Underground Cellar wants to be like Robinhood but for buying and trading wine

Jeffrey Shaw, 34, wants to change the wine selling game.

His roughly five-year-old Bay Area e-commerce platform for wine, Underground Cellar, saw sales shoot up 1,000% in the past 18 months, as the pandemic sent many wineries scrambling for ways to sell directly to customers.

But rather than sling wine at a discount to spur sales, potentially a gut-punch to winemakers, Shaw sees a big future in his “gamification” concept for selling bottles on the internet.

“The world is changing,” Shaw said in an interview with MarketWatch, on the heels of selling the platform’s first million bottles and securing $12.5 million of Series A funding to expand. “What might have worked 10 years ago is radically changing.”

By that, he means not only giving customers a less intimidating place to buy wine, even rare vintages that can fetch $1,200 a pop, but also by turning it into a game, with some bottles upgraded at no extra cost. 
It works like this: if a customer picks out six bottles at $30 each, half could be upgraded to bottles that fetch $50 or more. 

The idea is to help U.S.-based buyers learn more about all types of wines, at whatever starting price, but also to introduce them to more expensive bottles, far-flung vineyards and wines produced by smaller, family-run operations that customers might not otherwise hear about.

“Our users are not just wine drinkers but collectors,” said Shaw, Underground Cellar’s founder and chief executive. Beyond its continuing effort to educate clients about wine, by next year the platform also expects offer customers a way to start trading bottles with other customers, “much like Robinhood” for managing a stocks SPX, -0.05% portfolio.