Must 2018: IT Giants Vivino and Wine-Searcher on same Platform for the First Time

With Silicon Valley being so close to Napa Valley, one would think that some IT company would have a head start in the wine industry data-perhaps with some Indian connection. But two of the IT giants Wine Searcher and Vivino are headed by a New Zealander Martin Brown and a Danish national, Heini Zachariassen who is gradually spending more and more time in San Francisco. Both came face to face for the first time on stage during a discussion that was moderated by Rui Falcao, one of the two organisers of the second edition of MUST Fermenting Ideas in Cascais, near Lisbon in June 2018.

Heini Zachariassen, founder of Vivino.com had a very interesting Presentation about Vivino whose strength is the ratings by private taster consumers with over 100,000 tasters rating wines daily. It has an extensive reach and gives the power of selecting wines in the hands of the tasters and not in a handful of wine experts. The firm has collected enormous data on thousands of wines and just the click of a button on a smart phone gets the person enough information about the wine he or she is looking for.  Vivino also has instituted 149 wine styles for Awards and chooses the ten best in each category.

Martin Brown- Founder of Wine-Searcher.com has been in the business of not only giving information about average prices of a wine but a lot of other interesting statistics also. The business model counts on retailer listings, which pay for the listing. He went through the various graphs and charts available to the subscribers using the app.

Vivino

As a user of Vivino App knows, you see a bottle of wine, click the picture and boom! You get all technical information about the ratings and reviews by other tasters who are members of the Vivino community, with prices and availability online with which retailers.

Vivino was founded by Heini in 2010 much after Wine-Searcher; he was not a wine connoisseur inspired by retail stores in Copenhagen, Denmark displaying several bottles with confusing information for the customers like him not having much knowledge about wine and who found it very intimidating and as an IT guy he knew what he wanted to do. He feels that the wine world is rich and fun to explore but it can also be intimidating. As a result wine drinkers tend to stick with wines they are familiar with and do not like to come out of their comfort zone.“Vivino tries to use data and machine learning to build a recommendation engine that is personalised and yet focuses on discovery.”

Heini claims that because of the wide cross section of global users, Vivino covers 99% of wines sold in the world market and the crowd-sourced data is more consistent for the tasting results, with 31 million registered users, around 100,000 tasters reviewing out of 2 million wines daily, wines every day and rating on a 5 star scale used all over. Interestingly 40% give 4-stars to the wines they taste. 9.5 million wines from 208,000 wineries are registered at Vivino where 96 million ratings are listed. (The company tweeted 4 days ago that they had clocked 100 million ratings! Congratulations Heini!)  Heini tells delWine that he wanted to give the Power back to people - to pick out the best possible wine at every price point.

He is very proud of the wine market place that the company launched last year; It  allows users to buy several wines for delivery on its platform. He feels the company can sell around US 1 billion worth of wine by 2020. He raised 20 million earlier this year, taking the total investment by outsiders at $57 million unlike Martin who has not taken outside investment so far. For now Vivino offers more than 130,000 wines for purchase .

Martin Brown

Martin is a New Zealander who started Wine-Searcher.com in 1999 with his own funds and till date has not gone for outside funding. Wine-Searcher has become a de-facto web page to go to when you want to know the price and technical and geographical details of a wine, including the average price, excluding the auction prices. It lists the wine dealers and their declared prices – this service is free of charge and helps build the data-base. In fact Wine-Searcher is one of the most formidable specialist databases on the internet and is often referred to as the Google of wine.

Initially, like most start-ups, Martin ran the business and worked two jobs. Then Anne Walsh was General Manager, followed by an Indian living in New Zealand, Adon Kumar, for four years. Martin has been running Wine-Searcher for the last 10 years. In April, 2018 he stepped down as CEO and appointed Julian Perry, the creator of UK-based tech company ‘Limitless’ as the fourth CEO. Martin shuns the limelight and is a bit of an introvert as delegates to the Must Fermenting Ideas in Cascais, found out. But he is also very well grounded and an approachable and affable personality. ‘I come from an IT background, the functional end of the business, and have never enjoyed being out front,’ he admits candidly.

Over the years, the company has built in a nice data base which makes it a powerful tool for people who want to buy the product and who can compare the prices. Tasting notes from experts are also visible to the visitor. So what’s his business model? Several businesses are ‘Sponsors’. They are highlighted in the system and are encouraged to register as such, with bold listings. Things have changed tremendously over the last 19 years. "Tasting notes, encyclopedic content, market demand and supply data are the hallmark of wine-searcher today. We are at the forefront of what's happening in IT – natural language, pattern recognition, and clustering algorithms that we use in conjunction with our expert wine-matching team," he says.

The basic service is free but to use a Pro Version, a nominal fee of $60 is charged. This adds up to big numbers he is not willing to disclose but adds to the kitty. For the last 5-6 years the company has been focusing on content that is useful for both the trade and consumers and makes the website more engaging for every visitor.

Not everybody who visits Wine-Searcher is going to buy wine. People use Wine-Searcher to research the market. The price data is updated daily so has a reputation for accuracy. The company was foxed when they saw a million hits in India but no one willing to put their website detailing information about their sales even if the service was basically free. As I explained to Martin, online sales are not permitted in India and are frowned upon by the government. In fact, only a few days ago there was a massive raid in Mumbai and 50 shops were sealed on the discovery of a call centre, which is not allowed and has been reported in this issue. But thanks to the publicity given by delWine, there are several users who daily scout around on the Net for information and pricing on wines.

DelWine had conducted an interview with Adon Kumar when he was the CEO  for a couple of years when, as Martin informs, he was too involved in some personal matters. delWine had interviewed Adon when he was in the US by our then California Correspondent, Rishi Vohra.

Meeting of minds

While both the services are popular, it appears that Vivino is more popular with the younger group which likes to experiment around, taste several newer wines and share the Tasting Notes. Wine-Searcher is more popular with their previous generation looking for authentic information, like prices, availability on the Net. There is no specific information on the type of users but both agreed that it was perhaps right; there were several overlaps which use both the services-essentially free of charge for the basic users.

There is no doubt that both the services provided by the two IT guys, are very useful for the industry, consumers and even Indian wine students who want to self-educate about wines from every part of the world.

Subhash Arora

If you Like this article please click on the Like button