Posted on April 28, 2001 - by deCadmus

Adieu, Wine.Com

This very sad little message found its way to my inbox this evening…

Dear wine.com customer:

wine.com, Inc. (the corporation) is ceasing operations and the wine.com website is being transferred to an established and leading online wine retailer with an excellent reputation for quality and reliability. We are confident you will enjoy their selection and service and hope that you will continue to visit the wine.com website once under new management.

The purchaser of wine.com has committed itself to all of the protections established in the current wine.com privacy policy and will continue to safeguard the information you provided to us.

Once again, thank you for your business and loyalty.

Your friends at wine.com

Wine.com, once Virtual Vineyards, was a web pioneer. Recently Wine.com and Wineshopper.com merged, and I held out some hope that the combination of Wine.com’s “virtualized” distribution and Wineshopper’s licensing agreements within the established “tiered” distribution models would provide them a sustainable model. Evidently, it hasn’t.

This is certainly a blow to the good folks [and I believe there really are some fine folks in the wine.com family] who have worked very hard to make a go of it. It’s also a blow to their customers, who, like me, may find if they click through to the new owner’s site that they can no longer purchase wine for delivery to their state.

Sorry, Dorothy. They’re not in Kansas anymore.