Let’s look at the wine industry. It’s basically been bolstered for years by a bunch of pretentious chaps and chapesses whose repeated insistence that wine appreciation is an exclusive indulgence, not for the hoi polloi, has convinced the everyday man (or woman) about town that he or she neither knows enough about wine to drink it properly, nor can actually afford to buy it. Both nonsense, but closely guarded nonsense until the wine retailers belatedly caught up with the internet. We’ll use Rioja as an example. Say you were looking to buy Rioja three or four years ago. You’d have had to have gone to an actual wine store, where you’d no doubt have found yourself confounded, nay, embarrassed by the rows of quietly stacked cases, all looking as though they were daring you to pretend to know what was in them. The whole atmosphere of the wine store bred class distinctive rubbish. It was all about knowledge – if you didn’t know, you shouldn’t have been trying to buy the stuff in the first place.
This, of course, was plainly apple sauce – but it didn’t stop the wine industry from dragging its cybernetic heels for years after everyone else had gone ahead and transferred most of their sales to the web. Looking to buy Rioja online back then would have been just as tricky as going into a store and trying not to look stupid. However. The industry recently caught up to the fact that online wine outlets can actually teach customers about the stuff they’re buying, without having to embarrass them in front of members of the “Club” – i.e., the existing wine snobs. Now, a person can do a lot more than just buy Rioja online – he or she can learn about it, and learn about other varietals, flavours, origins, years – all the stuff that used to the jealously guarded province of the few. And with the post-slump boom on home entertainment still going, there are some outstanding offers to be had into the bargain. Vive le revolution.
