Wine Direct for Restaurants

The history of direct to consumers wine sales was a fascinating, frustrating and intriguing case study. In particular, learning how Wine Direct under the leadership of Joe Waechter has been able to establish a direct marketplace for wine consumers by leveraging Joe's career experience in the logistics business. Joe described the success of the SAAS component of Wine Direct in part because of the reality that wine makers are simple people with limited technical experience and resources to manage the complexity of an online sales presence. Similarly, I believe most restaurateurs are simple people and organizations that are much more interested in and success at creating a great dining experience than they are at maintaining the physical inventories represented by a wine list. The inefficiencies of a managing a wine list run deep into a restaurant operations. From the seemingly insignificant - the opportunity cost of the time spent searching for a particular bottle of wine to the missed moment of hospitality when a bottle is listed but unavailable. To the significant - improvements in working capital by elimination of low turnover inventory redundancies and next day replacement of super premium bottles of wine. 

Is there an business opportunity for restaurants to order small quantities of premium wines, often wines under allocation, direct from the wineries to both eliminate the cost of the distributor but also to free up working capital by not buying half or whole cases? Can the time-consuming responsibility of the sommelier or restaurant manager be automated via a SAAS patch between a restaurant's POS system and Wine Direct? Moreover, I have had poor experiences with restaurant wine inventory softwares and I see there to be an opportunity to connect all of these industry level opportunities.