Abandon Ship! Amazon Retreats on Wine Venture

Wed April 1 2009 2:44:00 ET

At Amazon.com headquarters in Seattle, company spokespeople were mum, but the Napa Valley is abuzz with the news that the online retail giant has backed away from plans to add California wine to it vast range of books, music and…stuff.

Initiation of the erstwhile wine division dates back to summer of 2008, when gossipers in Napa spread word that Amazon was in talks with valley officials to gauge the viability of selling wine online, the all-inclusive Amazon.com way. The plan was to have Amazon stock and sell only domestic wines, starting with California. At the time, the idea elicited mixed reactions among old-timers and newbies alike, many of whom said they did not see any reason to commit large chunks of inventory to such a project.

Fast-forward to winter of 2009 and the tune had changed. Amazon.com’s Napa liaison, Adam Byteman, became a big man around the town of St. Helena. Vintners up and down the valley sought Byteman out, saying, sure, they’d be happy to help Amazon get its feet wet in wine, so to speak.

Indeed, Byteman became a friendly and familiar face. He was known to set up shop each weekday morning in the Napa Valley Coffee Roasting Company. Stacks of business cards and spiral notepad on one side of his laptop, a mug of steaming java on the other, he patiently tapped away at the keyboard, usually smiling. The data entry phase seemed to be coming along just fine—that is, until yesterday at noon when Byteman was seen being whisked away in a straitjacket.

What went wrong? Serendipitously, Dregs Report had chatted with Adam Byteman earlier in the day….

“I’m almost done!” Byteman declared perkily at about 10:00 a.m. “For five weeks I have been logging every single Napa bottling that could potentially be stored and sold, starting in Carneros and moving north. It took me a while to get a handle on just how to tag all the variables. You see, with books and CDs, it’s pretty simple: category, artist, title, format, price—done. With wine, there is so much more data to account for: grapes in the blend, appellation, sub-appellation, proprietary names, special designation. Is it organic? Is it estate-bottled? Then there is vintage, the alcohol by volume, bottle size, critics’ ratings, case pack, volume discounts…and that’s all before we get around to tracking the maze of legal requirements to ship into all 50 states. So far I have close to 17,000 bottlings entered from Napa Valley alone. And as soon as I finish Calistoga, which should be today, I can head back to Seattle to analyze the data and set up the interface.”

But at around 11:30 in the morning, we noticed a dramatic change in Byteman’s appearance and demeanor. He was sweating profusely, clawing at his hair, breaking pencils and emitting sounds instead of words. By noon the shop’s manager called 911 and within minutes, Byteman was secured, sedated and led away. But not before Dregs overheard him babbling: “Calistoga Cellars, Calistoga Estate…. What if the TTB grants both a new Calistoga AVA and grandfathers in the two Calistoga wineries that have Calistoga in their names but do not use the AVA-required 85% Calistoga fruit? The threat to the internal binary data differential posed by such an overlap could have a domino effect on the rest of the d-base, rendering all place names in conflict with brand names. This could melt down the Amazon servers, resulting in catastrophic data corruption and capital loss!”

Concerned for Byteman’s well-being, we followed the ambulance to the hospital and waited several hours until the Amazon employee was released at 5:00 p.m. We followed him straight to a bar in Vallejo, where he was nursing a beer. “That’s it,” he told Dregs Report. “I am done. Fini. Outta here. We simply cannot risk managing the data represented by the wine business. Calistoga was the last straw. How is the average Amazon customer supposed to get a handle on all the variations if we can’t account for all of the logical permutations? And if we can’t do Napa Valley wines, well, fat chance we could handle the rest of America. And Italy…wow, that’s the stuff programmer nightmares are made of. I am leaving California tomorrow, and will recommend to Jeff Bezos and the board that Amzon.com drop all plans to get into the wine business. It is beyond technically challenging; it’s im-freaking-possible.”

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