I’m sitting in bed in a hotel room on the Costa Brava. I’ve just discussed with our daughter, two floors below us, who will give our grandson his breakfast, organised accommodation in Paris for an American friend, taken advice on how to promote my next book in Australia and discovered where to find the cheapest flight from San Francisco to Newark. All this without moving or saying a word.
There are huge benefits to the communication revolution, but how is it affecting the world of wine? Trading fine wine, like virtually everything else – with the emphasis on the virtual – has become far faster and all transactions are far more transparent. With credit card payments and websites that can keep track of stock in real time, a case of wine can be sold and paid for within minutes of being offered to a merchant or broker – very unlike the courtly rhythm of auction sales.
For many of us, handling a bottle and, ideally, being given the chance to taste its contents before making a purchase is the best way to buy wine, but online selling is making ever-increasing inroads into all sectors of the trade. There are now many successful online-only wine merchants such as Slurp and Naked Wines in the UK, Millésima in France, Pinard de Picard in Germany, but also even the likes of vinfolio.com, wine.com, winetasting.com, wineaccess.com and Lot18.com in the US, where it has long been more difficult to transport alcoholic liquid than guns.