Even mediocre corner liquor stores confront us with enough wine options to make our heads spin. At least, that’s what they’d like us to think.
“Over half of the wine sold in the United States is made by one of three conglomerate producers,” said Robert Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Winestyr. “People think they’re buying small-production stuff or unique bottles but, for the most part, it’s really all mass produced.”
Wilson wants to change that with an online marketplace connecting consumers with independent wine producers.
“There is a huge craft wine movement going on, and it started way before the craft beer movement,” said Wilson. “There are twice as many wine producers in the country as there are breweries, but it’s often really hard to find their wines.
There are twice as many wine producers in the country as there are breweries.”
Winestyr lets independent producers set up their own digital storefronts, which the startup’s team populates with information about the winery and its products. The company also offers fulfillment and logistics services to wineries, with a shipping center located right outside of Chicago.
In practical terms, that means a customer can order wines from several different wineries and receive them in one shipment. The startup also runs a wine club that lets consumers receive a monthly curated box, designed to help them discover new varieties.
Wilson said Winestyr only works with domestic producers, and that each winery goes through a quality control process before being accepted onto the platform. According to Wilson, Winestyr ends up working with about one third of the producers who approach it. The decision about whether or not to carry a wine is based on quality, branding and authenticity — that is, whether the wine is actually made by an independent producer.
“There’s probably more smoke and mirrors in the wine industry than in our counterparts in spirits or craft beer, but people do care where their products came from, and they want to support small producers,” said Wilson. “And some companies that claim to be direct-to-consumer just buy bulk wine and put labels on them.”
Some companies that claim to be direct-to-consumer just buy bulk wine and put labels on them.”
From a tech perspective, Winestyr is different from your run-of-the-mill e-commerce site. Wine distribution is regulated on the state level, and some states have different shipping licenses and regulations for different types of producers. Building a platform that ensures compliance with all of these regulations, said Wilson, has been one of the biggest challenges to getting the company off the ground.
“It’s a really fragmented patchwork that we’ve used technology to streamline,” he said. “We invested a lot of time and effort to develop this all in house. But there’s a reason why we’re the only company that operates under this business model.”
Wilson got his start in the wine industry a decade ago after graduating from college with a degree in finance and economics. But he quickly grew disillusioned with the wine industry after watching the difficulty small producers had cutting through the noise. Only three years in, Wilson was about to leave the industry entirely and go off to business school when he came up with the idea for Winestyr.
After spending a few years in California, Wilson and co-founder Scott Washburn moved the company back to Chicago in 2016 to be closer to consumers in the Midwest and the South — regions where craft wine is traditionally less accessible.
Winestyr currently has seven employees in Chicago, but Wilson said the company is expanding rapidly. Having recently opened a new warehouse six times as large as its previous space, Wilson said the company is already running out of room.
