Free Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed by Zachary Crockett Page A

themselves.
    Customers wanted to avoid fees of around 15% levied by middlemen
and to buy and sell without picking up a phone, so many people in the market
expected Vinetrade to do well. In early 2013,
however, Maskell decided to shut Vinetrade down. The most fundamental problem, he discovered, was that people resisted
ordering wine online. For hobbyists, it destroyed the fun of being part of an
elite group that unashamedly used words like “tannin” and “subtle.” For
investors, it denied them the opportunity to exchange information with
salesmen. “Even if they don’t admit it,” Maskell tells us, “people like having the posh voice on the other end of the line. They
want reassurance and they want to feel part of the ‘boy’s club.’”
    In the stock market, most assets have an underlying value based
on objective facts. In wine, taste and quality is a factor of perception.
Investors deal, then, in perceptions of perceptions. In the small world of
insanely expensive wine, value and prices are determined by what the wine
clique is saying about a given vintage. Sellers could not afford to trade
conversations with salesmen for the efficiency of a computer screen because the
only currency in the market is everyone else’s take on given wines. It would be
like trying to predict the next “it” couple in high school without talking to
the popular crowd. “I think that we proved that people buying wine don’t care
about our data and don’t care about our graphs,” Maskell reflects. “They care about what people are saying.”
    Two years earlier, Troy Carter took a different approach to a
wine startup — he bought a motorcycle and began driving around California
wine country. He rode up to small wineries, said, “Hi, I’m Troy,” and asked to
sample their wines. When he found a wine tasty and unique and the winemaker
pleasant and “authentic,” he offered to buy wine to distribute and sell through
his mailing list “Motorcycle Wineries.” Trucks drive the wine he buys from
California wineries to his San Francisco warehouse where he distributes them to
restaurants and individuals.
    Carter’s goal with Motorcycle Wineries — other than
travelling and tasting any wine he wants — is to bring romance and
authenticity to the experience of buying wine. “If you just want wine that
tastes good, you can go to Costco,” he tells us. “But there is a large group of
people that want to have a unique experience. They want to discover wine at a
tasting or at a winery off the beaten path. They want the history of finding
something that was sitting in a cellar for a long time. That is what I
provide.”
    Carter works only with tiny vineyards that use natural
winemaking techniques like organic grapes and follow traditional techniques
like hand-bottling . High labor costs renders these
wines more expensive. “Authenticity does not scale very well,” Carter says.
Nevertheless, his bottles cost around $15.
    How did Carter convince winemakers to trust him? By wearing leather. “They’re the only clothes I own,” says
Carter, looking down at his understated leather pants and jacket. By showing up
on a motorcycle wearing leather, he looked the part of a man who travels the
world looking for unique wines. When he didn’t wear leather, he was not taken
seriously. “Winemakers ride motorcycles,” Carter tells us. “I don’t know why,
but they do. Maybe because they have a romanticized vision of
wine. Like I do.”

 
    Romancing
the Wine Industry

 
    People
inside and outside the wine world can argue whether a 1982 Lafite Rothschild is incredible or a scam. But it almost no longer matters. The end
result of the fine wine market’s cherished romanticization of wines like Lafite is that now only corrupt
businessmen and oligarchs can afford it.
    Given the way people use the language of wine to police class
lines, it’s tempting to look at this result with schadenfreude and to cite studies by wine economists as a