Our mission at VinConnect is to enable American consumers with a passion for Old World wines to connect with and purchase directly from many of Europe’s best estates. This pursuit has received an incredibly positive response from both wineries and consumers alike, and VinConnect has rapidly gone from a flash of an idea into an international business, with 85+ winery partners connected to more than 20,000 passionate wine drinkers.  The press has noticed as well, with recent profiles in publications such as Bloomberg, The Washington Post and the Huffington Post, and podcasts like XChateau and Vint driving growth on a daily basis.

The idea for VinConnect grew out of my experiences as an avid wine drinker and collector.  While living in San Francisco several years ago, I enjoyed discovering new wineries in the Napa Valley area. I joined their mailing lists so that I could have a direct relationship, support them financially, and ensure that I would receive an annual allocation of what would often end up becoming highly sought-after wines.

I enjoyed drinking many French and Italian wines as well, but found the process of purchasing similarly high-quality, limited-production imported wines to be extremely challenging. They were often very hard to find and highly allocated — what might be available in one shop often wouldn’t be in another, and what few bottles might come to my local store might be sold out before I could visit or return to buy more.

So I turned to searching out high-end European wines on the internet, but that presented its own set of issues: pricing and availability varied widely; I could never be assured of the provenance of the wine, or how it had been stored or transported; and I had no direct relationship with the seller to ensure the wine’s safe arrival (or recourse in the event it didn’t).

Having appreciated the benefits of the U.S. model, I set about solving the legal, logistical, compliance and other issues related to enabling European wineries to offer mailing lists like their U.S. counterparts. This has been a massive undertaking, but with the help of the industry’s best legal and logistics partners and a dedicated team of wine industry veterans in the U.S. and Europe, we have succeeded in solving these challenges. Now for the first time, VinConnect enables you to buy top European wines you want the way you want to — direct from the domaine.

We at VinConnect are incredibly passionate about our role in bringing together top European wineries and their U.S. customers, just as passionate as the wineries are about producing great wines and our customers are about buying and drinking them. We hope this shared passion comes through in everything we do, from seeking out more top domaines to offer to providing exceptional customer service. Please join us as we continue on our mission…

Cheers,

Kevin Sidders
President