Wine for Regularians

So Amazon’s out of the wine game. I think I’m going to – sniff….
Well, there’s nothing like price slashing to catch attention on either side of the fence. I can attest to the value of the Web 2.0 model for propagating wine opportunities for consumers and sellers alike. Conversely, what we’ve been looking at since the dawn of domestic wineries’ replication of the direct-to-consumer outreach is: how to reach the “end user” in a meaningful way? How do we demystify what’s in the bottle and justify the purchase as the relevant one? How do we recreate the ephemeral quality of a wine experience and promise that potential time and time again with accuracy, romance and fidelity? The crux: how do we bring the wine to the consumer’s table with the assurance that (s)he will return to capture that experience again, across vintages and varietals? The endeavor for horizontal and vertical client-building relationships boils down to one thing: value. But to pull the cork for consumers is the only viable way to create the perception of desire. We’ve become victims of our own technologies in a way. We’ve been trained for centuries to displace our own higher knowledge and put it in the hands of our leaders – first cultural, then religious, and now economic. There is no match for wholesale point-and-click discount when wine consumers thirst strictly for the deal. But we all know that in order to work prudently and profitably within this Amazon-minded dilution of the wine experience, high production wines are the only inventory that can fulfill the model properly. Therefore, in this AmazonWine world, which participants would have won? The million-casers and the plonk-swillers. Who would have lost? The connoisseurs and the boutique wineries, which are the producers that can tell you a lot more about what to expect in that bottle than the corporate megalith in alliance with Amazon that a) deprioritizes quality and b) leverages the fundamentals of economy of scale to purvey what boils down to a profit-generating product. (I find “product” such a diminutive term for wine.)
Come on, don’t we eschew patronizing WalMart in favor of the family business? Let’s put the power of marketing back into the hands of honest-to-goodness wineries and let them maintain their values, brands, and above all – their pricing. Wine Societies, in my opinion, places that power where it belongs. Very searchable – see what I mean, and catch onto this revolutionary new way of transacting in a respectful manner, where everyone wins and nobody fails to understand the true value of a wine.