Wine is the highest-intent category you're not selling. Here's how to switch it on.

Most category-expansion advice talks about affinity: add products that pair well with what you already sell. That's fine as far as it goes, but it misses the more important point about wine specifically. Wine isn't just affinity. It's intent. And intent is worth far more than affinity, because intent is a customer who has already decided to buy, standing in your store, ready to spend, and finding nothing to spend it on.

That distinction is the whole opportunity, so it's worth being clear about what it means and why it changes the math.

Affinity is "this goes well together." Intent is "I want this right now."

An affinity product is one a customer might like alongside their purchase. It's a reasonable suggestion, and sometimes it lands. Intent is different and stronger. It means the desire already exists, fully formed, at the exact moment the customer is transacting with you. They aren't being persuaded to want the thing. They already want it, and they're looking for somewhere to buy it.

Wine sits in the intent category for a simple reason: nearly every purchase your customers make is tied to an occasion, and wine belongs to those occasions already. The dinner they're planning. The gift they're sending. The celebration they're pulling together. In each of those moments the customer isn't wondering whether they want wine. They've already decided. The only open question is where they'll buy it, and right now the answer is almost never you.

The intent is already there, and it's already converting somewhere else

This is what makes the missed opportunity so costly. You don't have to create the demand, spend to generate it, or convince anyone of anything. It exists, it's measurable, and it's in motion. Two-thirds of U.S. consumers say they'd buy alcohol from a retailer they already trust if it were simply offered to them. Seventy percent of 21-to-34-year-olds have found an alcohol brand online they wanted to buy, couldn't, and bought elsewhere. DRINKS puts the gap between where people discover alcohol and where they can actually buy it at roughly $40 billion.

Read those numbers together and the picture is unambiguous. The intent isn't hypothetical or latent. It's active demand that your customers are currently satisfying at a competitor, occasion after occasion, because you haven't given them a way to satisfy it with you. Every one of those purchases was yours to capture. You just weren't set up to take it.

So why isn't every brand already selling it?

If the intent is this strong and this proven, the obvious question is why wine isn't already in every relevant cart. The answer has nothing to do with demand and everything to do with a wall of operational blockers that made the category genuinely hard to enter. For most brands, "add wine" ran straight into a list of reasons not to:

You'd need alcohol licenses, issued state by state, each with its own application and renewals. You'd need a compliance function keeping age verification, volume limits, dry-ZIP rules, and required warnings correct everywhere you ship, and current as they change. You'd need tax calculated and remitted to the ZIP code. You'd need fulfillment through licensed channels, inventory you don't want to carry, and a checkout that handles a regulated product without breaking the flow you spent years optimizing.

Faced with that, most brands made the rational call and left the category alone. The blockers, not the demand, are the reason the highest-intent category stayed switched off.

Removing the blockers, one at a time

The reason this is worth revisiting now is that every one of those blockers has been solved, and solved in a way that keeps them off your plate entirely. This is what DRINKS Anywhere does. It doesn't hand you tools to build an alcohol operation. It runs the operation underneath your storefront so you never have to.

The licenses belong to the suppliers in our network, so you don't hold any. Compliance runs as a real-time engine that clears every order against the rules of wherever it's shipping, so a non-compliant order never gets placed. Tax is calculated and remitted automatically, by jurisdiction, and updated as regulations move. Fulfillment happens through licensed partners, so you carry no inventory and manage no shipping. And the whole thing embeds into your existing cart and checkout, so the customer buys wine the same way they buy everything else, with no redirect and no friction. What's left for your team is the part you're actually good at, which is choosing and merchandising a selection that fits your audience.

Switch those blockers off and what remains is the intent, unobstructed. The demand that was leaking to competitors has somewhere to go, and it goes to you.

The category was never the problem. The plumbing was.

The takeaway is simpler than the category's reputation suggests. Wine is the highest-intent category most brands could add, the demand is already there and already spending, and the only thing that ever kept it switched off was the operational and regulatory plumbing. That plumbing is now handled. A typical implementation goes live in two to four weeks, with no inventory and no upfront cost, which means the distance between where you are and capturing that intent is measured in weeks, not quarters.

You're already sending customers away to buy the thing they most want to buy from you. Switching it on is now the easy part.

See how to switch it on: drinks.com/anywhere