For wine consumers, smart shopping increasingly involves smartphones.
Many local merchants have noticed a steady and often marked increase in customers pulling out their devices to determine their buying choices. And no, it's not just those app-happy millennials going this route.
"I've seen a lot of people in their mid-40s to mid-60s using [smartphones]," said Lonny Isenberg of Haskell's Minnetonka. "The apps are maturing so that it's filtering up from the early enablers to more mainstream."
What are they looking for? "A lot of everything," Isenberg said. "How prices compare, how people reviewed it, just looking for a lot of information because it's readily available. Some apps even have food matches."
A simple scan of a label or URL code can provide a wealth of info from Vivino, Corkz and other apps. Looking up ratings on a crowdsourcing site such as Cellar Tracker or Delectable produces countless reviews, from pros and avid "amateurs."
And while younger consumers might be more inclined to seek out feedback from their peers, high-end buyers likely have a decidedly different goal.
"If somebody out there buys a lot of really good stuff, the high-end [Robert] Parker stuff," said Mike Thomas, whose family has owned St. Paul's Thomas Liquors since Prohibition, "he might be checking for the prices" at sites such as Wine-Searcher, which lists prices from stores around the world.
In a sense, these wine buyers are using the wide, wide world of the wine Web in lieu of something that's already available to them: "shelf talkers," the placards in front of bottles that might show only a Wine Spectator score but increasingly are crafted by winemongers to include ratings, descriptors and possible food pairings. "We're doing the homework for them with our own shelf talkers," said Thomas, who shares writing duties with one of the Twin Cities' savviest wine salesmen, Peter Vars.
