Press J for 'Jammy'

Vidi, vici, vino. forget wine in a box. The grape new thing is a sommelier in a box, figuratively speaking. Roughly half a dozen companies are testing and marketing interactive touch-screen wine kiosks for placement in grocery and liquor stores, as well as wine shops. The kiosks vary but do the same thing: allow confused shoppers to search for wines by name, grape, region, price or menu compatibility. And they allow wine sellers to answer customer questions without having to hire a full-time wine pro.

In stores with kiosks, says Jim Grinsfelder of WineConnect in Minneapolis, "we've seen an increase in wine sales of as much as 12 to 20 percent." That presumably helps the proprietor pay the $400 monthly fee for the kiosk. A competitor, the Wine Expert, in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., charges $2,000 a year to install and maintain its wine database on computer terminals that store owners buy for between $4,000 and $5,000. The firm says it expects to be in seven countries and close to 100 stores by the end of the year. Another company that's developing kiosks, Wine Miner in Atlanta, already has a wine-selection data-base on its Web site, wineminer.com, that allows users to find wines in their price range with adjectives like "jammy," "chewy" or "hedonistic."

But right now, the field is wide open, and store owners are being dined and, er, wined by companies that are going head-to-head to be the first to get a contract with a Wal-Mart or Costco-type chain. "Everybody is trying to land that big deal," says David Drain, executive director of the Self Service & Kiosk Association, the trade group representing companies that make interactive displays. "It's a land grab."

-Linda Stern

© 2007