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. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure how many of you are aware, but there is a website in the wine industry that claims to be an blog aggregator for the purpose of “content analysis”. Here is what they say about themselves - Vinolin’s justification for being thieves. To make matters funnier/worse, the layout of their site looks like a slight rip-off of cork’d’s.

I noticed Vinolin was aggregating our content when I discovered this post on their site about a year ago. In all honesty, it didn’t really bother me all that much, as they were just displaying the excerpt, and I saw there was a back-link to our site.

Now… just take a look at this page: Vinolin’s Rip-Off of our last post. This link takes you to google’s cached version, I did this in the event they pull down the page after this article goes public. On this page, you see they didn’t limit themselves to an excerpt, they blatantly copied the entire post and displayed it on their site. The audacity is unbelievable, especially considering they are aware that people have a problem with it(as people should).

So, not only do I discover that they are stealing content from our site and others, but as an even further sign of disrespect, they have not managed their robots.txt file so as to keep those articles from being spidered by the search engines. For those of you who are unfamiliar with search engine optimization, most search engines exact a penalty for duplicate content. It is not uncommon that an original creator of content can lose page rank, and even their indexed version of a page if the spider crawls the the duplicate first. The fact that they are providing a back-link doesn’t help anything as they would lead you to believe, because they are not linking back to the original content, they are just linking back to the main page of (y)our site. Read the rest of this entry »

Current laws allow wines to be shipped direct-to-trade IF a distributor is involved in the transaction. The distributor is responsible to pay the taxes, and…well, thats it. A virtual inventory portfolio is - all of the wines, that a distributor represents, in the direct-to-trade markets.

Supplier’s take their inventory, and place it in a fulfillment/distribution warehouse, where it is kept on consignment basis. (technically, this could be the distributor’s warehouse) The supplier is responsible for shipping it to the warehouse, and is responsible for all the costs of warehousing the wine. When a trade order is placed for the wine, it ships directly from this fullfillment center to the restaurant/specialty shop/retailer. Once the wine is delivered, the monies to cover the taxes are then transferred to you, the distributor, along with a ‘virtual portfolio handling fee of $3-$5 / case. Read the rest of this entry »