Good deals go fast on wine websites

Wineries, importers and wholesalers are embracing direct-sale sites that can make inventories vanish in a matter of hours.

By Patrick Comiskey
LA Times
July 8, 2009

New Jersey wine retailer Joe Arking was in the Napa Valley last month, drumming up business. Arking is hardly a typical retailer in the bricks-and-mortar sense or, for that matter, in the normal Web-commerce sense. His website, winestilsoldout.com, sells just one wine at a time and at an incredibly steep discount until it's gone without a trace -- usually within eight hours. While Arking doesn't like to use the word "liquidation," the wine's swift and mostly silent evacuation is the website's greatest virtue.

In ordinary times a Napa winery wouldn't bother even meeting with a guy like Arking. But with wine sales at a virtual standstill, wineries, importers and the wholesalers who make wine available to retailers and restaurants have had to resort to some unusual, some would say drastic, measures to get wine out the door.

Born of opportunity, winestilsoldout.com and similar sites such as winewoot.com and thewineliquidator.com have become one of the industry's most effective underground sensations. While each of these websites takes a slightly different approach, they all work to the same end: acting as a vehicle for moving wine that might otherwise be gathering dust in a warehouse -- often without undercutting the wine's hard-earned reputation.

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