.

That doesn’t mean you can’t turn the industry inside out by turning the traditional winery business model on its head — and that’s exactly what Naked Wines did. I decided to have a closer look at how a 10-year-old company can upend one of the oldest industries in the world.

What do you get when you mash together half a stalk of grapes, a handful of angel investment principles, a sprinkling of crowdfunding and a well-oiled marketing machine? You end up with Naked Wines, a young winemaking company that’s shaking up the world of wine. For its angels, it’s offering up one of the tastiest “exits” imaginable: wine.

Turning money into wine

When I started digging into Naked Wines, it struck me how similar the company’s role is to publishing, from a winemaker’s perspective. A winemaker pitches an idea for a wine at the company. If its in-house winemakers like the idea, they pay the winemakers a stipend, not dissimilar to an advance on a book deal.

Naked Wines then fronts the winemaker money to buy (or grow) grapes, along with access to winemaking and bottling facilities. And once the wine is ready, Naked Wines takes care of the marketing and distribution of the wines.

You can imagine a Shark Tank kind of situation, except with wine drinking. It's great fun.

— Anne Saunders, U.S. president of Naked Wines

“For the winemakers, we help de-risk their lives,” Naked Wines’ U.S. president Anne Saunders tells me. She points out that, much like carrots and potatoes, wine is an agricultural product. Unlike root vegetables, where you see a result after a few weeks, for a wine, it can take years to determine whether or not an experiment was a success. “By working with us, winemakers don’t have to worry about whether or not the wine is sold. We buy the full production of wine, so they can just focus on the art of making wine.”

Makes sense, but making wine isn’t cheap. So where does the money come from? That’s the other big innovation on the business model. Naked Wines sells a recurring wine club membership to its members, whom it calls “angels.” By paying $40 per month, a customer unlocks the doors to the Naked Wines cellars. The money contributed on a monthly basis accrues as “wine credits” over time and can be exchanged for wine at a steeply discounted price.