Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/70673
D A T A CENTER flash wine sales website is a web-based business whose main service is online direct-to-consumer wine sales or marketing with a prominent discount component, a time-urgency component and a limited-quantity component. Flash sites can either sell wine directly with their own retail licenses and ship them, or they can solely market wine for unrelated wineries that take the sale and ship the wine. Wines & Vines is tracking numerous flash sites and outlines data from six of them in The Flash Report this month. What is a flash site? A The flash site's attitude might be called pure Jersey: no telephone calls, minimal cus- tomer service, take it or leave it. The offer- ings seem balanced between domestic and imports. The average discount from winery retail in December was 51%, and the aver- age offered price was $28. Recently WTSO has sold a wide variety of brands including Kunde, Round Pond, St. Supéry, St. Fran- cis, Charles Heidsieck and Piper Heidsieck, Sonoma Cutrer, Raymond, Hess, Mumm Napa, Beaulieu and Chateau St. Jean. Wine Woot, which is affiliated with Woot. com, offers one wine each day. It acts as an advertising agent for the winery but not as the seller. The winery is the seller of record, but Wine Woot handles the logistics of shipping that wine, even picking it up from suppliers near its Santa Rosa site. Broth- ers David and George Studdert are the co- founders who approached Woot.com to set up the operation in 2005. It appears to be the pioneer flash site. Wine Woot has be- come a wine community as well as a sales site. Extensive dialogue between fans and winemakers takes place on the website, and users initiate local gatherings to taste wines and socialize. All wines are domestic, mostly from California. The average offered price in December was $62. The wineries' view Wineries have mixed feelings about flash sales sites, as evidenced by their reluctance to talk about them either on- or off the re- cord after a dozen calls to normally reliable contacts. Selling wines through the sites can upset distributors and retailers, some of whom pay more for the wines than the flash prices. Another concern is that regu- lar consumers or wine club members might happen on flash sales at lower prices than what they have already paid, though most flash offerings have short exposures. One well-placed winemaker/manager with extensive experience at a medium-size 7 Hours Left ORDER NOW Turn to g page 16 for The Flash Report. and a small winery, notes, "It's an impor- tant tactic in these hard times, but it creates hard feelings with distributors. It's a way to reduce inventory and raise cash. Some of these sites can take hundreds of cases of wine and sell them out in hours to minimize the time people might notice them." The manager, who prefers to remain anonymous, says the low prices hurt win- eries, but the wineries supplying wines to flash sites don't actually lose money on the deals. He adds, however, that the practice isn't sustainable for a winery. It can't con- tinue to do this as a routine business prac- tice. He adds, "It's a sign of the future, and every crack in the distributor's three-tier monopoly helps!" One of the few winery officers who would talk said that working with The Wine Spies was a very good experience. "They pick up the wine and we don't have a lot of paperwork, and they pay in three days." Her winery has used the The Wine Spies six times and sold 25 to 60 cases each time; she added that an experience with Rue La La proved frustrating. Chris Dearden, former manager and winemaker at Benessere in St. Helena, Ca- lif., and now a consultant and vintner on his own, hasn't used the flash sites but of- fers his opinion, "For the record, I believe that you erode the consumer base and it is sort of a rip-off to your wine club mem- bers to offer the wines on these flash sale sites unless you are going to offer the same thing to your members first." He adds, however, "This has to be tempered with inventory concerns, I admit." Dearden says he thinks it would be bet- ter to make more by-the-glass options available and discount more heavily to dis- tributors before using a flash site for an established brand. 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