Finding the Wine you Like Through Trust and an App

 Wine is a very personal thing. And in the world of wine, wine choices seem endless. In Italy alone, there are dozens of wine regions and classifications inside of each region. Most people keep drinking the wine they know, it’s what they are comfortable with or it’s the wine they had on a holiday that reminds them of those carefree days and nights away from home. Drinking wine usually boils down to fidelity – what you know and who sold it to you.

In Cortona, Italy there is a wine merchant that banks on fidelity to sell wine around the world – utilizing low technology in a high tech world. In Denmark, there is an entrepreneur who believes that technology can help you never forget a wine you love.

Marco Molesini, owner and cofounder of Molesini Wines in Cortona, Italy believes that buying wine is about fidelity and trust. He does this through an amazingly simple system: one website and a highly curated email distribution system. Are you ready for this? They notify their customers, who are scattered around the world as far as Japan, Brazil and Russia, five times a year a complete list of their wines: Brunello, Amaro, Barolo, Super Tuscans, Limoncello and some olive oil just because. But the trick is this. Marco and his brother Paolo, taste all the wines they sell, so there isn’t one wine in their store in Cortona they haven’t tasted or winery they haven’t visited.

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“Eighty percent of our customers we know personally,” said Molesini. “The other 20% come from Google ads, advertising in Italian magazines, trade fairs and winesearcher.com. But in the end we find that customers just want to be taken through the process of buying wine and learning how to appreciate it.”

Molesini adds, “You can order a bottle of wine on the internet, but you won’t know how to store it, how it tastes or feels in your mouth, this is only done through fidelity and trust which means you don’t have to make mistakes when you buy a bottle of wine.”

Marco admits he is very traditional. When it came to taking the wines online, it was his younger brother Paolo Molesini who pushed for the online presence coupled with the online ads.

To prove Molesini’s point, during my interview with them in their store in Cortona, Tom Carroll, an annual and regular visitor to Cortona from Sentinel, Colorado comes into the store and asks Molesini for a red wine. Molesini replies: “What kind of red do you want?”

Carroll replies, “I don’t know, I just know I like red and I trust you to pick one out for me.”

I asked Carroll how he usually selects his wine and he said from people he trusts. I asked him if he would use an app to help him find or select his wine. Carroll replied, “How do you know the taste of something through an app?”

But on the complete opposite side of the Molesinis, who sell their wine around the world armed only with the Internet and a mailing list, there is Vivino.

Vivino is a start up in Copenhagen that has a brand new app that helps you remember any wine you drink. All you have to do is take a photo of the label from the wine you are drinking or want to buy and Vivino sends that image to a database powered by some fancy algorithms and recognition software and in about 30 seconds, all the information about the wine – where it is from, grapes, winery, etc - pops up on your smartphone. You can also “like” the wine and Vivino will  put that wine in your wine library so you can remember what you like in case you forget later on.

Vivino has 450,000 wines from 11,000 producers in their database and currently matches about 40% of all wines that come in. If it doesn’t match the wine, you can still like it and Vivino will remember it for you. But here is what’s cool, Vivino has some human beings, aka researchers, that will research the wine for you and get back to you with the details on the wine through the app, also updating the Vivino database. So basically, you can help make the app smarter.

“Several years ago I was on a business trip in Seattle having dinner and had one of the best red wines I have ever tasted. I remember leaving the restaurant with a piece of paper with the name of the wine on it so I would not forget what it was,” said Heini Zachariasson, CEO and founder, Vivino. “Back in Denmark I tried to find the wine in several local shops and on Google, but the notes I had were not good enough to identify the wine. That was when I vowed to never forget another bottle of wine again and Vivino was born.”

Vivino also has some other entrepreneurs that believe in the company. Today, the company announced that Janus Friis, cofounder of Skype, has invested an undisclosed amount in their first angel round. This, in addition to previous private investments, positions the company for international growth.

One interesting tidbit is that Vivino also detects your location, so for me, it shows that there are 67 wine shops near me carrying 47,225 wines. Vivino runs on Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Phone