Online wine communities give wineries and consumers a chance to make a match.
People in the United States are drinking more wine than ever before. By 2010, the United States is expected to be the biggest wine consumer in the world, drinking even more than Italy or France. Between 2000 and 2010, retail wine sales are projected to increase 45 percent in the United States. And the fastest growing channel of this expanding industry is online wine retailing.
Because of this, a slew of wine websites have popped up on the Internet, each trying to connect the consumer to the wine. Some are social networking sites—similar to MySpace and Facebook—that try to connect wine consumers to each other. Another model is more like Netflix, and uses a math algorithm to predict wine recommendations based on the user’s personal tastes. Still another kind of website uses the reputation of wine experts to provide users with information. The result is a mismatch of new technology striving to attract the up-and-coming wine buyer.
“What you’ll see is the younger demographic turning to online wine buying and older folks buying by referral, wine tasting or other, more brick-and-mortar methods,” says Jon Phillips, owner of Inspiration Vineyards & Winery in Santa Rosa. Philips, who established Inspiration in 2002, has continued to work in the information technology field until just recently, when he left to focus full time on the winery. “Although I haven’t read any market studies, I’m feeling this is true in my gut and seeing it in my own observations.”
Younger people, ages 21 to 35, are both more likely to use the Internet to buy something and generally more intimidated by wine than older generations. As both the Internet and they mature, online retailing may become an essential way to reach them.
Bottlenotes wine clubs
Bottlenotes.com, which launched in 2006, uses wine clubs to match its users with wines. It collects data on the user’s personal tastes, then uses that information to suggest new wines to the user.
Although Bottlenotes has customers ages 21 to 81, the majority are between 25 and 35. It specializes in matching them with small or “boutique” wineries, artisan wine with only small-scale production.
“People can go to Costco or any major liquor store and see lots and lots and lots of large-scale wines,” says Alyssa Rapp, CEO and founder of Bottlenotes. “What we do is help people find the hidden gems, and help those hidden gem wineries get access to new markets.”
Rapp came up with the idea for Bottlenotes when she was working on her master’s in business administration at Stanford University. At the same time, she was presiding over the Stanford Wine Circle, a 500-member wine club.
“During my time there, I was struck by how much these smart, well-educated, traveled people were intimidated by wine,” she says. “I didn’t pretend to have the answers either, but I was empowered to find them.”
Rapp drew up the business plan for Bottlenotes, found investors, developed the website and partnered with New Vine Logistics, a company that specializes in helping wineries ship to 44 of the 50 states.
To find the “hidden gems,” Rapp has an advisory board of wine experts ranging from wine writers to sommeliers to marketing researchers, all of whom taste the wines and rate them on a scale from 1 to 10. Only wine that gets a rating of 6.5 or above goes on the site.
Although people don’t have to pay to join Bottlenotes—you can fill out a profile and receive recommendations for free—the site’s real business is in its wine clubs, which specialize in matching customers with wine. The clubs range from the Connoisseur Club for high-quality wine, to the Kosher Club for Jewish consumers, to the Little Black Dress Club for women.
After joining a club, users get wine sent to them based on the personal tastes outlined in their online profile. The profile includes questions about what kind of wine people like, how adventurous they are in trying new wine and even how they take their coffee.
By doing this, Bottlenotes is trying to take a subjective thing—taste—and break it down to basic components. It then runs those components through a computer program that matches the person’s tastes to other comparable wines.
“Wine is an opaque product,” says Rapp. “Like anything else, it’s a skill you learn. The best metaphor I have is that it’s like putting someone who’s never been on a pair of skis and pointing them down a black diamond trail. They’re going to ask, ‘How do I turn? Where do I go? What do I do?’ So what we try to do is ask people what they like. We ask them questions they’re comfortable answering. And we use that to match them to the wine.”
Since shipping wine to other states is complicated and difficult, partnering with New Vine Logistics was essential for Bottlenotes. For wineries like Inspiration Vineyards, being able to ship to other states is one of the biggest perks of working with the website.
“It lets us distribute wine to states I’m not permitted to distribute to myself, because I have no license to ship there,” says Phillips. “So it fills a hole for me.” It also helped Phillips find other distributors. Once Inspiration Vineyards’ wine labels were brought up to compliance through New Vine Logistics, other sites (including VinUnici.com and AndreaImmer.com) that use New Vine have been able to carry the wine as well.
Online retailing is a way for small wineries to reach customers it otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach. For another Bottlenotes customer, Fisher Vineyards, a family-run vineyard that straddles the Sonoma/Napa county line, online retailing helps differentiate its product from all the other wines out there.
“One of the challenges small wineries have is finding representation in a crowded marketplace,” says general manager Robert Fisher. “Or rather, it’s the customer’s challenge of finding what they want on a crowded shelf. The criteria that [sites like Bottlenotes] demand really expand which wines are available to customers.”
Robert Parker’s expert archive
Of course, not all online wine sites are targeting younger, inexperienced wine drinkers. The website eRobertParker.com seems to attract the opposite—people who are already knowledgeable about wine and want to learn even more. Most of the site’s subscribers are serious wine lovers or people in the wine trade, according to website manager Mark Braunstein.
Robert Parker is one of the world’s most powerful wine critics. His 100-point rating system is so influential, wines that he rates 90 or more quickly become sought after. His website has a searchable database (reaching back to 1992) of all his reviews from his newsletter, The Wine Advocate, plus thousands more from his books. It also features reviews and food-and-wine experiences from other Wine Advocate reviewers, past and present. Users pay $100 a year for access to the site, which they can view anytime they want, even from their cell phone.
“So if you’re sitting at a restaurant staring at a wine list and you’re not sure what to order, you can look up a review on your cell phone,” says Braunstein. “Another common scenario is, you’re in a wine store considering a particular wine, and you want to see what Robert thought of it. And also, you want to see if it’s being sold at a good price.”
The site’s only source of revenue is the subscriptions. Although it offers links to merchants selling the wine, no money is made from them. The site also has no advertising. Because Parker’s prestige and reputation drives interest in the site, it’s essential for it to remain independent.
“Our customer is the consumer and nobody else,” says Braunstein. “Our aim is to be an independent resource, like Consumer Reports for wine.”
Other wine experts also have specialized websites based on their reputations. For example, master sommelier Andrea Immer has one that offers a wine club, where she chooses wine for her subscribers, as well as her books and CDs. Like Parker’s site, these experts’ reputations drive interest to their websites, and their offerings are (one would hope) based purely on their enjoyment of the wine.
Snooth’s social networking
Yet another twist on the online wine site is social networking, where users make personal profiles to share what wines they enjoy. Snooth, which launched in June 2007, is one such site. Part social networking site, part wine retailer, Snooth lets users create profiles, rate and review wine, link to each other and peruse a database of more than 300,000 wines.
It also provides recommendations for new wines to try. Like Bottlenotes, it uses an algorithm that pairs the wine the user already likes with other, similar wines. The difference is, it’s based on the user’s ratings of bottles they’ve tried, not descriptions of taste. Snooth is free for users and for wineries to list on; the company takes a referral fee for traffic sent to the merchant checkout pages.
Founder Philip James first thought of Snooth when he was working for wine marketing firm Wine Messenger. Coming from the business side of things, James didn’t know much about wine. But soon he saw there was a problem with how connoisseurs communicated with the average customer.
“I saw there was a gulf between the way people in the industry and those who wanted to learn more talked about wine,” he says. “I felt that even though I had little experience, I could see both sides of the same coin.” James’ approach to bridging the gap between winemakers and consumers was to build a database of wine and connect users to each other so they could discuss what they liked. He named it “Snooth,” a made-up word that sounds like a cross between sleuth and smooth.
Through social networking, a kind of democracy emerges that helps people better understand wine. Users meet people who like the same things and, through ratings, they get an idea of how people feel about a particular bottle. This, James feels, works better for the average wine drinker than magazine reviews.
“Robert Parker is just one person who reviews wines,” he says. “So OK, he likes big fruity Cabs; but what if you like dusty Italian wines? Snooth helps guide you to what you like.”
Making it real
Wine drinking may seem like it contradicts online social networking. After all, wine is something best enjoyed with others, not while sitting in front of a computer screen. But social networking online often leads to real-life socializing and friendships. On eRobertParket.com, a popular part of the bulletin board is a section for people to meet up for wine gatherings or to talk about food parings. On Bottlenotes.com, simply click on “Wine Events” to see what Bottlenotes-sponsored events are happening nearest you.
“Wine is very social,” says Braunstein. “Wine people like to hang around with other wine people. But that’s no different than anything else. People who like stock car races hang around with each other. People who like football hang around with each other. And that’s why social networking works so well.”
Some sites are already working to put wineries in touch with customers who want to find new ways to socialize. Next year, Snooth is going to launch a feature for wineries to build their own profiles to let people know about events and wine tastings, as well as see customer ratings and reviews of their products.
In the end, the website that connects wineries and consumers will have as much to do with how well known it is as anything else. The trick with ecommerce has always been attracting people—and keeping them around long enough to buy something.
For wineries, online wine sites are a way to use technology to connect with new people. The more wineries try new things, the more they may be surprised by new customers.
“Customers vary,” says Fisher. “And the Internet is powerful in that sense, because you can participate in all venues very efficiently. You’re not going to find all the customers in one place.”
