GigaOM » Wine

Facebook makes Gifts available to all U.S. users, adds more wine to options

Eliza Kern — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:00:01 +0000

Facebook first launched its gifts platform in September, but come Tuesday, all users in the U.S. will finally have access to the service when the company rolls Gifts out to all users. There will even be wine.

Facebook has been experimenting with e-commerce on the site, allowing users to purchase items from a variety of sources including Brookstone, Baby Gap, Dean & Deluca, Fab, iTunes, Starbucks, and many others. With the site already collecting data on birthdays and anniversaries of all its users, it’s not hard to see how gifts are well-suited for the company’s business model. And Ryan Kim wrote why it’s in Facebook’s best interest to see it succeed:

“Gifts represents a big commerce opportunity for Facebook. Since it knows a lot about what’s happening within your social network, it can push users to make targeted purchases throughout the year. Also, getting people to buy even one product allows Facebook to get a credit card on file, which could turn out to be important if Facebook builds out its own payment system.”

By November, Gifts was only available to about 20 percent of users, but beginning Tuesday, all users in the United States will have access. The company also announced in November that it would be selling wine in the coming weeks, and it will be available for purchase on Tuesday.

The company has also added several new partners selling wine on the site, including: Amuse Bouche, Blackbird, Bonterra, Capture Wines, Clark-Claudon, David Family, Domaine Chandon, Goose Cross, Mondavi, Mutt Lynch, Recuerdo, Tasting Room, Terra Valentine, Titus, Twisted Oak, and Wine Country Gift Baskets.

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Wine site Snooth builds a virtual sommelier for Springpad

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:03:31 +0000

When relaxing with a glass of Bordeaux the last thing most people want to do is math. But for wine website Snooth there’s no more perfect pairing than a fine wine and a complex algorithm. Snooth is working with note-taking service Springpad to match the perfect wine to the recipes its customers clip for their online recipe boxes.

For those of you unfamiliar with Springpad, one of its niftiest features is the ability to “spring” culinary ideas from websites and store them as structured recipe data in your account. The advantage of that approach is that Springpad winds up with gobs of parsable data on ingredients, cooking techniques and instructions that companies like Snooth can act on. Every time a customer clips a recipe, Springpad relays a copy to Snooth’s servers, which then spit out detailed lists of wine recommendations that Springpad embeds at the bottom of the saved recipe.

There are countless recipes on the web — Springpad customers alone have clipped 1.3 million of them — so rather than hire an army of sommeliers to suggest pairings for each of them, Snooth has taken a Pandora-style approach to categorizing them, said Rich Tomko, the CEO of Snooth Media. It has developed a proprietary algorithm that assigns recipes to one of 2,000 flavor profiles based on their ingredients and techniques used to cook them. It then assigns each flavor profile to three of its 1,400 different wine profiles, creating nearly a million different possible pairings, Tomko said.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Tomko said. “Barbequed or grilled chicken will have a completely different taste than [sautéed] chicken, and they would match with completely different types of wines.”

If you’ve been to Epicurious, MyRecipes or Fine Cooking, you may already be familiar with Snooth’s wine recommendations. It has indexed the recipes from half a dozen partner sites in order to offer up recommendations to their users. But with Springpad, Snooth is venturing out into the larger web to parse recipes on the fly. As long as Springpad can recognize and clip the recipe — the service has trouble with food blogs and other nontraditional formats — Snooth will be able to push wine pairings, Tomko said.

NYC-based Snooth launched in 2007 with the aim of becoming the primary wine resource on the web for the growing masses of wine consumers. Snooth isn’t after the wine elite. It’s targeting the 22 million or so core wine consumers who drink wine two to three times a week. Today the site has 1.1 million registered users and 300,000 newsletter subscribers. It has raised a total of $2.6 million, all from angel investors. It has an advertising-based business model, and according to Tomko, it expects to turn a profit this year.

Snooth isn’t the only company to apply big data techniques to recipes. Yummly, which recently raised a $6 million Series A round, has been parsing the recipes of the web to extract nutritional and flavor data, which it then uses to power its semantic search engine for food. Like Snooth, Yummly is trying to predict how a dish will taste. But rather than apply that data toward wine recommendations, Yummly wants to create a service that allows cooks to find recipes by conceptual notions of sweet and savory, bitterness and saltiness, not just by ingredient lists.

Featured photo courtesy of Flickr user Davide Restivo

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What food goes well with syrah? Ask your wine bottle

Erica Ogg — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 16:36:20 +0000

Credit: Moore Brothers Wine Company

You know how you’re sitting in a restaurant and you know what kind of wine you want to drink (Tempranillo, please) and later, when you’re happily sipping and scanning the menu you think, ugh, so which food is this wine supposed to go with, again? A steak? Roasted chicken? Thai food?

This happens to me all the time. Thankfully — as with most things we write about here — people are using technology to sort this out. There’s a wine seller called Moore Brothers Wine Company near me that’s printing QR codes on all the bottles it sells to help customers understand more about the wine they’re drinking. And for those who don’t read every issue of Food & Wine, it includes those helpful food pairing suggestions. Here’s an example of what you get when you scan a bottle.

We’re big on BYOBs here in the Philadelphia metro area, where Moore Brothers does some of its business, which means picking out your own wine for a dinner out is fairly common. So the ability to scan my wine bottle at the table with my iPhone’s camera and get a tailored list of suggestions from the wine guys who sold it to me is a lot easier than opening mobile Safari and doing Google research. I can see this being helpful in other contexts outside restaurants too: It could also be a quicker way to decide on dinner ingredients when you’re out grocery shopping.

Moore Brothers Wine Company isn’t the first to pioneer the idea of a scannable code on a wine bottle. It’s starting to become a trendy thing in their industry now. But Moore Brothers is looking at this use of the technology for specific reasons: it’s a regional company, it imports small-production European wines to a market that is dominated by state-run wine stores that carry a limited variety of brands and a lot of Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Moore Brothers are trying to sell Nebbiolo, Sangiovese and Gamay, which can be a little more mysterious to shoppers.

Here’s what David Moore, who’s a co-founder and the company’s CTO, said about his business in an e-mail to me:

This presents a lot of challenges in marketing (nothing says “merlot” on it), so over the years we’ve built a lot of systems to provide contextual information about the wines and regions to our customers. This current project helps make it easier for our customers, even when they’re not in the store.

Using tech to help their customers is a great idea. But if the company’s experience is like the broader industry deploying QR codes, it’s going to be a challenge. While QR codes are popular in places like Japan, they haven’t caught on in the U.S. yet. The ability to scan these codes is almost universal in smartphones thanks to apps and built-in scanners, but people are just not embracing them: Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported that just 5 percent of Americans scanned a QR code last summer, even though the codes are popping up in 8 percent of print ads.

The QR code “fatigue” stems partly from the lack of creativity on the part of companies and advertisers employing them — people who do scan them don’t see any real payoff from doing so. That’s why I really like that Moore Brothers are thinking about how to incorporate these codes into their product in a way that’s not purely a gimmick.

Going beyond wine

Even if QR codes on wine bottles don’t take off, it’s exciting to see a non-tech company using tech to better connect their customers to valuable information.

It made me think about how many other ways food and technology could be so much more awesome together. For instance, how cool would it be if these codes were on all food packages? What if we had codes that were linked with a semantic recipe search engine like Yummly that helps with the intent of my search, not just a keyword or food category. Even more interesting: what if I scanned a box of pasta or a lemon, which would add those food items to my digital pantry, and a recipe library like Gojee (a personal favorite) could then suggest recipes to me based on the combination of items I added?

It would mean spending a lot less time spent on inputting information about what kind of ingredients and beverages I have on hand, and on doing recipe search. I will gladly lift a glass to anyone who makes this happen.

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Wine wars: Lot18 gets new funds as Gilt debuts wine site

Colleen Taylor — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:00:34 +0000

Lot18 has secured a small investment from some big-name backers, just as its competition is heating up. The New York City-based daily deals site focused on high-end wine and complementary foods announced Wednesday it has received funding from Quidsi founders Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara.

The fresh funding comes just as Lot18′s competition is growing significantly. On Monday, discount luxury e-commerce site Gilt.com launched Gilt Wine, a new segment of its food-focused Gilt Taste site that sells a well curated selection of high-end wines.

Quidsi, the company best known for Diapers.com, was acquired by Amazon for $545 million in November 2010. We’re told that Lore and Bharara’s investment in Lot18 totaled less than $1 million, and is classified as an interim round held specifically to bring in strategic private investors. Lot18 has raised more than $13 million in venture funding to date.

In an interview earlier this summer, Lot18 Co-Founder and President Philip James told me he was aware that players like Gilt were eyeing the wine space, but said he was quite confident his company was positioned well ahead of any potential competitors due to its technology and industry know-how. As I wrote then:

Selling wine online is challenging, in large part because of the complex regulatory issues that come into play when selling and transporting alcoholic beverages across state wines. Lot18 has built a software backend that checks and catalogs various compliance issues in real time for each winery with which it works, James said. Lot18 is not a licensed retailer of alcohol, and it does not hold any inventory. James told me that underneath the hood, the site functions as an eBay-like marketplace between wineries and individual consumers.

The wine buying market is hugely underserved online (no pun intended), but it’s such a lucrative space that in the current web gold rush it could not stay unaddressed for long. Lot18 has a leg up on competitors by being one of the most serious and well-built first movers in the space, but it will clearly have to work hard to keep its edge as the market fills up.

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Want some cheese with that wine? Lot18 has you covered

Colleen Taylor — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:00:15 +0000

Updated. Lot18, the membership-only daily deals website for high-end wine, is set to expand into three new product categories: food, travel, and spirits. Lot18 will start rolling out the new verticals, starting with food, within the next several weeks, ~~CEO~~ Co-Founder and President Philip James told me in a recent interview.

Lot18 has taken off rapidly since the site launched with wine sales in Nov. 2010. The New York City-based company hit an annual revenue run-rate of $12 million in April and has grown to a staff of 75 full-time employees. Last month, Lot18 closed on $10 million in Series B funding, bringing its total venture capital investment to $13 million.

According to James, Lot18 has been received so well because it taps into a hugely under-addressed market. Selling wine online is challenging, in large part because of the complex regulatory issues that come into play when selling and transporting alcoholic beverages across state wines. Lot18 has built a software backend that checks and catalogs various compliance issues in real time for each winery with which it works, James said. Lot18 is not a licensed retailer of alcohol, and it does not hold any inventory. James told me that underneath the hood, the site functions as an eBay-like marketplace between wineries and individual consumers.

Now that the company has built a scalable infrastructure, it is keen to start facilitating sales of other, related products, James said. Hence the move into artisanal foods from small producers. “If you think about the conversation we have when sourcing from these small wineries, it would be similar to what we’ll have with a small cheese producer or a farmer,” James said. “There are similar problems with getting their brand out there and shipping complexities. Those are all things that we have an expertise in.”

Lot18 expects to roll out the food vertical first, followed next by epicurean travel packages. “We have insider access to the best food and wine, and we already have a team of curators that work to source our product,” James said. “We have these connections, so we’ll more easily be able to plan a trip to go to Bordeaux and help with the harvest, or to have an exclusive dinner at a wine auction house.”

Lot18 is also working to roll out a sales vertical for high-end spirits. But that particular launch will be in the longer-term, James said, due to the additional regulations around selling hard alcohol.

While all this growth is exciting, I had to ask: Why is Lot18 working so hard to expand, when it’s already doing so well as a single-focus wine business? Why not stick to that vertical and foster the company’s status as a pure-play acquisition target? After all, Amazon has displayed an obvious interest in getting into wine sales, with its short-lived Amazon Wines effort. Even smaller daily deals and e-commerce companies such as Gilt Groupe and Groupon could certainly be interested in buying their way into the space. Why didn’t Lot18 choose to just stay small?

James acknowledged that Lot18 is probably a very attractive takeover target as it is. But the company opted to take on more funding and invest in growth because he just isn’t looking for a quick flip. “We have a pretty long-term vision,” James told me.

Indeed, James stressed to me his vision of Lot18 as much more than just another trendy daily deals play. “In terms of the competitive landscape, the kinds of sites I think about all day are not Groupon and Gilt. I think of Zappos and Diapers.com.” Both Zappos and Diapers.com had relatively long histories for the e-commerce space, and were eventually acquired by Amazon for around $850 million and $540 million, respectively. Lot18 may be shooting the moon, but if it all works out, the strategy could pay off big.

Ed. A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Lot18 Co-Founder and President Philip James as the company’s CEO.

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Vaynerchuk Thunders Into Book Deal

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:23:55 +0000

Gary Vaynerchuk is like the James Brown of Web 2.0 — the hardest-working man in the social media business. Forget turning water into wine, Vaynerchuk has so far turned wine into a video/blogging/Twitter empire and is now expanding away from his digital roots and into a seven-figure, 10-book deal.

The Wall Street Journal writes that Harper Studio will publish the books, with the first, Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World, due this September.

This isn’t Vaynerchuk’s first book. He also wrote the aptly titled Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World. (Given the length of his book titles, Vaynerchuk should opt to get paid by the word.)

Watching Vaynerchuk is like taking a master class in brand building (a very hyperactive master class). The guy sticks to his message, engages with his community and constantly works to promote himself across every new platform available. He even squeezed in a video show during a recent flight on Southwest Airlines. No wonder we named him one of our 2008 Breakout Video Stars.

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