20 years ago, buying wine was a task that daunted all but the most knowledgeable. We all knew that wine was a good thing, an interesting thing, a thing that could really offer rewards when you got into it. But we did not know how to get into it and we were afraid to ask, afraid to seem uneducated, foolish or just plain plebeian. And then the online wine merchant came along and opened the door for all of us.
What happened was this. Suddenly, the general public (that would be us) had access to all this information. The Internet meant that we could research wine properly, without having to look beginner in front of people who may already have known a lot more about wine than we did. And so we read, and we cautiously expanded our tasting horizons, and we started to learn what constituted a good price for a fair bottle of cheap wine