Zap that price …

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The Good Grape posted the other day about WineZap Mobile, which is a great little find. WineZap Mobile begins to solve a problem that Kevin and I encounter quite often. We are unknowingly paying too much for our wine.
Quite often I’ll be standing in the Cork & Bottle down the street. I know, as it’s happened many times, that they mark up their wines a little too much. Usually I’ll get home, enter the wine into CellarTracker, and discover that the average price for the wine is around $5 less than what I paid. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get seduced by the wine on the shelf or at the tasting and I keep buying. I am the ultimate definition of an impulse buyer (this also extends to shoes).
Usually I can halt an impulse buy with a dose of reality. WineZap provides that little bit of reality I need. All you need to do is just text the name and vintage of the wine to mobile@winezap.com. It will text or email you back with the lowest/highest/average prices for that wine. If you add your zip code, it will let you know where to buy it.
I tried this with the Woop Woop Shiraz yesterday and recieved this:

WINE/LOW/HIGH/AVG
Woop Woop-Shiraz-Syrah/$7.47/$13.99/$10.96
No matching local retailers found.

The good news is that while I paid above the average, I paid below the high.

This is a nifty, free service. I can now picture myself asking the smug little wine guy at the Cork and Bottle why his price is so much above the national average. Maybe this is the first step in getting prices to actually make sense.

I only have two suggestions for improvement. The WineZap database doesn’t yet seem to be overly large. We often pick up Hangtime as an easy to drink Pinot Noir. Hangtime is not in their database. Neither is Cloudline, an Oregon Pinot I recently discovered. My other issue? They seem to have no information on stores in my area. These are just issues with expanding their database and that will, hopefully, come with time.

Posted by Michelle at 9:30 am in Wine Tech | Permalink | Comments (2)

2 Responses to “Zap that price …”

Jim Eastman says:

September 12, 2006 at 12:39 pm

The problem with a national average is that different states have different minimum markups on wine. Ohio, unsurprisingly, has minimum markups that are higher than the national average and so wine becomes a bit more expensive here. This is, of course, a damn shame.
John Dito says:

October 5, 2006 at 9:50 pm

Nice one, I may have to post about this on my site…although ive stumped it twice…still gr8 resource.
-john