The Amazon Winery

The wine business has always been very profitable, as has any alcohol business, for that matter. There are always scores of people wanting to celebrate something or drown their sorrow, and alcohol in any form has been known to be one of the best ways to do that.

Amazon.com, the world's biggest online shopping web site, is looking to recruit a senior wine buyer that will be responsible for "the acquisition of a massive new product selection," according to the Financial Times. That puts a totally different emphasis on wine selling for the company, but gives it credit for attempting once again to enter the online alcohol selling business, especially difficult in the United States due to the multitude of laws that are different from state to state.

The first attempt at selling wine from Amazon.com happened in 1999, when the company bought Wineshopper.com for $30 million. Unfortunately for the online sale site, this only lasted for about a year. Despite this unnerving precedent, the board decided another try would be welcomed after looking at the numbers for wine selling in 2007, totaling a whooping $30 billion.

The circumstances are also a lot better, after the US Supreme Court ruled that state governments cannot not prohibit their residents from ordering directly from wineries outside the state, back in 2005.

I don't know why, but a song from Damien Rice pops into my mind when reading about this future course of action from Amazon.com: Cheers, Darling. It's the story of a young singer that meets a girl by accident and walk into a pub together and start drinking, getting closer, up to the point when he is certain that he is in love. Being young and without a lot of money, they had to take the same bus home, and he intentionally did everything possible for them to miss it, in the hope of spending the night together, walking on the streets, a good chance for the both of them to get to know each other better. When she notices that the last ride has gone, she tells him not to worry, because her boyfriend will come and pick them up. With Amazon, it's almost the opposite of that story. After having been shot in the wing at first, it now holds strong hopes that it will work out alright.