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• Selling at bargain prices: Flash sales offer attractively-priced wines for a very limited time.
• Gary Vaynerchuk’s US CinderellaWine.com model may spread to other countries.
• For producers and customers, flash sales are attractive, but not without risk.

Anyone who has followed the developing relationship between wine and the internet over the last 20 years will be familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, the wine retailer, turned YouTube wine influencer, turned entrepreneur, turned motivational speaker. A striking entrepreneurial venture he launched in 2009 was CinderellaWine.com as a Flash Sales site selling small batches of wine at bargain prices on a When-It’s-Gone-It’s-Gone basis.

Vaynerchuk did not invent the concept. The clothes giant Zara pioneered the notion of limited-offerings in the 1980s and an online venture called Wine Woot was started in 2004, but ‘GaryVee’ as he is widely known, was the creator of the highest-profile and most professional of the flash sites the emerged in the wake of the 2008-9 recession.

The wines on offer on this and other similar sites like WTSO, Last Bottle, Lot18, and Flash Sale Wines were a mixture of excess inventory of familiar brands and wine supposedly from top-flight wineries, but under an alternative label.

The model, which has, so far been rarely seen outside the US and Australia – apart from an unsuccessful foray into Europe by Lot18 – proved to be one of the beneficiaries of the growth in online sales during the pandemic.

Bored, locked-down wine drinkers were happy to receive emails inviting them to check out ‘today’s must-buy’ bottles.

Vaynerchuk has stepped away from wine selling, after selling Empathy, his DTC business to Constellation for an undisclosed sum in 2019. Now, the Drop, the online editorial platform of the young US platform, Pix, is offering its readers a weekly preview of particularly attractive offers that are going to be available from Flash Sales sites.

Will the model catch on in other markets?

It took a very long time for European wineries to catch onto New World-style wine tourism, but it’s happening now at speed.

French wine drinkers are very accustomed to buying fine wine at bargain prices in their own bricks-and-mortar version of the Flash Sale, the Foire à Vin. These low-margin events, run by supermarkets to build traffic to their shops are now a solid part of the Gallic wine retail landscape, and a popular means for producers to offload stock. There may be differences between online purchases and buying an attractively priced wine along with your detergent and dogfood. But the basic similarity of the two models is clear: if you don’t buy the Bordeaux Cru Classé on sale in your local Leclerc store, you may never see this vintage again at this price.

No fun without risk

The appeal to a wine producer of clearing inventory – under their own brand or a specially-created label - is clear. At least in terms of cashflow. On the other hand, there are negative aspects. Flash sales require ongoing offers. As soon as one wine is sold, the site and the customer will move onto the next bargain bottle. Customer loyality is not part of the game.

However, as the French producers who take part in the Foires à Vin acknowledge, it may be better to see a batch of one’s wine sold quickly and cheaply over a brief one-off period, than to be forced into the cyclical discounting of markets like the UK, where shoppers have become used to waiting for the price of their favourite wine – or other product – to drop during one of the regular promotional periods.

French wine drinkers are already buying flash sale wine from sites like 1Jour1Vin – 1-Day-1Wine and the fashion platform Bazarchic.com which was acquired by the giant Galeries Lafayette in 2016. Strikingly, as it does with its garments, Bazarchic focuses on selling big brands.

The concept of When-It’s-Gone-It’s-Gone was popularised by the clothes retailer Zara. Perhaps it is unsurprising to see a major fashion chain helping to introduce Europeans to snap up bargain bottles of Bordeaux in the same way as a dramatically discounted haute couture dress.