Online Wine Club Taps Booming Trend

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The New York Sun

Are you bewildered by the many new wines that are popping up on menus? Does your comfort zone extend no further than Bordeaux and the Napa Valley? Do you secretly study your Sharper Image electronic guide before heading out to the wine shop?

Don’t be ashamed. Small wineries are proliferating throughout America, and retailers are responding to booming wine sales by expanding their purchasing radius ever farther from home. Since 1990, the number of wineries operating in the country has more than doubled, to more than 3,000. Fueling the expansion has been an 11-year climb in consumption, which hit an all-time high of 2.77 gallons per capita in 2004.While we trail the Europeans, the emergence of the thirsty Millenial Generation – some 70 million strong – is driving demand and creating new marketing opportunities.

To cash in on these trends, Kim Donaldson and partner Alyssa Rapp launched Bottlenotes earlier this year. The online wine vendor and club attempts to select wines from small vineyards around the world that will suit their customers’ individual tastes. To join, a potential member simply logs onto www.bottlenotes.com and then fills out a short questionnaire that gives the organization some clue as to preferences.

If you’re the kind of person who’s nervous about sharing too much personal information over the Internet, stay calm: The questions tend to focus on your choice of pinot grigio or Chardonnay, or whether you put sugar in your coffee. Not the kind of thing that facilitates identity theft.

Once Bottlenotes has your profile, you can sign up for monthly or quarterly wine purchases that will automatically be charged to your credit card – and that can be terminated easily. The folks at Bottlenotes send you wines that appear to match your profile; according to Ms. Donaldson, e-mails from customers suggest that their selections are right on the mark.

Ms. Donaldson likens the approach to that of Netflix, the DVD rental group that sends out films based on former choices. In fact, a co-founder of Netflix, Jim Cook, is on Bottlenotes’ board of directors.

As befits a customized sales approach, the company offers a number of different clubs. Customers can choose from the Explorer’s Club, which offers relatively inexpensive wine from less well-traveled wine regions such as Chile or Santa Barbara. The least costly regular club purchase is two bottles per quarter for $39.95 plus $9.99 shipping. The most costly is from the Connoisseur’s Club, where the two-bottle order is $99.95 plus shipping.

A new club being rolled out next week is the Limited Addictions Club, an invitation-only affair where membership will be held to 500 nationwide. This group will be offered tasting events and will have access to extremely hard-to-come-by wines.

Ms. Donaldson’s entrepreneurial credentials include a possible genetic predisposition inherited from her father, William Donaldson, and the founding in 1994 of the successful Donaldson Design Group. This company produced design and marketing programs for many well-known companies, including Yahoo and the New York Stock Exchange. An assignment from Kobrand introduced her to the founder and CEO of Napa winery Cakebread Cellars, Jack Cakebread, who is now a Bottlenotes director.

She led Mr. Cakebread around the country on a marketing trip that included wine tastings and seminars at several prominent business schools. (Apparently, budding execs are as intense about mastering wine trivia as they are about conquering finance.) On the tour she developed her palate and her understanding of the wine business. Also, she met her partner, Ms. Rapp, who was heading a 500-member wine club as a student at Stamford Business School. In 2004, Ms. Rapp became sales director for RO Imports, a small company importing wine from New Zealand that was owned by a well-known fund manager, Julian Robertson. Not long after, she proposed the founding of Bottlenotes and recruited Mr. Robertson as a director.

The company markets mainly to people in their 20s and 30s, tapping into that group’s apparent appetite for wine. These are folks who apparently enjoy dining (or at least drinking) at home, and who don’t mind paying up for a decent or unusual bottle of wine. They are also people who are accustomed to buying anything and everything online.

The business has grown rapidly since its start-up, and is now regularly serving 300-500 customers a month, Ms. Donaldson said. In addition to purchasing wine through the company, customers can maintain a personal “virtual cellar,” where past purchases are noted and even tastings of wine from other shops can be recorded. With the customer’s permission, friends can review their cellar, to choose a gift or tap into their experience.

The personal profiling distinguishes Bottlenotes from myriad other online wine ventures. Also, the founders have built an advisory board that includes such industry notables as the head of the Charles Krug Winery, Peter Mondavi Jr.; the trade liaison for the Bordeaux Wine Bureau, Robin Kelley O’Connor; and the founder of Christies’ New York Wine Department, Jackie Quillen.

Bottlenotes’ founders intend to link the company’s Web site to food and entertainment sites such as Netflix, and to help customers organize entire events. Also, other clubs are sure to be rolled out, as well as new wineries.

Ms. Donaldson is clearly excited about the company’s prospects; she also says she’s never worked harder in her life. One of the more pleasant chores that comes her way is the tasting of a great deal of wine. Now that could become a limited addiction.

lpeek@nysun.com


The New York Sun

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