After reading both Tom Wark’s post last week about the coming implosion of the US wine wholesalers and the news released yesterday of Amazon entering the US wine market, I think we can all feel the change coming. We haven’t talked about it much in our writings over the past year+, but our main advisor/investor in our Tastevine wine project is on the board of directors of the recently merged R-NDC (Republic National Distributing Company). From our experience, change is ready.
We have learned so much having an inside viewpoint on the true nature of the industry, from the struggles, to the perceptions, to most importantly the arrogance that all parties use to mask their fear of change. Everyone knows where the industry is going and really wants to come together to bring about change, but no one is 
ready to compromise. As the direct movement continues to gain momentum and breakdown barriers, wholesalers continue to feel backed into a corner, forcing them to use their brut force and FUD tactics to make everyone else feel the stress that they do. Wark’s line is priceless tho –”Now, they whine like a little girl who just soiled their Sunday dress and run off crying to daddy asking him to put down his tools and stop doing his job, so he can clean the mess the little girl made all by herself.”– lol.
The only real way to make great change is to reach out and show compassion to everyone. I’m sure we all remember a guy named Bill Gates who reached out to the big bad IBM and helped them see the light. Sure he still has critics for being a pirate, but that act helped catapult IBM into a more innovative company, which in turn allowed room for a lot of other players to thrive (Apple ironically being one of them). The point is that the wholesalers are not going away and some of them are actually decent people, so how do we help stop all of this chaos and come together to build more value and make more money together? A cool millennial brand to spark distributor centric dtt SaaS could be a start
