When you call or email to reorder wine, I might say something like “Umm.., I’m not sure that we have any left. I’ll go downstairs, look in the warehouse, and call you back.” You may have gotten this response enough so that you don’t even think about the implications.
With today’s sophisticated databases, tracking programs, and instant feedback, nobody needs to walk into a warehouse to check inventory. If you are asking about a product or service, the information resides in a computer program that customer service people see on their screens. Mostly, you don’t need to call or email anyone. You can check availability and order online.
Enter Tere Williams, armed with degrees in computer science and accounting, now our hero and partner, he who will bring Celebrations Wine Club into the present year of 2016. Not that you can’t still call so we can compare weather in our different parts of the country, catch up on family members and friends, who also belong to the wine club, talk about politics and religion when you reorder wine or update your credit card. Although Celebrations Wine Club has been an online business for 20 years, I’ve operated it as though it were a neighborhood store, one of the reasons that I enjoy it so much.
But now you’ll have another option, a system at Celebrations Wine Club that will enable you to access information more efficiently than I have ever delivered it. It’s in the works, thanks to Tere. Make no mistake though. Tere is not a nerd, who cares only about systems. He loves wine and is willing to take on the updating task only because we sell it, drink it, and celebrate it. He has actually taken wine a step further. He made some.
I asked Tere what prompted the uncommon leap from drinking wine to making it. “Just the way I am,” he said. “I think I can do anything. It’s a problem that I have.” The wine was bad, he admitted, one major reason being that he was fermenting grape concentrate instead of grapes. So the experiment ended, and he’s back to drinking wine made by professionals, those featured by Celebrations Wine Club.
Should Tere answer your phone call, you’ll hear his southern accent, which he developed in Oklahoma, where he was born and raised. The accent expresses the warmth and hospitality, or which southerners are famous. He’ll happily answer your questions, but he won’t have to run downstairs to get the information. And neither will I. Nor will you have to wait for a call-back. Happy 2016!
What a Warehouse Trip Was Really Doing
Walking downstairs to count bottles sounds like a failure of technology, and in one sense it was. In another sense it was a perfectly sound system, because the person counting also knew which cases were damaged, which had been set aside for a member, and which were about to run out for good. A spreadsheet knows none of that.
Inventory software solves a narrower problem than it appears to. It records what was received and what was shipped, then subtracts, and the number it produces is only as accurate as the discipline behind every transaction. Breakage, samples poured at a tasting, and cases moved without a record all pull the count away from reality.
This is why even large operations conduct physical counts. The database holds the ledger, and the shelf holds the truth, and reconciling the two is a permanent chore rather than a solved problem.
| Consideration | Walking to the warehouse | Querying a system |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | Minutes, and only during business hours | Instant, at any hour |
| Accuracy | Exact at that moment | Exact only if every entry was made |
| Context | Condition, location, and history all visible | A number, stripped of circumstance |
| Scale | Fails as volume grows | Indifferent to volume |
| Effect on the customer | A conversation and a callback | Self-service and no waiting |
Why Small Merchants Modernized Late
Online retail grew steadily through the 2000s and 2010s, and the United States Census Bureau’s quarterly e-commerce retail sales series tracks the shift quarter by quarter. What those figures conceal is how uneven the transition was between large and small sellers.
The obstacles were rarely about willingness. Small merchants faced software priced for enterprises, catalogs whose products changed constantly, and the cost of migrating years of records that lived in ledgers, email, and memory. Every hour spent on that migration was an hour not spent selling.
Wine added its own complications. Alcohol shipping rules differ by state, licensing and reporting requirements vary, and a system built for general merchandise handles none of that without modification. A small operation frequently found that the software it needed did not exist at a price it could pay.
Wine inventory is unusually awkward to model as well. A single label may exist in several vintages, each behaving as a separate product with its own quantity, and the older one is not simply an older version of the newer one. Systems designed for shoes or hardware assume otherwise.
Allocation compounds the difficulty. When a small production sells out, the remaining bottles are often promised to particular members rather than available to whoever asks first, and encoding that kind of commitment in software is far harder than counting cases.
What Automation Costs a Small Business
Every step of automation removes a reason for two people to speak. That is the point of it, and it is also the loss. A merchant who talks to members about their families and their politics accumulates knowledge that no field in a database is designed to hold.
The usual resolution is to automate the transactional layer and protect the conversational one, so routine questions resolve themselves and the remaining calls are the interesting ones. It works better in principle than in practice, because convenience is habit-forming and the calls simply stop.
Celebrations Wine Club operated on the older model for most of its twenty-five years, and the personal character of that arrangement is recorded throughout the newsletter archive. Shipments ended in December 2019, and what remains is the writing rather than the ordering system.
Making Wine at Home, and Why Concentrate Falls Short
The failed home winemaking experiment described above failed for a specific and instructive reason. Grape concentrate has been heated to remove water, and heat destroys the volatile aromatic compounds that give wine its perfume. What remains is sugar, acid, and color, which will ferment into alcohol but not into anything memorable.
Fresh grapes also arrive with their own yeasts, their skins, and the phenolic material that gives structure and texture. Concentrate arrives with none of it. Home winemakers who work with whole fruit get closer to real wine on the first attempt than concentrate allows on the tenth.
The broader lesson holds for anyone tasting seriously: the raw material sets the ceiling, and technique only determines how close you come to it. That principle runs through our guide to practical wine skills and knowledge and through most of what winemakers say about their own work.
Wine Club Technology FAQ
Why did wine sellers lag behind other online retailers?
Regulation, fragile inventory, and the cost of shipping heavy glass all slowed adoption. Compliance rules differ from state to state, and general-purpose retail software rarely accounted for them.
Does a database make a small merchant less personal?
Not necessarily, but it changes what the conversations are about. Routine questions disappear, leaving fewer but more substantive exchanges, which some customers prefer and others miss.
Is the club still operating?
No. Celebrations Wine Club stopped shipping in December 2019 after twenty-five years, and the site now serves as an archive of the writing produced during those years. Background on the people behind it appears on our about page.