It is a son and grandson of winegrowers who created the platform in 2014, with in mind the difficulties of his ancestors in managing an online store and their recriminations against the margins of distributors. That’s good: Erwann de Barry is a graduate of a business school and knows his contemporaries well, who no longer let go of their smartphones. Also Twil (acronym for The Wine I Love), a live marketplace with producers, functions as a “wine Shazam”. We taste a good bottle in a party? Scan the label or look for it in the database of 500,000 cuvées, then order it in three clicks!
The company even provides anti-breakage packaging for transport. The small French Vivino challenges its Danish competitor by favoring short circuits. According to his calculations, out of the 15 euros for a bottle purchased on the market, the winemaker only recovers 6.15. At Twil, his share amounts to 8.53 euros, despite the 15% commission charged by the site. He can therefore even offer discounts to the customer. A win-win system.
A respected family trading house since 1983, when the Bordeaux mail-order company was still called Vins des grands vignes, Millésima sold by catalog, on Minitel, then on the Internet. All the wines come from the house, and what wines! The most prestigious Bordeaux châteaux, en primeur; rare Burgundy cuvées; great champagnes; famous wines from Italy, Spain and the New World. The pure player, now managed by Fabrice Bernard and his sister Hortense, guarantees transport and storage conditions, in a cellar housing 2.5 million bottles and no less than 13,000 references, i.e. the largest wine cellar of the online world. Average price of the bottle: 50 euros. Average amount of the basket: 1000 euros.
In 1999, you had to be a visionary to sell wine on the Internet. The survivor of the Web pioneers sits on a pile of gold: a stock worth 22 million euros, in a temperature-regulated cellar located in Bordeaux. One of the most prestigious ranges of wines, spirits and champagnes on the Web, with more than 5,000 references, resists competition thanks to artificial intelligence. “Instead of a common newsletter, we send up to 80 different emails to 80 consumer profiles, determined by analysis of purchase history and pages visited,” explains Managing Director Bernard Le Marois. Wineandco doubled its catalog by creating, in 2019, a marketplace open to producers.
Created in 2011, the site hit the mark by offering a monthly subscription to receive a box of two bottles. The pioneer of “boxmania” has managed to retain 150,000 customers. A young population who, to unearth beautiful skittles, trust the former sommelier of the Ritz Jean-Michel Deluc. He also manages an online store, enriched by the acquisition, in February, of Decantalo, number two in e-commerce wine in Spain. The company recently changed shareholders, passing from the hands of Veepee to those of the trader and logistician Cogip. The ideal cocktail to develop Le Petit Ballon in Europe.
The site puts forward three strong arguments: the lowest price guarantee, reimbursement of the difference and delivery within 24 hours. Founded in 2002 by Emmanuel Toussaint, this pure player has popularized online sales among thirtysomethings with a selection of bottles between 5 and 10 euros made by sommeliers. The range, stored in a warehouse in Annecy, has expanded, with soon 7000 references at all prices. Available in five languages, Vinatis delivers to 25 countries. It is one of the few e-tailers, along with Millésima, to venture abroad, which represents a third of its turnover of 57 million euros. An amount that makes it the new number one specialized site, ahead of the same Millésima.
