wine.com - online wine shopping

My second wine merchant review covered one of the most marketed wine sites of the year, Wine.Com. With a catchy name and great graphics, Wine.Com is poised to be a big player in the online wine sales market.

The main screen has a newsletter-feel to it, with blurbs about various current wine selections. Links near the holidays included choices of bubblies and year-end reviews. On the left, drop-downs are available by category, price, and origin. The categories and origins are nicely broken up into winetypes and countries, making it easy to begin your search. At the very bottom of the page is the where-shipping-to choice. This is so small and hidden that I have to imagine that hardly anyone sees or uses this before beginning their browsing. I therefore didn't use it.

I began my quest by searching for "Greek". No wines, but this is not a typical region so I moved on to Hungary. There were only two wines available from this country, one for $31 and one for $525. The results listing is nicely laid out, with great symbols indicating the best values and the special items. I decided the $31 might be nice to get.

It's at this point that the system thought to ask me which state I lived in. It turns out this wine isn't available! It's frustrating to go through the selection effort and find something you want to buy, only to be told after you try that you can't have it. The state selection definitely should be much higher on the main page, to almost force you to choose a state before moving into the system. Otherwise, frustration is sure to result.

With the state on, I tried Israel. Only one selection, which is a shame with it being the holiday season and all. Other more common wines I looked for were not in the system. After further poking around, I did order a Banyuls and a Long Island dessert wine. A few quick screens of information, and I was done.

A few days later, I got a phone call. Apparently what Wine.Com does is ship the customer's wine to a wine shop near that person, and then that wine shop sends someone out to deliver the wine to the customer. The wine shop owner was making sure I was home before he drove the hour + to get to my home. Sure enough, about an hour and a half later he pulled into my driveway and handed over my purchase.

The packaging was great. There was a main invoice, a filled-by-the-local-shop invoice, then details on each wine with 'Peter's tasting chart". This paper included a description of the wine and details about the winery. It also included charts of perception of dry/sweet, intensity, body, acidity, tannin, oak, complexity. Very nice, especially for new wine drinkers.

I think with a bit of redesign, so the visitor is sure to choose the state first, that this site would be easy to use. I was disappointed with some of the common items I looked for and could not find, but I'm sure their selection will grow over time. Perhaps the part that made me most uncomfortable, though, was the thought that some poor wine shop owner over an hour away would get rousted every time I placed an order, and would have to manually drive it out to me. There are definitely local shippers that are licensed to carry wine, and I'm curious why wine.com wouldn't use them.

Wine.Com

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