What Makes Virtual Vineyards Rule?

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Second, Net commerce seemed likely to make its reputation as a source of lower prices in general because it promised to lower marketing expenses. Four half-page ads a year in the New York Times more than cover the cost of a good midrange Web site, and once a site is up, it's up 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And a Web site can sell direct to customers, eliminating intermediaries and slashing distri-bution costs. Falling costs, the Web masters said, would lower entry barriers; lower barriers would bring new competitors crowding on-line; and greater competition would ensure that all the cost reductions ended up where they belonged: in the consumer's pocket.

Finally, history testifies that whenever an opportunity for lower prices and simpler transactions appears, American consumers respond aggressively and enthusiastically. Over the past 20 years, American retail has been racing to feed demand by building larger chains of bigger stores, using size to club price cuts out of distributors and producers. That strategy has spread through most sectors of consumer retail, from Wal-Mart to Home Depot to Staples. Given that history, the prospect of consumers floating through virtual superstores so large that they make Sam's Club look like a corner bodega seemed a natural next step.

The argument looked pretty strong, but not everyone bought it. From the beginning there were people -- like Peter Granoff -- who were left cold at the prospect of the world's vendors wrapped in a grim struggle of all against all, a world in which brand and customer loyalty is a joke, price is king, and the closest vendors get to customers is watching software agents squint at their price tags.

But with his brother-in-law writing the code, Granoff thought he could combine the best parts of the Web-site paradigm -- convenience, reach, and low costs -- with "touch." What Olson and Granoff's Virtual Vineyards would offer consumers would be credible and useful information, an education in wine, a breadth of labels that the superstores could not and would not match, as well as a little entertainment for a market that wanted a more intimate relationship than the superstores were created to offer.

All that and lower prices, too.

Virtual Vineyards is not the only Web store selling consumer goods or the only wine shop on the Web. What makes it different is the credibility it has established in a niche market. The emphasis is on information -- supplied by Peter Granoff, an acknowledged authority in his field. "Every time we sharpen the authorial presence, people respond," Olson says.

For example, most sites that list retail goods carry links to reviews by other experts, mailing lists and newsgroups, professional prizes and awards, newsletters and journals, and the like. On Virtual Vineyards there is a clean line running straight to one voice: Granoff's.

Ordinarily, resource sites introduce the original producers by linking to their sites, which in this case would mean giving customers the opportunity to wander through the Web sites of a dozen or more wineries to read a dozen or more product presentations.

But not Virtual Vineyards. A user clicking through the winery descriptions learns as much about Granoff's command of the industry ("Among the many reasons to explore the wines of Fisher Vineyards is their use of wild yeasts instead of cultured yeasts, a very old technique that is getting a second look in California") as about the operating details of specific producers. The Web site has no forum where, in the best Internet tradition, users can and do flame the master for cluelessness.

Virtual Vineyards does have an advice column, in which Granoff fields questions on topics from investment, wineglass selection, and the relation of storage methods to climate, to put-up-or-shut-up challenges. ("Do you taste evidence of noble rot in Bonny Doon's 1993 Le Sophiste?")

Virtual Vineyards wants to educate its visitors as well as sell them products. For example, the Portfolio option, which describes wines on sale, gives a sentence or two about each label ("very bright, raspberry-scented zinfandel fruit in a medium-bodied red wine"), then takes the user up a level for a generalization about the class of wine ("Marty Bannister's two 1993 zinfandels offer an opportunity to explore the impact of appellation on finished wines with a precision unusual in California"), and then goes down a level for the next entry. Again, users learn as they shop, something they can no longer do at their local liquor superstore.

The third feature in the Portfolio option is Peter's Tasting Chart, which has seven parallel horizontal lines, each representing a dimension of wine taste (intensity, sweetness, body, acidity, tannin, oak, and complexity) for the label under discussion. Each line represents a range. The sweetness line, for example, runs from "dry" on the left to "sweet" on the right. A red diamond, placed anywhere from far left to far right, indicates the status of the wine in each dimension. Olson says the chart began as an effort to communicate with techies in their own terms. Whatever its origins, the chart is a real innovation, conveying a great deal of information at a glance.

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