With the increase in online shopping stores over the past ten years, so to has the online wine industry, albeit somewhat slower than some other industries. One of the main reasons behind this has been the skepticism behind buying wine from unknown sources.

However, over time more business have entered the market place and added a large variety of ideas about how to sell wine over the internet. The level and quality of wine being sold has improved as business models have improved. But, there are still some bad ways to buy wine over the net.

Online wine auction houses are one dubious way of buying wine of the internet. Many wineries and wine companies dump their stock to these online auction companies at a bottomed out price. There is nothing wrong with deals like this, although most of the wines are “cleanskins” (no official label) and are usually only labelled by type and wine region.

Cleanskins are always fraught with danger as you don’t know exactly what you’re getting, especially if you are unable to try them first. The varietal of wine may match with the region, but the quality of the wine is always anybody’s guess. Why do you think that the wineries or companies are dumping this stock off to auction houses in the first place?”

Many examples of wines being purchased which have found to be off can be found, with the main reason being the lack of knowledge as to how the wine has been stored. Imagine buying a six pack of well known quality wine worth $50 a bottle for $20 a bottle, then finding only one of them is drinkable

“Affiliate” sites are also starting to creep into the online wine market. These types of wine stores look like any regular online wine store, but generally look like they stock more wines than the ordinary. The problem with these sites is that they don’t stock any wine at all. They are on-sellers and just pass on your order to the originating wineries and take a commission for them.

The best way to pick these types of web sites is by checking their “Shipping/Delivery Information” pages. You will generally find with these sites that most will ask you to check the shipping costs either from the winery themselves or a special shipping page which shows the costs of delivery per winery. The best course of action here is to order the wine directly from the winery itself as you will be supporting the winery directly. If they are smaller wineries, they will appreciate your patronage more so directly than paying an affiliate a commission.