Analysis Summary: Neutral to Positive

Instant, accurate information is the digital game and those that are easiest and quickest to be found, win. People’s habits have demanded that those who play in the digital sphere get faster and more comprehensive with their information and that brands wanting attention actively participate. That’s why we at VinTank believe services like Vinopedia to be critical for the wine industry’s success online. While Vinopedia is not the only player in the wine searching world, with veterans like Wine-Searcher and Snooth, it does offer a new comprehensive tool for wine enthusiasts to search wines, easily compare prices and locate wine retailers – all for free. With its functional, clean user interface (UI) and its complimentary offerings to visitors, we believe Vinopedia will become a positive and influential service for the wine industry.

Market Impact: Moderate

Vinopedia has the potential to attract a broad audience in the long-term with an affordable model for retailer participation and free information for all wine-searching visitors. However, its lack of visibility in Google search results, the existence of well established competition and no formidable partners to help penetration limit its current market impact. However, the market is still open. Another strong comparative search engine is needed since the two afore mentioned veterans are using similar data.

Analysis Summary: Poor to Neutral

As more and more consumers take to the internet to research their vacations, gather destination information and manage calendars, it’s not all that surprising that this is now our second application for digital winery reservation management to Pulse in less than 4 months. There is a viable market for the right company to step in and provide wineries with this service. However, as competition starts to rise, we can no longer (responsibly) analyze these services without an eye on the new standards.

CellarPass, a Submerce product, pledges to provide wineries with reservation and customer relationship management, while giving consumers (as they refer to them) the control of their vacation that they’ve always wanted. However, after an extended post launch grace period and over a month of research, we at VinTank have determined CellarPass to be full of potential but currently premature and functionally flawed.

Market Impact: Low to Moderate

We at VinTank believe that wine country tourists and wineries alike would greatly benefit from a service such as this. The idea and timing is right, but with the significant challenges CellarPass is currently facing, we predict that it will be difficult for them to rise above their competitors.

Analysis Summary: Positive

As tasting rooms boast an incredible 48 million visits a year and fall only second to Disneyland as the top tourist destination in California, it’s easy to see the impact and importance they have in the wine industry. However, until now wineries have lacked a single tool or software application designed to accommodate and capitalize on their tasting room traffic. VinoVisit provides both customers and wineries with practical reservation management solutions through their website: a winery search engine, an itinerary creator, their reservation widget and a reservation management dashboard. And while the ultimate benefits of their software is yet to come, the thoughtfulness of their development, strength of their platform and power of their strategic partnerships will ensure a successful product.

Market Impact: Moderate to High

VinoVisit is the first reservation service of its kind with a goal of “Monetizing the 48 Million Annual Visits to the Wine Country” making it more manageable for visitors to plan trips to wine country and automating the reservation process. Although an ambitious goal, particularly considering the sluggish release of key features, we believe that VinoVisit’s ability to increase winery exposure while redefining the way wineries connect with their visitors could have a strong impact on the market.

There are dozens of wine related applications (apps) now available for the iPhone with many more in development. All of these apps are stirring a general undercurrent of consumer confusion over what – exactly – is available and what is the relative value to a user? Which app is the best and for what wine purpose? What’s the difference between this one and that one? Should I spend money on this? How should wineries or consumers interact with them, if at all?

To satisfy our curiosity (and yours) we took it upon ourselves answer these questions.

We searched and pulled together a large pool of wine applications and spread them into categories based on their capabilities, functionality, overall performance and impact on both the market and the consumer.

Analysis Summary

Neutral to Positive

Natalie MacLean is a trusted name and celebrated writer for the wine community. The introduction of her tool is, in her own words, a simple extension of services for her fans and readers answering the question she has received time and time again, “What wine would go with x?” Her jump into a mobile platform is crucial in educating consumers and broadening the reach of different varietals. Although not a tool that directly connects consumers to sales, Natalie’s personal touch and trusted opinion would undoubtedly influence the purchasing behavior of her audience if enhanced.

Market Impact: Potentially LOW

While a great application for wine neophytes and foodies, the lack of an online conversion mechanism makes its market impact low. Specifically, the wine-pairing tool suggests varietals to hundreds of dishes but doesn’t easily offer brand names or where to find. An excellent tool to broaden purchasing choices but not significant to increasing sales. The key importance of this tool however, lies within access to information necessary for making purchasing decisions by Natalie’s loyal and trusting audience.

Analysis Summary

Neutral to Positive

As with similar services, a Wine and Food pairing widget adds value to any wine search by answering often the most intimidating question to consumers – What wine to drink with what food? By partnering with Yahoo, Time Inc and Conde Nast, Snooth not only has access to over 1,000 recipe categories to offer the consumer but also an audience of up to 20mil relevant monthly visitors (the largest audience possible*) to offer retailers in Snooth’s database. However, the results to the pairing search needs to maintain integrity of suggestions and transparency.

*Measured by unique visitors to the page
not guaranteed brand impressions

Market Impact: Potentially HIGH

Although this is similar to a variety of other applications available online, Snooth’s partnerships offer potentially higher market penetration. With the benefit of a large database of retailers that are encouraged to maintain their own brand visibility and integrity, the exposure of their suggested wine pairings will have a greater, wider reach dependent on the wine’s availability in the state.

Analysis Summary

Neutral

While a mobile platform will be incredibly crucial to the future of wine sales (especially point of purchase sales), particularly to Millennials. However the mobile applications need to have strong clean data and/or useful services that make it easy to leverage the information that is meaningful to consumers and allows connection with the trade and wineries.

Market Impact: Potentially LOW

This is one of multiple similar applications available on the iPhone. Until Snooth gets greater retailer penetration for its location based services, this application has less usability, innovation and value than other iPhone Apps focused on user generated reviews.

Analysis Summary

Positive

In early July 2009, Vinfolio will be releasing an innovative marketplace coupled with a tight partnership with CellarTracker.com. Aggregating supply from users’ VinCellar and CellarTracker accounts, the Marketplace will potentially have the largest selection in the world for high end wines and more. What is groundbreaking and innovative in the program is the ability for wineries and importers to participate in the Marketplace.

Market Impact: Potentially HIGH

The ability for wine aficionados to buy and sell wine through the Vinfolio Marketplace will allow unprecedented access to long tail wines at all levels of price points creating a healthy and stable marketplace. Moreover, the ability for winery participation injects unique and possibly lower than market placed wines without creating channel conflict due to anonymity.

Analysis Summary

Neutral to Positive

Hello Vino is a wine pairing and suggestion tool that is designed to give access to recommendations to beginning wine drinkers where ever they may be through a multi-platform delivery – iPhone, Web, and SMS. We are slightly positive on the announcement for its innovative, multi-platform approach and focus on beginning users but have reservations on content and lack of ability to leverage buying pattern influencers (key to viral expansion).

Market Impact: LOW

This is one of multiple applications available on the iPhone but differs in that it compliments iPhone access with web and SMS queries. The impact to wine producers, as with other iPhone applications, only comes when producers can publish content once and reach the most users. This application only slightly enhances a producer’s reach until they extend their content matching engine for use by other partners and give producers tools to help them participate in the matching or through advertising. However, this type of mobile application will be instrumental in influencing purchases OFFLINE at the retail store level. This could be a strong tipping point if leveraged properly. Multiple paths to accessing the content (SMS, Web/WAP, iPhone) is a good start, but its too early to see what levels of adoption can be attained.

Analysis Summary

Positive

Vinfolio is quietly building one of the strongest online businesses in the wine industry. They’ve done a remarkable job focusing on a valuable niche of wine drinkers – true oenophiles, wine collectors, investors and enthusiasts. This free iPhone application extends the breadth of services and ecommerce to a mobile platform giving access to critical information anywhere and anytime a collector may need it.

Market Impact: Medium

Vinfolio is a financially sound company with a dominant position for a unique and affluent niche. Their core customers are served even further through this mobile application. While it may not appeal much to the average drinker or even wine hobbyist, the Wine Prices tool provides the avid collector with a wide breadth of very clean data on rare wines and it gives these investors a mobile platform to confirm auction pricing anytime and anywhere.