I quite strongly believe that someone with an understanding of tech, the ability to build something, and take a position on stock, could make a lot of money in this market.
The warehouse situation seems like it needs solving. I don't quite get why someone that buys 5k of wine wouldn't pay for a good warehouse. High tech new age warehousing for wine seems to be the in.
With some big customer that loves wine you'd basically switch to building and running his warehouse and then see how you can scale that to warehouses that store wine for multiple people.
Premium wine is pretty much comparable to art imo. Show effect and "because I can" are big drivers for buying. If you successfully run the warehouse for one rich guy you can leverage that as marketing.
Either way: Very fascinating article. Thanks for posting it.
They're relatively successful, but are hugely inefficient (no tech).
Coming to the specific problem OP has. The wanted to work on fine wines, not WalMart wines. If the best wine in the world, would be sold at WalMart(or any other super market) even at the same price and in the same conditions it would lose immediately value because all the research, experimentation, and everything is lost, and that is a huge part of the experience that you taste with the wine.
A practical example: you know how to make the best cake in the world, but it takes a lot of time and it's hard so you can do it only once a year, but you love it, it's your favourite cake so when you make and eat it you love it and you wish you could do more. If WalMart started to sell the same cake you would buy it once or twice but it would not be the same and you probably would end doing once a year as you always did. This is the same problem of OP, people wanted the service, used once or twice and then went back to the old habits.
It is very similar to bookstores and record stores. Yes, there are big players that are handling there own optimizations but if you are a small winery (or bookstore/record store) you are doing it at this point in part as a preservation of an artisanal experience. There are countless ways they can do things better but there is a genuine fear that "optimizations" can be a slippery slope to Walmart-ville, both in how they think and how they are perceived.
