Why It’s So Hard to Sell Wine on the Internet

I recently read a Bloomberg article titled, "Why It's So Hard to Sell Wine on the Internet" and I found it quite fascinating as it hit on some themes we have discussed in class. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-13/the-secret-to-selling-wine-online?mc_cid=eef05f185f&mc_eid=165016ea80

As the article writes, a major reason it is so hard to sell wine today is, "About 25,000 different wines are for sale right now, says Nielsen, with 14 percent of them having hit the market in the past year. Not even the most soused sommelier can keep up, let alone everyday drinkers who, if lucky, find a label they’ve tried before."

As we have seen through multiple guest speakers, brand, design, and a good story are crucial (along with delicious wine) to sell large quantities of wine in today's world. However the company highlighted in the Bloomberg piece, called Winc, decided to go all-in on the Silicon Valley approach and use data to figure out what their consumers wanted. By analyzing what wines they liked, the commonalities amongst them, etc, they were able to design a wine from scratch to hit on their demographics needs. Is this the future of wine? What is the balance between making traditional wines the traditional way and using data and technology to invent the perfect wine for a particular group at a particular price point? For cheap wine and self-centered millenials is this going to lead to the growth of "wineries" such as Ava Winery, "Wines without Vines", a San Francisco start-up that is making synthetic wine without grapes – simply by combining flavor compounds and ethanol?