Influx

Wine’s elitist image has been around for decades, you can see it in popular culture, like in the movie Sideways, but this looks set to change. With lower prices, a burgeoning Boomer population and increasing interest in wine from minorities, wine’s elitist bubble looks set to burst once and for all.

One retailer wants to capitalize on the opportunity by making the wine purchase easy. Vino 100 is an astonishingly simple concept; a store with 100 great wines all priced under $25. The group currently operates 13 stores around the country, but is on an accelerated expansion strategy with 20 more stores opening in 2005.

Here’s how they describe the opportunity:

“Wine stores are all too often intimidating, snobbish and expensive, or are designed as wine “superstores” where the quantity of wines is overwhelming and the quality of wines and the service provided is under whelming.”

Vino 100′s focus is on user-friendliness making sure that the store is easy to shop and information is easy to access. One area of focus has been on the shelf-talkers highlighting each wine. These are clearly important communication tools in the battle to de-mystify; they provide a simple description, pairing examples and ratings for flavor and body.

Vino 100 is offering a great service based retail concept in wine, but what about other categories? Despite the rapid growth and easy of information access through the web, few reliable, objective aggregators have emerged. Consumers have to personally sift through product reviews and customer feedback. We saw a comment on the web the other day, “I’ve been researching a PDA for 6 months.”

Surely, there’s an opportunity here for someone to step in here and stop the madness.

Anyone developing an outsourced personal concierge service?