vinfolio

Anyone else surprised at the substantial price increase announced today for storage at Vinfolio? What are the other options in the Bay area?

they just cancelled a nice burg order i placed from back in december so kinda sore.

A few have asked to see the email recieved. Here is a link to their new rates:

http://tinyurl.com/pdpf36f

Thank you for your continued loyalty as our client. Commencing with our March storage billing (for services provided in February), our storage fees will increase.

If you have difficulty viewing this email, you can view it in a browser.

Vinfolio


Jan 22, 2015

Thank you for your continued loyalty as our client. Commencing with our March storage billing (for services provided in February), our storage fees will increase for only the second time in six years. The reason for these increases is to better match our prices with our costs, allowing us to further invest in upgrades to our VinCellar software. All storage and wine customers will continue to access Vincellar at no charge, including having all their stored and Vinfolio purchased wines catalogued into their personal VinCellar. We will also implement significant improvements in customer service and fulfillment.

With these changes, Vinfolio storage will continue to be a tremendous value proposition and complement to a home cellar. Serious collectors merit the unparalleled care, security, provenance and cellar management that Vinfolio offers, including:

• Exceptional, state-of-the art storage conditions
• Experts at every step in the process, from receiving to cataloging to fulfillment and
  management
• Service far superior to a self-service storage locker
• True value at < 1.5% of wine value per annum for the typical cellar
• Virtual wine concierge

The fees will increase by $0.04-$0.05/bottle per month and our minimum monthly fee will increase to $50/month. Our Private Clients will continue to take advantage of discounts on all fees, and in 2015 we have expanded our Private Client Program to include all storage customers with more than 500 bottles of wine in storage. Most storage customers can generally maintain their current storage rate (with the exception of our monthly minimum charge) by taking advantage of our pre-paid storage option. Details of our 2015 Private Client program will follow shortly.

(For full details of our new rate sheet please click here)

Thank-you again, we deeply value your business.

Kind Regards,



KAREN VERGURA
President

Amusing.

VinCellar has been dead and untouched Since December of 2009. It is fascinating that they have suddenly gained interest in it again.

Disclaimer Im in the storage business, and could be considered a competitor in theory, although we dont do long term storage in napa at this time, only consolidation

they have 50k cases or so according to their own newsletter. thats 600k bottles x 4 cents per btl per month. thats 288k of increased income. sounds like a lot of very expensive software if they need 288k a year for the forseeable future to improve what they already have.

Not a fan.

And with the price of energy dropping, funny huh?

Peter, energy costs for wine storage are immaterial compared to the cost of leasing space and personnel costs, both of which typically increase 3-4% a year. In my business, electricity amounts to about 3% of my costs, so even if it goes down by 50% (not going to happen, it comes from Seattle City Light, a monopoly), it would be meaningless.

We raise rates periodically to keep up with inflation, but their rate increase of $0.48-0.60 per bottle seems very high. Our rate is currently about $1.60 per bottle per year, so that would be a huge increase for us.

If I understand the email, they bill in March for storage for the month of February. That gives customers (or soon to be ex-customers) nine days to find alternate storage and move their bottles. I don’t know the provisions of the contract, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t require 30-days notice of any price increase. They can claim they’re giving more than that, but since the increase is really effective in nine days it’s illusory. Unless I’m reading it incorrectly.

Wow, that seems very expensive, $0.35 per bottle monthly. Better off buying a wine storage fridge. Am I reading this correctly? That would be $4,200 annually for a thousand bottle collection.

Maybe they are thinking about buying ‘My Wines’

I have a small amount of storage there and the price would amount to a doubling for me, given the $50 minimum.

As someone who has spent a good amount of $$ with them (by my standards, perhaps not their standards), I’m disappointed with the lack of notice and the lack of responsiveness when I asked to delay the minimum through spring shipping season due to pre-arranged shipments.

They politely declined, and I will politely decline to use their services any longer.

Erich, did you check your contract? Are they seriously allowed to raise their rates without 30-days notice?! If so, that’s absurd.

I took a quick look at the Ts&Cs when I got the email (I don’t think I signed a contract), and they work on a storage unit basis – so at any point, when they bill you, you have to buy units at the then-current rates.

Whether they “can” do it isn’t that relevant to me anymore – they shouldn’t do it with essentially no notice.

I was actually recently considering moving more wine there, as I have had pretty good luck using Marketplace to move a few bottles when someone was willing to pay a high price.

Hmmmm, my thought was you’d need a lot more than that to build decent software. Programmers in the bay area aren’t cheap!

Michael

They explain everything really clearly in their support forum: http://www.vinfolio.com/forums/

Oh wait. They shut that down 2 years ago. But they still link to it.

Crack operation.

But I seem to have heard something about another ex-technology jock, Steve Case, investing in Vinfolio. Do you really need to publicly piss on this effort the way that you did repeatedly on Parker’s failed effort? You WON, Eric. There is only one CT. You are there to cheer like a soccer mom at every public mention of your “child”. Fair enough. Your kid got the full soccer scholarship to the school of its choice. Parker’s “child” got a high of 350 on its SATs after 4 tries and will be going to Monkton Technical College to take up plumbing. The “child” that Case invested in has a steep uphill struggle.

Root for your kid, Eric. No need to keep talking trash on other peoples’ kids. It is unbecoming…

P.S. As an aside, I was never sure why people who scramble their names on wine boards because they do not want potential thieves to figure out where all that expensive wine is (or to keep their spouses and bosses from knowing how much time they are wasting playing on wine boards) would want to have a full inventory of their holdings on somebody else’s computer to begin with, but that is just me…

Bill
That is an interesting wider question.
The company I’m currently working for is starting to use cloud-based solutions even where the data is company sensitive. This may seem equally crazy, but with appropriate (thorough) security, there should be no difference in risk. On the upside there are many benefits to such solutions including mobility/portability. Another quite refreshing benefit, is that if you need more storage/CPU, that used to take weeks or even months to organise, whereas with the cloud provider (and a pragmatic approach internally) we can have both increased inside the hour.

The cloud is not in itself secure (as has been proved in a couple of high profile instances recently) but the breaches are a tiny fraction of what is out there and most companies are very thorough in their security setup. Personally I trust Eric’s expertise in this field - because of (or despite) his Microsoft background ;¬)

I think Eric’s posts have focused mainly on facts (and I see nothing wrong with what you quoted), but yes he really didn’t need the sarcastic ‘crack operation’ comment. I do see it valid in him challenging competitors track records (with facts, not opinion). At the moment that feels like shooting fish in a barrel but it may not always be such a one-sided landscape.

I think most of Eric’s (CT related) posts are ‘customer support’ more than marketing, though I do reckon we could have some fun posting threads such as “Missing feature in Cellartracker” and a message giving an estimated time in minutes before Eric turns up

regards
Ian

I use both cellar tracker and Vinfolio. Yes Vinfolio is expensive but the value is in the management of the bottles. The software is ok they really do all the work, I still track on CT. The point of the software for me is to order what bottles I want the guys at the warehouse to pack up. There is also great value to me of them picking up the wine at the wineries. This saves a huge amount in shipping. Most of my wine comes from northern California. I always have a harder time visualizing paying $50 bucks to ship a case of wine from St Helena to American Canyon. The big value for me is the ability to pick and pack. For many wines I have a ten year vertical. I love the ability to drive up (20 miles for me) and pick up my years supply of wine for my home cellar, which includes a bottle from 150 different cases. Doing this at a storage facility is horrible on my old back. My old offsite storage was a huge problem for me with a floor level locker. What ended up happening is I would drink some wines too young and let some sit longer than I want. The warehouse people are nice and do a good job.
I think there is a lot of animosity out there. Some driven by bloodthirsty competitors touting their own service, maybe a few people who had some delayed payment a few years ago from the previous poor management of the auction business. Most by casual observers. The internet right.