The Wine Knows

Several weeks back, I wrote an item about a business called Vineyard2Door. It's run out of the Seattle area and is targeted at wineries struggling to sell their products online.

Gary Robertson is the guy behind Vineyard2Door. He saw a need: Wineries sold almost no wine online directly to customers because they couldn't set up their shopping carts and figuring out the state-to-state compliance issues was a nightmare.

Robertson quickly jumped into the niche. He created a way for wineries to have web sales set up in a jiffy without having to worry about whether they could ship to certain states. He set up a way for them to easily manage their all-important wine clubs, and he even came up with a point-of-sale solution.

Now, he's working on a way for wineries to manage the entire process from bud break to bottling.

Robertson has many wineries set up. In fact, he's decided to move to Walla Walla so he can be closer to his clients. He has a slick product and will be successful.

Why should you care? First of all, Vineyard2Door has opened up a new way for you to get the wines you like. I wrote an item a few weeks back about buying wine online. This solves a lot of the problems. Second of all, this is the kind of opportunity that exists in the Northwest wine industry. If you want to get into the burgeoning wine scene, perhaps you can identify a job that needs to be done, then go do it.

Here's our interview with Robertson: