Drink wine? Then you must own a yacht

How else to explain the ads that show up on the WC’s Internet pages?

Imagine my surprise when I saw the ad at the top of the page as I was running through my morning Internet routine the other day. Yes, believe it or not, a yacht broker.

How is that possible, given that I am the world’s foremost authority on cheap wine? That’s hardly very yachty,

The only answer I could come up with is wine. Internet ads, thanks to our overlords at Google and their co-conspirators at companies like Meta, harvest our searches and then sell the information to advertisers. That’s why, when I’m pursuing my computer geekiness, I see ads for software services and server hardware. Or sometimes see ads for dog food and the like when I am doing a search for Churro, the blog’s associate editor.

But yachts? I don’t search for boat moorings, high-end cars, luxury apartments, or $5,000 refrigerators – all things that would seem to indicate a socio-economic penchant for yachts. And, given that Google and the like sell data they glean (a polite way of saying steal) from our personal information, they should know I don’t live near an ocean, don’t own anything save for the Honda Fit, don’t live in a uber-fancy ZIP code, and that I use coupons (digital, of course) when I go to the supermarket.

Again, hardly very yachty.

But I do search for wine, and when I did the reporting for the Gallo post after the company bought Rombauer and Massican, I was looking for information about two pricey Napa producers. And I regularly search retailer and winery sites, as well as Wine-searcher, to write the blog and to do my freelance work.

So what other conclusion could the Internet bots come to? I must have a yacht to sell if I’m checking Wine-searcher for $100 Napa cabs. And, as Gallup pointed out in its most recent annual survey, wine drinkers are about as close to the 1 percent as it gets when it comes to alcohol.

So thank you, premiumization. Who knew anyone would ever think the WC owned a yacht, if not for you?