Surfin'

Wines & Vines, Dec, 2001

The silence speaks volumes. I mean the silence after all the hype about what was billed as the biggest wine auction in history. Pre-auction press releases from Realm Connect, the company handling the sale of about 80,000 cases of wine and wine paraphernalia, were all that remained of the defunct online wine retailer wine.com.

Held at the end of September, the auction was expected to raise most, if not all of, the $10.6 million owed to creditors by the company.

It was a flop. A bomb. A dud. The auction was held in a hangar at the Napa Airport, and some 6,000 people were expected for the two-day event. Instead, only about 300 showed up each day, according to reports. Frank Prial, writing in the New York Times, quoted Roger Sanford, the chief marketing officer of Realm Connect, as saying that "only a fraction" of the $10 million was raised.

While agreeing that timing was a major problem--he was referring to the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.--Prial wrote that the lousy results were "dramatic evidence of how far interest in online wine has slipped. When even such a large array of bargains fails to attract many buyers, it's clear that, for the time being at least, the once-promising future of Internet wine sales is a thing of the past."

Wine.com started, as you recall, with grand plans to ship wine to every state. Not an easy task, considering the regulations on interstate wine shipments. (By contrast, eVineyard, which now owns the wine.com name but had nothing to do with this auction, ships only to states that allow wine shipment.) Wine.com built up a huge inventory, searching the cellars of the United States and Europe, buying up rare vintages but also, oddly, buying up a lot of rather ordinary wines, like 15,000 cases of Beaujolais. Millions of dollars were spent on wine when wine prices were at peak levels.

Prial reported that at the auction many of those same wines sold for as little as 10 cents on the dollar.

What struck NetBoy was the lack of post-auction hype. Nary a press release in sight. I did all sorts of Web searches but found no report of auction results. I guess you had to be there.

Winecountry.com Adds Sites

In happier news, winecountry.com announced the successfully completed launch-phase of mendocino. winecountry.com and santabarbara.winecountry.com. WineCountry.com is a resource for the destination traveler gathering information on the wine country of California.

FreeRun Technologies, Inc. is the parent company of winecountry.com. FreeRun Technologies, established in March 1993, specializes in the design, implementation, hosting, maintenance, e-commerce and marketing of Web sites.

RELATED ARTICLE: A Site to See

William Bincoletto, the founder of the online wine magazine Purple Feet, believes that, "Life is too short to be too serious." Bincoletto is a sommelier and founder and director of the Alberta Wine institute in Canada.

The articles are informative and literate, the latter a rare quality in wine writing. Topics cover both food and drink. A recent feature included a detailed report on the 2000 vintage in Bordeaux. On the food side is a wonderful article about eggplant. Yes, seriously, eggplant. NetBoy says check it out at wineiscool.com/purple.

Netboy