WHO: Alyssa Rapp, GSB 2005

BottleNotes was founded by Alyssa after finishing at the GSB. She gave me the pitch at a Gelato store in Palo Alto - she is not one to miss an opportunity to get a new BottleNotes customer!

I see BottleNotes as a cross between the traditional wine-of-the-month clubs and Netflix. They have a engine that lets you import your preferences on wine and get recommendations - then, like Netflix, you can dynamically rate your list and the personalization engine re-recommends. It is a neat idea for those of us (like me) that like wine but are not experts. Alyssa has recruited the co-founder of Netflix to her board to develop this personalization engine further.

Sure - there are a bunch of wine clubs and a quick Google search will bring up a list. I did a quick comparison of the top five Google results and they fail in a few areas that BottleNotes excels - they don't seem to respect what you might want and they make you feel like you are getting sell-off wine. The general focus seems to be gift-buying where the thought is supposed to count more than the wine.

My wife and I have created our own wine-of-the-month club to send California wines back to her parents. We did this ourselves because we couldnt find a good wine club that had the local focus we were looking for. It is a pain - you have to buy the wine, pack it, and then trick the post office into letting you ship it. No more - now it will be all BottleNotes.

Check out BottleNotes, refer a friend, send me some wine...