Amazon.com customers will be able to buy wine through the e-tailer’s Web site as early as this month, a spokesman for the Napa Valley Vintners Association divulged on Wednesday.
Amazon has been working with the nonprofit group, which represents 315 vintners in the Napa Valley, to arrange workshops with wine producers that might be interested in selling wine through the e-tailer.
“It should be live in the next few weeks,” Hall said, adding that Amazon was “really looking to be the go-to Web site for wine sales.”
Amazon has dabbled in the wine business before, investing $30 million for a 45 percent share in Wineshopper.com in 1999, a start-up that was acquired by Wine.com in 2000 before going through a series of layoffs. Wine.com has a storefront on Amazon, through which it sells gourmet food baskets but not wine.
Since the Supreme Court ruled in May 2005 that states must grant the same shipping rights to out-of-state and in-state wineries, winery-to-consumer shipping has become legal in 35 states, according to wine advocacy group Free the Grapes. There are now more than 5,000 wineries in the United States, at least one in each state.
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