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.

We are key supporters for the #ownit campaign at yourwineyourway.com.  This innovative and free service from Cruvee.com was created to help catalyze the success of wine online by helping wineries and wine/tech companies leverage clean data from one source.  Will you and your brand #ownit?

New Media and Wine

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.