Wine.com is considered as the largest on-line wine retailer and when you go to their site, it certainly appears that way. They have a banner smack on the homepage stating: “over 14,000 fine wines!” and another image whose words are “welcome to the world’s largest wine store”. As a serious wine collector, I started poking around and here’s what I found.

According to the wine search engines out there, as well as this site WineFetch.com, Wine.com has at most 1,300 different wine bottles at any given moment. By this I mean different “varietals” of the same or different wine producer. For example, if Heitz has listed both it’s Napa Cabernet and its Chardonnay that would be considered 2 bottles. But if the Heitz Napa Cabernet was in multiple bottle sizes, that would only be considered once. I don’t know about you, but when I read the phrase “over 14,000 fine wines”, I assume them different bottles and not the actual bottle count.

But the wine search engines could be wrong. So I started playing around on Wine.com itself. I’m a big fan of Brunello di Montalcino and was looking for a couple of the 1999’s. I did a text search on Wine.com for the term ‘brunello’ and only got back 5 results, only 2 of which were actually brunello’s. Now how can the largest on-line retailer for wine have only 2 brunello’s for sale!!!

I thought maybe I was being too restrictive, I mean, who really drinks brunello di monalcino anyway So I tried two more searches, a text search for the word ‘bordeax‘ and then a guided search for ‘California Cabernet Sauvignon‘. The first search returned about 60 results, some of which were for books and glasses so it’s probably closer to 40 bottles. And the second search resulted in 90 results, but considering the search was for California Cabernet, I expected the number to be in at least the hundreds.

What does all this mean? To me, it means that Wine.com has products that its not willing to sell or they are counting every bottle in their inventory towards their 14,000. It implies that sites like Zachy’s.com or HiTimeWine.com are actually the largest retailers on-line and they should try to build a more on-line presence.

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