Vivino launches wine awards judged by its app users

Wine rating app Vivino, the world’s largest online wine community and marketplace, has launched the first-ever industry award “judged” by real users. 

“The world of wine has had a reputation of being limited to a select group of people,” Morten Fillipsen, head of Asia-Pacific, Vivino, tells db Asia. “The Vivino Community Awards highlight a passionate and diverse community of wine lovers, who aren’t necessarily trained wine critics, but are eager and more than qualified to share their opinions about the wines they love.”

According to Fillipsen, the fundamental belief behind the awards is that “the opinions of everyone – from the wine curious to the wine enthusiast – are valuable and collectively more trustworthy than the opinions of one or a few expert critics.”

Following the global Community Awards, determined by 54 million users around the world, Vivino debuted market-specific Community Awards this November. Both global and local lists are available for markets including the US, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.

“The local Community Awards is solely a reflection of these users’ preferences and of course it speaks to that particular market. Simply by comparing the local award lists between Hong Kong and Australia, we can see distinctive results already. For instance, Hong Kong, without any surprise, drives more towards reds from big brands, while the Australian list is dominated by local production, largely Shiraz.”

This year’s list of Hong Kong’s ‘top 25 overall wines’ was collated by way of ratings and reviews from 400,000 users from the market over a 12-month time period.

As the results show, red wines dominate Hong Kong’s top 25 list, with 17 represented, while just seven sparkling and one white wine make it into the top 25.

France reigns as the most popular winemaking region for Hong Kong with nine entries in the top 25, followed by Italy (seven) and Spain (six). Argentina, New Zealand and Lebanon with one wine each, rounded out the list.

Prestigious well-known brands, such as Dom Perignon, Krug and Chateau Lynch-Bages, continue to lead the Hong Kong market – in fact more than one-quarter of the winners were Champagnes.

The surprising inclusion of one Lebanese wine on the list was thanks to the 1998 Rouge (Gaston Hochar) from Château Musar in Bekaa Valley.

All users’ interaction on the app are organic. In order to uphold the spirit of community, Vivino set up a special team led by its chief trust officer to ensure authentic communications between users. Earlier this year, the company raised US$155 million in funding and according to Fillipsen, Vivino has plans to put resources into developing further personalisation A.I., such as product recommendations based on preference in a similar vein to Netflix.

Fillipsen approached Vivino founder Heini Zachariassen and pitched his vision to expand into the Asia-Pacific region in 2018. Drawing on his multi-discipline expertise in technology, online retail, client experiences and mobile innovation, he single-handedly launched Vivino in Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.

“Our team started to develop the e-commerce business of Vivino in 2018, and we extended that to Singapore and Australia in 2019. What we did is to provide a platform that bridges local merchants to users, who can order wine directly if they are interested.”

Over the past six years, the average wine rating within our Asian community has steadily increased every year. Today, close to 70% of all wines rated by the community in Hong Kong and Singapore are over four stars and considered really good wines.”

Fillipsen says that to date, Hong Kong is still the best performing market in Asia-Pacific, thanks to the longest operation of the platform there: “In Hong Kong, we are working with 52 merchants with more than 18,000 products on offer. In fact, most of these merchants are used to being very trade-focused; Vivino has become the retail front for them to attract mass consumers.”

He further added that in Australia, Vivino works with a handful of niche local producers who let local consumers buy directly from the winery, “some of these small producers are quite popular and can receive up to 2,000 reviews a year, which is encouraging as most of the time they may not be under the spotlight for renowned critics.”

Speaking of the impact of COVID on e-commerce for wine, he said the pandemic provided great momentum for APAC throughout the year. The growth in sales from 2019 to 2020 was 206% and Y-O-Y growth in 2021 (i.e. Jan-Oct 2021 vs Jan-Oct 2020) is 86%.

“This shows that even with the majority of the lockdowns and restrictions removed, the shift to e-commerce is here to stay,” he commented.

In early November, the team freshly introduced the e-commerce platform to Japan. “We are fortunate to already have a user-base everywhere in the world and Japan is no exception. Before we launched e-commerce in Japan, we had around 700,000 – 800,000 users in the market. In the last couple of months, we spent time finding suppliers to list their inventory on the app, and are now working on boosting consumer awareness.”