A series of interviews and articles with a theme of buying and selling wine here in NZ. Part 3: The Wine Subscription Service. Interview: Yvonne Lorkin, WineFriend.
How did WineFriend come about – what’s the background to it being founded?
My mate Debbie Sutton and I started WineFriend back in 2015 and it was very much Debbie’s idea originally. She’d recently become a My Food Bag subscriber, and began wondering if there could be a way to somehow incorporate the subscription model for wine and make it a personalised service. Debbie has a background in international wine PR and also co-owned a boutique, Awatere Valley wine company called Blind River with her father. So she has a wealth of experience in both wine consumer behaviour and also what it’s like to be a small wine producer battling to find new markets in an increasingly cluttered and competitive environment.
We’d become friends through my writing about Blind River for magazines and filming a story on them in the first series of Thirsty Work.
Debbie and I began talking and it became clear that we knew people wanted to try new and interesting wines, but supermarket wine selections are yawn-inducingly narrow and the small amount of wines there don’t give you any clues as to whether they’ll suit your personal tastes – so it’s a risk dropping $15-$20 $30 on a bottle that (despite having a tonne of shiny stickers on it) may totally not be right for you. So we tend to stick to our same old same olds – which is really boring.
AND we’re busy right? Aint got time to be schlepping around the internet looking for wines or trawling from wine shop to wine shop. We take the hassle and guesswork out of finding great wines for time-poor people who want to try something fresh and new and trust that those wines are going to be right for their individual tastes”. And we do it by asking simple questions online to find out how your tastebuds tick, then we get you to tell us about all the wines you normally drink, this gives us a base profile for me to match 6 wines to – we send them to you and then you rate the wines – through emojis and comments if you want. This helps us get better at choosing new wines for you the next month and the next month until we’re in perfect sync. Essentially we match wines to people.
Without giving away all your secrets… what is the model for WineFriend – what makes you unique? Despite what recent copycat services might spout, we are the only company in this part of the world who has painstakingly build unique software from scratch that codes all the stylistic components of each wine, with the individual palate profiles built from an initial customer survey. Those profiles are then refined and refined as the two-way communication mechanism kicks in when each customer rates and reviews their wines.
Our customers can choose to subscribe to different tiers for different price-points and quality levels at different frequency rates. We charge one flat fee for delivery whether that’s rural or urban, no exceptions. I taste everything and nothing my team and I don’t love makes it through. We wanted to be able to offer people a personalised alternative to supermarket sameness, while also offering small, boutique NZ wineries a new route to market where their brands are protected, not discounted. That’s what makes us unique. Plus we pour absolutely everything into relentless customer service.
Do you offer deals only to members? Someone can’t just browse and buy wine like in a shop? What’s the benefit to joining up? A WF subscription is about embarking on a journey with us and helping us learn more about how you taste wine which helps us find the right wine for you. It is a very rare thing that your selection of wines would be the same as your friend or your neighbour – because we all taste wine differently. We’re not like a normal shop. Normal shops rely on you having to do the mental gymnastics of figuring out whether a wine is right for you and then you still have to pay for it in advance to take a chance on it. No matter how many medals or accolades it’s got, it still might not be right for your palate. We take all that hassle and guesswork and risk away. We offer the occasional deal to members and people who are on our database. It could be a wine that’s awesome but falls outside of our usual pricing parameters – but it’s not a regular thing. We don’t want to bombard peoples inboxes with offers – that’s not cool.
Are people happy to try a wine they’re not familiar with? Kiwi’s are great explorers. Our customers are really open-minded so long as recommendations are coming from someone they trust and someone they know has their tastebuds in mind. So yep, our customers are really adventurous bunch and I love that.
How do you choose what to offer – do you have to taste every wine, or rely on things like gold medals, reviews? I taste everything. And it has to be a wine that my team and I personally love, to be featured in WineFriend no matter what level. I don’t rely on other wine critics or medals or ratings. Those things are nice to be able to communicate to the customers that we send that wine to – but they really don’t factor at all in terms of initially choosing the wine. In fact it really grates me when companies will say “oh it got 5 stars from such and such – you should feature it”. I’ll make my own assessment thanks.
Can members submit votes and reviews? Or requests/ suggestions? Yep, in terms of submitting ratings and reviews our whole business model depends on our customers doing just that. All wine ratings are kept private (unlike traditional wine ratings sites) so that people can feel completely comfortable being brutally honest. In terms of requests and suggestions, we will always consider wines that customers are fans of, however those wines have to work for us stylistically and fit into our pricing model. I love it when our customers suggest wines that I may not have seen before – that’s a bonus.
What trends have you noticed – or are predicting? Rosé all day, every day, every season, all year round. People want all styles of chardonnay – however those honking great roasty, toasty, buttery styles still rule. Sparkling wine is becoming more of an everyday enjoyment rather than a ‘special occasion’ thing (hooray!!!)
What do you think is next for New Zealand wines? Oh lord. Um. Please let it not be sparkling pinot gris.
Are you behind New Zealand wine, or is just about selling whatever the market wants? We are heavily behind New Zealand wine and about 80% of our listings are local, however we’re also really keen for our customers to embrace different wine styles from other countries and learn about how they’re different to what we grow here. That’s why we always include a ‘wildcard’ wine in our boxes, to gently push people to try something they may never have seen before, but something that still sits in their palate parameters. I love it when we’ll have a customer who, when they sign up, might be very set in their ways and preferences, then a few boxes down the track they’ll say things like “I had NO idea I liked so many different wines!”
I want to show people great wine and it can come from anywhere.
