Tag Archives: Drizly

Winebits 684: Drizly, tannins, wine lawsuits

drizly
How much wine can you fit into an Uber car?

This week’s wine news:  Uber buys booze delivery service Drizly ($1.1 billion!), plus tannins may work against Covid-19 and yet another terrific wine lawsuit

• Uber-Drizly deal: And yes, the exclamation point in the subhed is warranted. Some five years ago, I interviewed one of Drizly’s co-founders, Nick Rellas, and $1.1 billion was about the last thing on his mind. We spent much of the time talking about how Rellas started the company by delivering booze for a Massachusetts liquor store to get an idea about how delivery worked. But there it is, one year into the pandemic — the company is worth $1.1 billion to Uber, the ride sharing and delivery service. The wise guys and analysts can debate and pontificate about the deal as much as they want, but that an alcohol delivery service is worth that much money in a country where alcohol delivery is still illegal in many places is difficult to believe.

• Bring on the tannins: One more reason why health news is banned from the blog, save for stories to show why it is banned from the blog: Taiwanese researchers claim that tannins in wine can help fight Covid-19 by inhibiting the activity of two key enzymes within the virus. This is, of course, exciting news, save for one thing: How are we supposed to get tannins into Covid-19 patients?

• Let the lawyers loose: The Wine Curmudgeon has long had an almost Pythonesque fascination with wine lawsuits, the sillier the better. So consider this: Rapper Drake is suing two retailers for discounting his $400 Champagne. The details are — pun fully intended — priceless, with the rapper and his partner alleging conspiracy on the part of the retailers and the brand’s former distributor. Their goal? To destroy Drake’s bubbly top benefit the competition. The WC has just one question: How surprised was Drake that the wine business was just as nasty as the record business, which is infamous for being nasty?

Photo: “uber” by stockcatalog is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Winebits 660: Takeout wine, James Beard awards, Drizly

takeout wineThis week’s wine news:  Takeout wine is on the upswing because of the pandemic, plus no James Beard awards this year and Drizly, the booze delivery app, raises $50 million

• More takeout wine? One-third of us have ordered takeout wine, beer, and spirits during the pandemic, and almost 60 percent of us want states to make ordering takeout booze permanent. That’s the result of a survey from something called  bid-on-equipment.com, which sells used restaurant equipment. Yes, that’s an odd source for a survey like this, but it’s worth noting if only because the survey lists its methodology. Most of the “studies” that do this sort of thing to get cyber-ink just flash the headline and leave it at that. This methodology seems legit; my only concern is the average age of the respondents is 36.

• No Beard awards: The James Beard Awards, the Oscars for the restaurant business, won’t be given in 2020 or 2021. The 2020 nominees will be recognized, but the awards won’t be given because of restaurant business turmoil during the pandemic. The “foundation believes the assignment of awards will do little to further the industry in its current uphill battle,” it said in a statement. In addition, buried toward the end of the news release, the Beard Foundation said it would try to make the awards more transparent and equitable — an acknowledgement, said the report in the link, that awards go to “mostly to white men, with the same nominees being named over and over again.”

• Cash for Drizly: Drizly, the alcohol delivery app, has raised $50 million for what the company calls supporting its “laser focus on alcohol delivery.”  The additional cash comes as Drizly has thrived during the pandemic, growing more than 350 percent so far this year. The news release is worth reading not just for the news, but for its wonderful use of business-speak, which makes no sense to anyone but the people who wrote the release. My favorite? “Retailers that join Drizly experience incremental growth from new customers. …”, which means absolutely nothing. Do retailers who join Drizly experience incremental losses? Of course not. That’s the company’s fancy way of saying that not everyone picks up a lot of new business.

Graphic courtesy of bid-on-equipment.com