Good Grape Wine Company

This is a huge opportunity - and the marriage of review potential with buying power is massive. If one looks at how Amazon utilizes user reviews and personal lists to boost sales - the opportunity certainly exists in wine. This week I’m going to take on the London wine-fair, which is basically 1,500 wineries strutting their stuff in a space the size of two football fields. The cost of participation is significant, and what’s even bigger is the sheer anonymity of it all. Having represented a few brands myself, I’ve seen the frustration that comes when you see that you don’t get any return on attending a wine fair. Namely because you can’t sell the wine there and then - and by the time the guy you got excited about your brand has left the room, he’s already gone through the innebriating sip-spit-sell-sell routine 50 times, and is not likely to remember much the next day.

I think that a lot of wines are like indie bands. They’ve got a small following of regular attendees - and they haven’t quite gotten close to getting a big record deal. Ultimately the differentiation then between sell out wines and ones that don’t get to the shelves, becomes arbitrary.

The whole situation is reminiscent of the music industry before MySpace, which has just acquired the rights to sell music from the site. I wonder if we’ll start seeing online concerts from people’s garages where you can buy tickets to watch online. 

Now that Gary’s got Cork’d - the opportunity exists to mary consumer participation with consumption. Ultimately your observation that Gary’s taken the Wine 1.0 model and made it a lot bigger is too true. Gary’s a super-salesman who hand sells wine - and before WineTV he won hearts and minds one customer and one wine at a time. Now he’s able to do multiple wines and win over hundreds of customers each episode, five times a week, 52 weeks a year. Unfortunately - the system ends up perpetuating itself - and its a case of either being on WineLibrary TV/ or more often, not being on WineLibraryTV. Gary may not yet be Wine 2.0 - but he runs the risk of becoming Parker 2.0… and I think that acquiring Cork’d will make WineLibrary less autocratic and Garycentric… and will instill a more democratic vibe. The community aspect is missing.

We live, or rather - drink in interesting times…