June 15 (Bloomberg) -- Technology entrepreneur Aaron DeMello has wines in his 2,000-bottle cellar he just doesn’t want anymore. What to do with those big Aussie shirazes and Napa cabs now that he’s mostly a Burgundy guy?

Vinfolio Marketplace, an online wine market going live on July 1, is the latest answer. With a click on his computer screen, DeMello, 34, can add his unwanted wines to a virtual inventory of almost 12 million bottles, valued at $2 billion, held mainly by North American collectors. Participants can legally offer wines from their own cellars or place bids to purchase from others.

“It’s a game changer,” DeMello said by phone from Montreal. “It’s like a commodities spot market for wine.”

He’s already planning his test run, which will include a mixed case of rare Raven, Atlantis, and Poker Face syrahs from California cult winery Sine Qua Non.

Vinfolio’s rapid-talking chief executive officer, Stephen Bachmann, said he had the idea of Marketplace in mind when he started the fine wine and collector services company in San Francisco six years ago. Vinfolio provides everything from storage facilities to an auction and retail price index to personal inventory managers who organize messy cellars. The core money-maker of the business is an online wine store.

Many bottles in the store come from the private cellars of the 53,000 wine lovers who use the company’s free Web-based cellar-management software, VinCellar. Most barcode each bottle, adding new purchases and subtracting consumed wines by waving a wand-like scanner. Users can access their inventories over the Internet.

Critical Mass

“The Marketplace turns these collectors into suppliers to one other,” Bachmann said. “But I couldn’t start it until we had critical mass.”

To increase numbers, VinFolio partnered with Seattle-based CellarTracker LLC, the leader in online cellar-management software founded by former Microsoft Corp. software engineer Eric LeVine in 2004.

“The 82,000 CellarTracker users collectively own 9.6 million bottles of about 400,000 different wines,” said LeVine, 39. The community has a strong wine-geek social element. Members have posted about 250,000 tasting notes of their wines, which include everything from 47,000 bottles of classic Bordeaux Chateau Leoville-Barton to 7 bottles of Sula Dindori Reserve shiraz from India.

The largest U.S. retailers, such as Zachy’s, list only about 5,000 labels.

Legal Sales

Vinfolio Marketplace will also allow wineries and importers to list wines for sale.

Unlike existing online wine sites like Snooth, which connects consumers with wine merchants and producers to help them compare prices, Marketplace’s focus is on facilitating sales between collectors who can’t legally do so alone without a liquor license.

Still, Bachmann isn’t alone. This month, U.K.-based Decanter magazine reported London’s venerable wine merchant Berry Brothers & Rudd plans to launch an online trading platform for its customers by Christmas.

Vinfolio Marketplace follows an auction consignment model, but Bachmann claims it’s faster, simpler, cheaper and more flexible than existing live or online auctions.

It took me only five minutes to register for a VinFolio account on the Web site and enter several wines in VinCellar (I could have used CellarTracker), all for free. A couple more clicks and I’d marked two for sale.

Sellers can offer one bottle or 1,000, list a price or not, set a filter to screen out low offers, and accept a bid only when they’re happy with the price.

Watching the Kids

“I’ll be able to check bids when I’m bored in an airport or while watching my kids play Legos,” said New York City venture-capital lawyer Edward Zimmerman. San Francisco attorney Dan Bailey, 41, said he likes being able to view all wines owned by the entire community as well as those marked for sale.

“I’ll be looking for great-drinking 10-year-old Etude and Dehlinger pinots,” he said. “They’re too old to be in shops and they’re not high-end enough for auctions.”

His bid will be automatically e-mailed to all sellers of the wine; the first to accept wins. Bailey pays no buyer’s premium.

To complete the sale, the seller has to send the wine to VinFolio’s in California, where employees check it’s in good condition and not a fraud. The latter is vital as trades are anonymous, so buyers won’t know the wine’s provenance.

Warehouse Discount

Vinfolio then charges Bailey’s credit card, sends the wine to him, and pays the seller, deducting a 20 percent fee. (If the wine is stored in VinFolio’s warehouse, the transaction goes faster and the fee drops to 15 percent.) Bachmann says checks to sellers will go out within a week.

That’s faster than the process in a traditional wine auction, said longtime collector Langhorne Reid, president of Dallas-based Arcady Capital.

“Between the time you send a list to an auction house and finally get your money is three to six months,” said Reid. “But I wish Vinfolio would cut shipping time further by collecting the wine in several major cities.”

Some collectors are already selecting wines to sell for when the system goes live. Bailey said he may put up his whole collection to see what happens.

“Everything has a price,” he said.

Bachmann said he plans to expand Marketplace into the U.K. later this year.

“We opened an office in Hong Kong last fall,” he said. “But it’s not ready for this kind of buying and selling -- at least not yet.”

(Elin McCoy writes on wine and spirits for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of the story: Elin McCoy at elinmccoy@gmail.com.

Last Updated: June 15, 2009 00:01 EDT