September 10,2007

Perfect Wine Store, Faceted Classification

recently consumed

wine shop
wine: dream shop

tasting notes

I have been meaning to write this article for a while. I was firstly inspired by my once colleague, still friend’s comment on one of my previous articles, wherein he mentioned wine needing a faceted classification system, a concept first presented by one of the fathers of library science, S. R. Ranganathan. Upon reading more about Ranganathan’s five laws of library science, I was inspired to delve deeper into my idea of the perfect wine store.

I was inspired, but then forgot… until this month’s Wine Blog Wednesday was announced. The focus is on indigenous grapes, which reminded me how important “location, location, location” is to learn as a wine fan and how HARD and not fun wine shops make it to learn the interconnectedness of things like flavor, food pairing, varietal, style, age-ability, and region (see terroir).

So, here is my proposition for my perfect wine store. First, this wine store would understand and live by the five laws of library science, which I think are important enough to reiterate here. These rules would be plastered on the walls of my ideal wine shop:

Wines are for use. Ultimately, wines are meant for drinking and enjoying, not just collecting.
To every drinker, their wine. Wine is for all people, not just the elite and knowledgeable. Every drinker should be considered.
To every wine, its drinker. Every wine has a drinker, thus every wine should be findable.
Save the drinker time. Make their search an efficient, fruitful search, and they will come back a confident return buyer.
The wine library is a growing organism. Good years, bad years. The wines of the moment. The audience that appreciates them. The countries that make them. Wine is every changing and the system should be made to accommodate this.

So, with the rules of business out of the way. How do you take care of this issue of faceted classification? It works well for online wine stores (Wine.com, Cork’d), where you can utilize tags and multi-attribute navigation options. But how does that translate into a physical store experience that will allow the user to take away a holistic view of wine and its many dimensions, or more importantly the dimensions they want to pay attention to.

My perfect wine store would be laid out like map, meaning different areas of the store would be dedicated to different countries. In each section would be signs with easy to identify icons that highlight the other facets: cost, flavor profile, food pairing, etc. This will allow “browsers” to wander around the store and tune into the information that they need, whilst learning more about aspects they hadn’t know (i.e. champagne isn’t the only fizzy wine in the world, italian wines are a great match for mushrooms, and portugal and southern france are great resources for inexpensive tasty reds). The store would feature periodic kiosks and store maps for the “searchers”, so that they can easily locate their targets, develop a shopping list, and get recommended “wines they might like” or other wines uses like them bought.

I attempted to express this idea more in depth via a personalized Google Map that highlights the different flavors, food pairings, and varietals of some key wines in Europe.

It’s a dream, but with the leaps and bounds being made in the online web world… it is only a matter of time before the physical retail world will be expected to catch up.

suggested pairings

comments (2)

2 Responses to “Perfect Wine Store, Faceted Classification”

Paul Arthur Says:
September 13th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Personally, I hate hate hate having the default top-level classification of wine be by country. It splits up similar wines for no good reason and can be extremely difficult for newbies to navigate.

Save the drinker time; when looking for an unoaked Chardonnay, it quickly becomes an exercise in frustration when I have to look through four different sections to find all of the candidates.
Marta Strickland Says:
September 14th, 2007 at 8:09 am
The limitations of a physical store format do make this a dilemma. You have to choose one primary form of organization, despite icons and kiosks. So is it primary organization by varietal or by country?

I think there is a good argument for varietal, but I chose country for the reason of simplicity. A wine has to have a country, but if you organize by varietal you’ll find yourself getting into tricky territory as soon as you get into blends and indigenous grapes. How would you handle something like the Barbera/Nebbiolo blend I just had for WBW? If there is a defining attribute of this wine, it is that it is made with two grapes from the Piedmont region, which is known for those two varietals.

My proposition was to organize by country, but give other users enough tools to navigate by their preferred style. By keeping the country context, one would be able to search their method but learn about the geographic nature of wine.

However, that should also be applied in reverse, perhaps forcing geographic-natured searchers to learn about where else in the world there are things like a delicious unoaked Chardonnay. Perhaps there can be a “flavor oasis” in the middle of my imaginary store that brings the more world-wide wines (Shiraz, Chardonnay, etc) out of their geographic context and lets them mingle happily.