The news of the week in the online wine world has to be the Winelibrary acquisition/partnership with Cork’d, a wine tasting note site launched last year. It might be an acquisition. It might be a partnership. Who knows? What is known is that Gary Vaynerchuk from Winelibrary isn’t afraid to take a risk.
Fact is he could continue to sell in a Wine 1.0 manner while letting his star burnish an image from a marketing perspective in the Wine 2.0 world. So, it takes a lot balls to try and marry the two in a manner that hasn’t been done. Lost in the noise of the ongoing evolution in the Wine 2.0 world is the fact that “free” isn’t a business model, so, perhaps, taking the community aspect of a tasting note site and merging it with buying opportunities via a large online retail wine presence is a way to leapfrog the old guard (Wine.com) and the new guard sites (appellationamerica.com) into truly a next generation site that provides value.
Interesting to me that a wine direct marketer like Geerling & Wade hasn’t tapped into the online community to a greater degree in order to mobilize a community of online wine drinkers into customers—they ship to all 50 states and could have been doing something like this and operating on the cutting edge for months, if not for well over a year.
For now, perhaps it takes a young visionary guy like Gary from Winelibrary to see opportunities, and more likely, to see risk as the cost of doing business and but a small factor in building success.
For a round-up on the blog posts I’m aware of discussing the acquisition, see the below links: