Wine, after a shaky end to the 20th century, is enjoying a similar renaissance to that being experienced by beer. While the end of the 90s saw us all swilling our guts out with cheap lager and Blossom Hill, the end of the Noughties has spawned something of a revolution in the way we think about drink: real ale is back (hurrah) and good wine is, once again, top of the supermarket hit list. The only problem with that list? It’s stuck in a supermarket, where no-one who is on hand to help knows anything about any of the products at all, let alone something as complicated as wine. Supermarkets are places designed to facilitate mass buying of cleverly advertised product, not informed selection of good wine. The solution, like every other solution, is found on the internet. Wine online, after reasonably humble beginnings, is starting to look like big business. The biggest benefit of buying wine online is the same benefit one gets from buying anything on the internet: choice. Supermarkets, in addition to being staffed by know-nothing teenagers on minimum wage, have a finite amount of physical space in even the biggest store †which means they can only stock a certain amount of wine, all of which is standardised and centralised through the office of a single buyer. E-commerce sites selling wine online can stock as many varieties of the blushful stuff as they can find suppliers †which mean that stocks of wine online are virtually endless. With endless stock options comes limitless quality: you can’t buy a 10,000 bottle of Bollinger in your local Tesco’s, but you can do it online. The really great thing about buying wine online is that you can also buy a 2.99 bottle of reasonable plonk †either from the same site as your mortgage-swallowing Bolly, or within the space of a few clicks, which makes the process practically the same as buying from the same site. The immediacy of the internet means that buying wine online is like having anything from Oddbins to an exclusive sommelier, in your living room: and that means that a home wine cellar can be stocked with anything from bargain-bucket goodies to royal vintages and rare pressings. It’s a wonderful thing, this buying wine online. The internet has democratised so much, a lot of it rubbish: so how nice to find something that really is better online than it is in real life. Food is food is food †but wine is wine, and thanks to the burgeoning availability of wine online, wine is mine, and yours: in whatever quantity, and whatever quality, we want.
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