REthink Wine Blog

In Ancient Roman times, March was the start of the New Year. So, as any good pundit would offer, here are the top 5 wine and technology predictions for the New Year:

1. The Rise of Web Service Components. Standalone widgets to address winery e-commerce problems, such as address verification, age verification, tax calculation, shipping calculation, compliance checking, price posting, license validation…  These are already available in some form or another, although some may not be accessible as a web service. IBG will offer major components for free.
2. An industry-wide Service Oriented Architecture. The multitudes of service components will have to be orchestrated by a central agent. IBG will be there.
3. Direct to Trade. Trade restrictions are really just logistics problems by another name. IBG has solutions to these problems.
4. Supply chain visibility on the sales side. You already know the production side–where your grapes come from, where they are pressed, fermented and bottled. But the grapes’ journey does not end there. Imagine seamless flow and visibility of data between the tasting room, the fulfillment warehouse, the shipper, the state authorities, the distributor, the retailer, and all the way down to the consumer. IBG will lead this effort.
5. Growth of online wine communities. As the American wine market matures, less credence will be placed on the Robert Parkers, the Hugh Johnsons and the Wine Spectators of this world. Wine lovers will flock with others that have similar consumption profiles, and the Internet provides the tools to make community building possible. IBG will provide tools to build such communities, and to close the gap between wine producers and consumers.

This entry was posted by Patrick Angeles on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Wine Industry Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.