Article

A study in wine research

Nascent wine information company turns to the University of California's business school for advice on marketing its Web site and kiosk to wineries and retail outlets.

February 20, 2002

Picking the right wine for the right meal is one of the great challenges of fine dining. Does a chardonnay go well with roast duck? How about a riesling for steamed lobster? The potential combinations - and gastronomical faux pas - are seemingly endless.

Now what if you could walk over to a kiosk, touch a few buttons, and receive information on the perfect wine for your perfect meal. It may sound too easy, but a civil engineer in California has developed a wine-information kiosk that attempts to do just that.

Scott Shewbridge of Danville, Calif., has combined his love of wine with the information age to create WineResearch.com, a Web site and kiosk program aimed at bringing the world's wine producers closer to the public.

"I started looking at a really complex, diverse, and fragmented industry with some pretty distinct informational needs and the Internet provided a way to help bridge that gap," Shewbridge said.

To help him with his efforts, Shewbridge recently contracted the University of California's Haas School of Business International Business Development program to conduct a study on domestic and foreign wine producers and their concept of American consumers.

For more than a decade, the International Business Development program has provided mutlnational corporations and smaller companies assess global market and economic conditions.

"I came across this program, recognized the opportunity to retain four MBA-caliber people to do work for our company and took advantage of the opportunity," said Shewbridge, who has a doctorate in civil engineering from the school. "To get the kind of scrutiny that we got from four hard-driving, critical, yet constructive, MBA students is just phenomenal. It's been a great experience."

Outside the classroom

Those students spent late May and early June touring France, Spain, and Portugal to gain insight into the advertising and marketing behavior of domestic and foreign wine producers. What they found made Shewbridge propose a toast to technology.

"One of the things that was really clear was that none of them could spend any money on advertising," Shewbridge said. "They haven't seen how alternative media, such as the Internet, could be more effective in helping get the word out about their products."

Shewbridge said that is where his Web site and kiosk project could help.

"Our system provides a really good solution to a problem they have - getting information about their products out to consumers at a salient point in time," Shewbridge said. "With our retail kiosk system, that salient point in time is point of purchase."

So far, 75 wineries either have kiosks or a presence on Shewbridge's site. As far as retailers are concerned, he has only one kiosk at Jackson's Wines and Spirits in Lafayette, Calif. He has been conducting beta testing to make sure his system achieves its goal before deploying more.

"A lot of companies, because of the pressure of the Internet, have been putting things out that haven't been tested very much," he said. "We're a little more conservative. We wanted to make sure that what we were putting out was useful."

Paul Walton with Jackson's Wines and Spirits believes it is working. He's seen a 10 percent to 15 percent jump in sales since the kiosk was set up in his store seven months ago.

"It helps my evening guys and the uneducated consumer jump right in, have all the information available to them and help them make a better decision," Walton said.

A toast to information

Access to thousands of wines from wineries and distributors are provided at the touch of a screen. Shewbridge personally designed the software and currently does not have an exclusive arrangement with any kiosk manufacturer.

Distributors are responsible for entering the wines they are providing that particular kiosk location, a time-saving advantage for store or winery managers.

"The retailer has to do very little to no content generation," Shewbridge said. "They don't have to generate descriptions. They don't have to download images. It's automatically uploaded through the kiosk system."

Distributors, however, have mixed feelings about the system.

"I don't know if the kiosk has bumped our (business) up, but it definitely hasn't hurt us," said Hector Albizo, a key count specialist with American Wines and Spirits, a division of Southern Wines and Spirits. "As people become more and more comfortable with kiosks and computers, they're not hesitant to use them."

But Del Tascione, a consultant with Wine Warehouse, is still waiting for tangible results.

"Anything to get the word out is good," said Tascione, whose company distributes beverages from 80 of that state's wineries. "I think it's a positive way to go about it if we could just get the customers to use it more and maybe have it a little more user-friendly. In that aspect, I haven't seen that yet."

One winery operator who subscribes to WineResearch.com is not complaining. Tom Leaf with Grapeleaf Cellars in Berkeley, Calif., believes the site is helping push his eight wines.

"As a small producer, it's been great to just direct people to (the) site for basic Web site information about my wines," Leaf said. "It's hard to get the information out because I don't have television commercials or anything like that."

Advice for the enthusiast

Wineries can join the Web site for free and be able to list product names and basic information. To post links to the wineries's own sites, Shewbridge charges a $100 yearly fee. The fee for a full listing that presents label images, descriptions, and characteristics is an additional $100 per wine. Retailers are charged based on the number of wines carried in the store, but Shewbridge says the base fee is $150.

"We get no revenues from consumers directly," Shewbridge said. "All of our revenues come from the wineries, distributors, and retailers. But our bottom line is the consumers. Our main goal is to help consumers make wine purchasing decisions and to do it with confidence and comfort."

With confidence, Shewbridge says he is going to use the Berkeley study as a marketing weapon.

"This business is in place," he said. "We've tested it. It works. We want to get it out there and get more customers."