• "Why do they buy wine?" The wine business would benefit if it listened to experts outside the industry on marketing its products. That's the opinion of Helen McGinn who used to buy wine for the British Tesco supermarket chain, who told a conference that the wine business is too insular in its approach. “The golden ticket," she said, "is thinking why does someone want to buy a bottle of wine in the first place? Who are they drinking it with? Is it a celebraion or special dinner? And then giving them options.” This will not come as a revelation to regular visitors here, and I think it's especially significant in the wake of the industry's shock that the wine buyer for Costco isn't awed by wine as much as they think she should be.
• Direct-to-consumer wine sales: Wine drinkers buying directly from the winery could well be a key part in the future of the wine business, says the Wine Intelligence consultancy, tripling over the next decade. But there are a couple of caveats. First, the indsutry must still struggle with draconian shipping laws left over from Prohibition. Second, it's a tiny, tiny part of wine sales -- just 30 million Americans buy direct in a six month period, and it accounts for just one bottle in 50 sold in this country.
• The failure of iPhone apps: Writes Paul Mabray of VinTank in Palate Press: "Why are wine iPhone apps not succeeding when other niche apps like Foodspotting are doing so well?" The piece offers a couple of good reasons, including and most imporantly the lack of wine drinkers who want to use them. It's not so much that wine drinkers are interested, says Mabray, but that there just aren't a lot of wine drinkers to use them, and especially when compared ot food apps. Since everyone, after all, eats and only 60 percent of the U.S. population drinks wine.
The wine apps that I have seen are not very good. The one from erobertparker is apparently a dog based on the price ($4.99/mo) and poor utility. Parker's website indicates that they do not support the app themselves. What we need are some computer savy wine guys to come up with a useful app.
Posted by: Milton Zmijewski | May 08, 2012 at 01:28 PM
D2C has quite good growth and tripling could be a modest increase but there are many barriers to that growth. The USPS getting the ability to ship wine could really tip the issue quite nicely. So the gov't could eventually "pressure" states to get those 4,000 laws down to a handful and then maybe the actual price of shipping wine and the price of wine may get some adjustments made!
The future is both bright and messy for wine...change is good but some won't like it :)
Posted by: Noblewines | May 09, 2012 at 04:39 PM
Here is website that reviews (somewhat) the "wine" apps available for the iphone.
http://www.macworld.com/appguide/search.html?sort=search&search=Wine#types=&prices=any&compat=&sort=search&page=9&cat=&compares=&dir=desc&ages=&compare=undefined
Posted by: Milton Zmijewski | May 16, 2012 at 02:59 PM