| Wine.com | |
| Foundation: | San Francisco, California, 1998 |
| Location: | San Francisco, California |
| Industry: | Online wine retail |
| Homepage: | wine.com |
Wine.com is an American wine online retailer.[1] Wine.com sells over 2 million bottles per year, with a stock of more than 17,000 different bottles of wine, in the United States.[2]
The company now known as Wine.com was originally founded as Virtual Vineyards by Robert Olson in Los Altos, California in 1994 with co-founders Master Sommelier Peter Granoff, and Information Architect Harry Max.[3] Virtual Vineyards sold its first bottle of wine online on January 24, 1995 and went into full production a couple of weeks later. The current Wine.com business was founded by Mike Osborn in Portland, Oregon as eVineyard in 1998.[4] In 1995, David Harmon founded wine.com and in 1999 sold the information site Wine.com to Virtual Vineyards for over US$10,000,000. In 2000, VirtualVineyards.com and WineShopper.com merged under the Wine.com name. The combined business became bankrupt, and in the spring of 2001 eVineyard purchased its assets, becoming known as Wine.com, which then moved its corporate offices to San Francisco, CA. In 2006, Rich Bergsund joined Wine.com as CEO, seeing the company through a financial turnaround. According to Internet Retailer, the company grew to become the biggest online wine retailer in the United States. Wine.com is majority-owned by Baker Capital, a New York–based private equity firm.
In December 2009, Wine.com launched an iPhone application. In November 2010, Wine.com launched an iPad application, with a dashboard to view wine labels and an interactive geo-location tour of where the wine was produced.[5] In November 2011, Wine.com established a mobile site.[6]