I am not smart enough to be able to declare the new Artisan Vineyards website — brought to you by the local distributor the Wine Company (TWC) — a revolutionary, ground-breaking harbinger of the future of wine-shopping. But I can say that it’s really, really cool.

Affording Minnesotans a chance to click their way through a mountain of information and pick their way through hundreds of wines, this inspired brainchild of TWC poohbah Larry Colbeck debuted yesterday (Jan. 30).
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Full disclosure: Larry is a friend, a man whose company I thoroughly enjoy and whose work I greatly admire. And I share his predilection toward smaller producers, the “little guys” stemming the tide of the conglomerates that threaten to engulf the industry.

“The ultimate goal for this site,” Larry said in an email earlier this week, “is to focus on … small, obscure, idiosyncratic vintners who have no avenue to America’s wine lovers.”

Certainly the site has a lot to offer wine lovers. It’s the kind of place where the ADD-inclined such as yours truly can get blissfully lost for hours: maps with info on wine regions, a vast Wine 101 primer, food-pairing tips on everything from meat loaf to morel mushrooms to manchego cheese, a glossary, vintage chart, etc. There’s also a fun blog by the rather crusty wine savant Marcus Mansavage.

Oh, and they sell wine, too. Lots of wine. More choices than somemany retail outlets offer. I can’t recall seeing 35 dessert wines in a store, for example.

Local stores are still in the loop, by the way. Customers have three options: use a locator at the site to find a retailer carrying a particular wine, have the wine sent to a their favorite store or have it delivered to their home (with a chosen store still etting its “cut”).

Colbeck has spent the last several months explaining to retailers how the system works, and assuring them that they are not being undermined.

So it’s win-win-win-win. For the wineries, the distributor, the stores and most of all the wine-loving consumer.

There’s more, but I gotta run. There’s a certain Savennieres at the site that I’m afraid they’re gonna run out of soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.