Wine is an almost ineffable anomaly.

As much as I truly love the people, the sensations of place, the memories on my palate, as a marketer few things confound me more than the dynamics of this market.

This stems from a market conundrum that I can articulate but after mulling it over and over, find hard to fathom.

The modern wine market is grounded on the promise of the web as a foundation for communities of interest and an infinite number of micro brands. A true matrix of connections bouncing from a hillside in the Sierra Foothills literally around the world to countless touch points.

Take a look at where we are today.

Thousands of artisanal winemakers across the globe are making astoundingly interesting wine, each with an individual brand connected on the social web, with tens of thousands of enthusiast consumers.

In an almost one to one relationship, we call our favorite winemakers by their first names, sell out dinners with them when they roll through town, and invariably purchase their wine one bottle at a time from our local shops.

People sitting in Greenpoint have a personal relationship with Fabio from Ambiz Winery in Spain. Someone in Tokyo with Hardy Wallace from Dirty & Rowdy in Napa.

This is the Etsy effect—but without Etsy.

This is the web of connections with mostly terrestrial and disconnected points of commerce.

A transactional reality without a marketplace.

This is Anomaly #1. There are three of them.

As much as this exemplifies the concept of a global local community, wired on the back of the web itself, it is studiously retro and analog by nature.

How many wine enthusiasts have a wine app on their first or second screen on their phones?

Within my very broad networks, globally through the #winelover community, locally tied into the NY community and nationally through my interest in natural wines, almost zilch.

Too crazy and counterintuitive.

Built on the web, grounded in connections and need to buy and taste, yet app or even site wise, simply not there.

Take that further.

With the exception of winery direct to consumer and some wine clubs, wine in an ecommerce platform simply doesn’t exist.

Forget Amazon’s three time failure. There are many tombstones of great ideas to buy wine online under the monikers of natural or gen y or whatever. Most have been non starters.

A multi-billion dollar market. A wired community. A strata of heroes and rock star personalities, yet nada for online navigation and purchase.

Exceptions there are. Wine Searcher for one. Some signs of life in the local delivery segment but for the most part, this is true.

That is Anomaly #2.

And now to the strangest piece of all (and where I will raise some hackles).

Wine as a culture is so information rich yet compared to any other segment that drives an enthusiast community, content light.

There are really excellent wine writers, many of them friends, yet few true thought leaders from a market wise.

When I think of market drivers for this world, there are only two—Eric Asimov from The Pour and of course the grand dame of the wine world Jancis Robison.  This is the top of a very short and wide ladder.

When I asked two wine writer friends up for ‘best of’ writing competition how many people are reading their excellent work on their own blogs or in places like Palate Press, the numbers were between 500 and few thousand.

What!

Tastings at shops and conventions are overcrowded with people all dressed up, carrying a social dose of alcohol buzz and soaking up juicy topics like the intricacies of dosage! This is a billion dollar business. There are over 20,000 members in the #winelover community alone.

I can’t fathom this but it is most certainly true.

And that is Anomaly #3.

I write this post with true love of this amazing beverage and a community of people that enhance my life.

As someone who has blogged about wine off and on for a decade.

As someone whose embrace of natural wine has changed my ethical worldview.

And as someone who put his money and time where his mouth was and spent two years trying to build a commerce community and then shuttered it. Albeit some 20,000 strong, it couldn’t crack the market code and get beyond me personally as the brand. RIP thelocalsip.

This post is both an exclamation of affection and undying interest for what wine means to me.  Why most everyday I jump off the subway and spend 30 minutes and $30 dollars buying yet another bottle with a story to ponder over dinner.

I build brands and markets for a living and maybe that is why this so interests and confounds me.

I think of these anomalies with a head nod towards the inscrutable nature of it all. A smile that maybe these anomalies themselves are part of the wonder of it all.

Maybe why this remains so personal. Why a shared love of skin-fermented Grillo in discussion on a plane creates a true bond with a total stranger.

I’m not certain this world needs any disruption at all.

It does warrant acknowledgement for its uniqueness and its wonder.

And the power of it to make life better.  The mystery of it as a true bond amongst the most diverse community I know.

It certainly has that from me.