Shopping for wine online the virtual mall

Wines & Vines, Jan, 2000

The basics of making wine are pretty much the same as they've been for thousands of years. Throw some grapes in a container and let the yeast do that magic they do. A few bells and whistles have been added, but wine is still wine. But the way wine is sold has changed dramatically from the days when Samuele Sebastiani, among others, used to sell his wines from the back of a wagon in San Francisco.

Today, more and more customers are buying wine they've never seen in real time. Wine has come to the world wide web and business appears to be booming, although it will be interesting to check back after the holidays to see how much business is actually done. Wines & Vines will do that.

There are a number of online sites now in operation or in early startup offering direct sales to consumers. You can shop at wine.com, wineshopper.com, evineyard.com and several other sites offering national and international sales. There are also regional specialty sites, such as winesnw.com which has joined with avalonwine.com to offer direct sales of Pacific Northwest wines. (Avalon is both a physical wine shop in Corvallis, Oregon and a net shop.)

In the coming months, Wines & Vines will take a detailed look not only at the sales site but what this means to wine marketing and sales and its impact on the hallowed three-tier system.

Wineshopper.com began previewing its site on a state-by-state basis last month. By the end of this month (January) the site will be up and running in a significant number of the major wine markets, according to Suzanne Gannon of the San Francisco-based company.

Wineshopper.com has been very active in the runup to the startup, forming alliances with The Wine Spectator, Wine & Spirits and Food & Wine magazine to give consumers access to a large body of wines and wine information including reviews and ratings. According to Gannon, this is part of the company's strategy to provide consumers with unbiased information about wines from trusted editorial sources.

Visitors to the Wineshopper.com site will find a broad selection of national and imported wines only a click away. The site will also arrange delivery of the wine to their homes or to a local retailer, depending on the law of the state in which the consumer lives.

Wineshopper.com claims to offer service that is both legal and fully compliant with the existing three-tier system. The twin-engine system that powers the site provides access both to wines in distribution through Naxon Network, a wine locator database and to wines not currently on the market via WineShopperDirect, a proprietary services that sources wines directly from producers.

Wineshopper.com is backed by $46 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as well as other investors. The company was founded by Peter Sisson, the present ceo. Sisson became interested in wine when he took a wine tasting class while earning a degree in Computer Science at Cornell.

Wine.com gets fizzy

Wine.com, the Palo Alto based pioneer wine portal on the Web, kicked off a champagne wine club in time for the holidays, but the club will remain open year around. Club Bubbly is being billed as the world's first monthly champagne club.

Memberships begin at $27.50 per month and are available for three, six or twelve months. Members can opt for two, four or six bottles per month. With each shipment, wine.com includes educational materials and tasting notes for the wines.

Wine.com is apparently banking on the craving for bubbly to last past New Year's. Wines will be sourced by wine.com master sommelier Peter Granoff from producers in France, the U.S., Italy, Spain, Australia, South Africa and South America.

Club Bubbly is only the latest in wine.com's club lineup. There's the Discovery Club, Wines of the World Club, Crystal Wine Club and Classic Cellars Club.

The company also announced that it raised more than $50 million in financing from a group led by TH Lee. Putman Internet Partners, a company established to finance Internet companies. The TH Lee. Putnam investment is $20 million. The funds will be used for wine.com's global expansion and to expand the site's content through strategic acquisitions and partnerships.

Wine.com also expanded its advertising campaign over the holidays to include radio and tv advertising in a number of major markets across the U.S. The print campaign will be further expanded this year in national publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and The Wine Spectator as well as a number of daily newspapers.

Wine.com was founded in 1994 as VirtualVineyard.com and was the first online wine retailer. Wine.com claims to ship through a network of legal wholesalers and retailers to over 85% of the U.S., as well as Asia and Europe.

WineBuyer launched

Palo Alto-based WineBuyer.com, Inc. has launched the WineBuyer.com Millennium Member Program.

WineBuyer.com claims to be the first wine and spirits business-to-business supply chain information and transaction service designed to link licensed beverage buyers and sellers over the Internet.