More to come: Crowd-sourced wine?

At the risk of sounding "unofficial," I would like to post an entry about an entry I intend to post after I have thought this through better. Isn't that the point of this?

I think that there is a good business model out there to be executed around crowd-sourced wine. I think bringing the consumers and the vendors together makes a lot of sense, and at its simplest it solves 2 simple problems:

1. Restaurants and retail stores have facilities to store wine properly but have to carry the cost of their inventory before wine is sold--inventory is a bad thing
2. Restaurant and retail consumers generally don't have facilities to store wine properly but want to amass a wine "collection" for which inventory is a good thing

I need to research the state of wine blogs and wine consignment before saying anything intelligent about this, but I think that if you married the two, you could improve on the "wine locker" approach employed by some restaurants in which regular customers store their own wines at restaurants.

What if, for example, I stored 4 cases of Opus at Grill 23 in Boston. When I was in for dinner, perhaps I open one of "my" bottles with an upcharge or corkage fee. But what if the restaurant is able to sell my wine, pay me what they pay their distributor, but they don't OWN the wine until it is sold? The restaurant loses the inventory carrying cost, the customer has a great place to store wines, can access them any time, and the customer even has a revenue stream!

The crowd-sourcing side of this, of course, is that a restaurant could have a wine list that is essentially the sum of its participating customers' collections. And who knows better what wines a restaurant's customers like than the customers? Plus, build a community and all of a sudden you have restaurants getting regulars simply BECAUSE they participate. You get groups of individuals all storing wine at a given restaurant coming together organically to do tastings at that restaurant, to swap wines, to swap stories. Break down the barrier between online community and offline community...over a glass of wine no less.

Issues to resolve include the legal side, the restaurant operations aspect, and I am sure myriad others, but for each one of those, there are five upsides to the person who puts this model to work.

• Build out a site to manage all this inventory, and you are linking restaurants/retail with customers, and there is money in that
• Link to reviews and other intellectual property and there is money in that
• Always the advertising--no different here
• Create a COMMUNITY in which people can talk about, rate, discuss, buy, sell, and enjoy wine; by crowd-sourcing the content, you cna relinquish control to collaborative participation and just be the "connector"
• Go upstream down the road and help restaurants with their wine inventory; write standard and custom "reports" as dynamicly printed wine lists (daily, weekly?)
• Down the road, is there such a thing as a digital wine list on a netbook? Customers flip through the inventory with reviews, tasting notes, pairings, and other content right at hand?
• I bet a bottle of wine, 3 people, 45 minutes, and a white board is all it would take to come up with 10 other meaningful revenue streams.

Again, there is plenty of room for more content here, but I think it is a powerful business model, and perhaps one worth fleshing out.