Online Oenophile

Australian entrepreneur Justin Dry tells Hong Xinyi how he is disrupting the business of wine se lling by making the buying experience more palatable

- Hong Xinyi

WINE RUNS IN Justin Dry’s blood, and that is absolutely not our polite way of calling him a lush. After all, he is the first to offer up his wine-steeped origin story. “My ancestors planted some of the first vines in the Barossa Valley,” he says with discernible pride, referring to Australia’s famous wine region. His uncles were in the wine trade, and did tastings with him when he was a kid. He later studied wine marketing and wine making at university, and also worked in the industry.

In his early 20s, Justin started going to independent wine shops to ferret out rare, interesting wines. And that is when his passion started to bump up against what he describes as the elitist nature of wine culture. “I remember walking into one shop where the guy behind the counter was wearing a bow tie, and the way he talked down to people wasn’t very inviting. And I thought that if I felt intimidated, even with all my history and experience, a lot of people were going to feel the same. And that’s ridiculous. I wanted to democratise the industry so that more people could enjoy really good wine.”