theLocalSip

Connecting the web and wine worlds in a community marketplace has been a long-term dream of mine.

The magic of a great artisanal wine as a connector to people, culture and place perpetually intrigues and inspires me. The perfect wave of confluence between the social web as a connector and the rise of the natural and artisanal wine movement, speaks to a world where local can indeed be appreciated and experienced globally.

For a number of years, I’ve been musing over how a marketplace around wine could be configured where you could taste before your buy, purchase locally from passionate and informed individuals and order online with a click, using your social nets as the distribution channel.

theLocalsip  is the beginning of that solution bringing the wine and web worlds together. Not by skirting your neighborhood wine shops but by connecting them as the center of a commercial marketplace where community is built amongst consumers connecting locally at the street level, and nationally online.

The social web and community commerce is a great disruptor through efficiency and scale alone. An aggregated network of wine shops could even alter the economics of how wine gets from the artisan winemaker from all corners of the globe through your local shops to you. And provide the winemakers themselves with  an aggregated way to connect with their fans as a community.

theLocalSip is an early first step in doing this. Connecting quality local shops as informational and shipping hubs to a national neighborhood of wine lovers. And embedding a transaction in every single share.

Combining the power of the web to build global neighborhoods with the wine world is an idea whose time has come. theLocalSip wants to define part of this convergence.

theLocalSip.com was built simply as a prototype, the visualization of my idea to discover whether indeed consumer and shop owner behaviors would fit my model. It’s taken off quickly and fueled by the enthusiasm of the shops in a few short weeks, it has taken on a life of it’s own.

Do check out theLocalSip wine marketplace, play around with it and tell us what you think.