Find fine wine and get restock alerts

Tracking rare wines online is crucial to securing coveted vintage bottles. Online stores frequently refresh their selections, making it vital to stay informed of limited releases. These platforms offer extensive product details, customer reviews, expert ratings, and price comparisons, simplifying wine search.

Wineries also unveil exclusive releases online, providing in-depth insights into each wine’s origin. You’ll make better purchasing decisions by monitoring this data and staying vigilant about the availability of your desired wines. This article provides essential information for finding this data and setting up timely alerts to acquire your desired wines efficiently.

Important things you might want to track while buying wine online:

Monitoring the following elements on a wine seller’s webpage empowers you to make informed decisions and discover exceptional additions to your wine collection.

• Wine availability: Keep an eye on the availability of specific wines, especially limited releases or rare vintages.
• Price changes: Monitor price fluctuations, discounts, or promotions to ensure you get the best deals.
• New arrivals: Track the introduction of new wines to the seller’s inventory
• Restock alerts & inventory updates: Receive alerts when the seller updates their wine inventory and when previously sold-out wines are restocked.
• Auction status: For auction websites, you can track the progress of wine auctions and place timely bids.
• Availability by region: Track the availability of wines in specific regions or countries, especially when shipping is involved.

Let’s delve into how you can effectively track these specific information points on a wine seller’s webpage. This article helps you with tips to find your desired wine using web page monitoring services. One of them is Distill, which helps you find and monitor wines being sold online.

Discovering fine wine with Distill: How does it work?

Distill is an easy-to-use website monitoring that you can use for discovering wine, especially if you’re looking for vintage wines. It acts as a page tracker, allowing you to monitor an entire page or specific parts of a webpage for changes.

For instance, let’s say you’re keeping tabs on a specific wine currently unavailable or sold out, and you want to be notified as soon as it becomes available. Whenever the wine is back in stock, there will be changes on the page, like an add to cart button in place of the greyed-out sold-out button. Distill will detect this change and send you a restock notification. The alerts can be sent via local pop-ups, SMS, email, or Android / iOS mobile app notifications.

Moreover, these change notifications can extend to various updates, including price adjustments, promotions, special offers announcements, notifications about new wine arrivals and collections, and alerts when bidding opens on wine auctions, among other events.

How do you set up monitors to track fine wine?

Visit the Distill website to download the Distill browser extension. It is available for popular browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge.

Once installed, you can pin the Distill extension on your browser for better access. If you want to set up cloud monitors (which run on the Distill servers), you can use the Distill web app to set up monitors.

You can click on the Distill extension after navigating to the wine sale page. It shows you two options - Monitor full page and Monitor parts of a page.

If you have a specific section of the page in mind that you want to monitor, we suggest you track only that. This helps reduce the noise of change notifications from sections in which you are uninterested. The rest of the article focuses on setting up parts of page monitor using Distill’s visual selector. This allows you to make selections with a mouse click. You even have the ability to expand and contract the area of selection. Let’s take a look at how you can do this.

Deciding what parts of the page to track to find your selection of wine

The next sections will focus on the various elements that you can track. We will use wine.com to illustrate how you can set up a monitor. You can use the same steps on other websites as well.

1. Restock Alerts & inventory update

The number of bottles left in stock is often mentioned near the product description, typically as “Only X left in stock.” Using the visual selector, you can track the section of the page indicating the inventory status (see image below).

If a product is in stock, you should be able to click the “Add to Cart” button to purchase it. If it’s out of stock, this button is usually disabled or not displayed. In this scenario, you can track the greyed-out button for changes. Whenever it changes to “Add to cart,” you will be notified of restocks.

2. Tracking price changes

For wine investors, monitoring price changes is crucial. You can spot wines with potential investment value that are currently undervalued, allowing you to buy at a lower price before their value appreciates.

Distill gives you price drop alerts. This lets you plan your wine purchases around price drops and make informed decisions based on your budget constraints.

• Step 1: As shown in the image below, once the visual selector is on, you can simply click on the price element seen on the wine sale page.
• Step 2: Save your selection, and you will be led to the options page. Here, set an interval to check for price changes.
• Step 3: Click “Add action” and choose an alert mode to get change notifications.

The Distill monitor will check the price element on the page at the set frequency, and whenever it detects a price change, it will alert you.

3. Finding new Vintages available on the site

Websites like Wine.com offer filtering options for wine type, vintage, and more. These filters help you find wines that match your preferences. You can use Distill Monitor to receive notifications when new wines meeting your filtered criteria become available. Please ensure you have sorted your filtered by the parameter “Just In”. This way, your list is ordered and when a new item is added it will be detected as a change.

Use the visual selector and click the first item on the search results. Use the “expand” option to select the entire list of results. In your preview, you should be able to find the data of all filtered results for your vintage criteria.

After you have confirmed that the entire selection is as per your tracking needs, click save. Now, whenever a new vintage is added to the list, Distill will send you an alert, which helps you find new wines added on the website.

How to use conditions while setting up monitors

When configuring your monitor settings, you’ll find an option to set conditions. Adding conditions to your monitor ensures you receive notifications only when specific criteria are met. This prevents you from getting irrelevant change notifications.

You can read more about conditions here. To begin adding a condition, click “Add Condition,” as shown in the image below.

• Add conditions for price range based on your budget

If you have a budget for your wine purchase you can use conditions to get alerts only when the price change falls within it. Notice how there are many options to check for numeric values in the dropdown.

For example, you want to track if the wine you are eyeing falls below $65. The condition should be set as: “Text”, “has number less than” and key in “65” in the text box.

• Conditions based on the text like - name of the wine, vintage etc.

If you are tracking the search results for vintage wines, you’d like to be notified if a specific new wine has been added by the seller. For example, you’d like to be notified only if “Chateau Angelus 1995” has been added. For this, your condition should be: “Added text”, “contains”, and key in the wine name e.g.:: “Chateau Angelus 1995”

You can even add compound conditions that work on logic like “and” / “or”.

Troubleshooting tips

Handling cookies and pop-ups that lead to SELECTION_EMPTY errors

Your monitor will encounter a “SELECTION_EMPTY” error when the selected area or element for tracking on a webpage is no longer available.

This may happen due to two reasons

1. The element being monitored has its HTML structure modified and the selected area doesn’t exist in the new layout.

Solution: Reselect the section of the page you want to track

2. There is a pop up like a cookie, discount voucher ,etc that is obstructing the selected area and needs to be handled.

Solution:

• You can use Distill’s profiles to save your cookies. Read more about Profiles in our docs or follow along this video guide. This is useful when you are making purchases on websites where you’d have to log in.
• In some cases, the pop-ups appear inconsistent and disrupt the monitor. In such cases, you can record interactions on the webpage with macros and add conditions within macros to handle the pop ups as and when the monitor encounters them. Here’s a post where you can learn more about this. Additionally, you will find more details about viewing the log of checks in our docs.

3. Ensure you run your checks on a local device. Especially, if the frequency of checks is more. But beware of implementing higher frequency checks as most websites implement rate-limiting mechanisms.

4. If you are running checks in the cloud, use proxies. Read more about Distill’s Proxies here.

Additional resources to help you find the perfect bottle of wine

Monitored Websites and Features

• Klwines offers a wide selection of wines. You can set up local monitors to track waitlisted vintages for availability and get notified as soon as they go up for sale.

• Finewineandgoodspirits is platform catering to those with a taste for fine wines and spirits. They offer a wide range of exquisite collections; tracking the feed of your favorite brand’s search results feed or the price on the collections can help you make a quick purchase at a good price.

• Totalwine and Wine-searcher are other popular destinations for a finewine purchase. You can use Distill to track the inventory status of your favorite labels to buy them before they sell out.

Conclusion

Online wine marketplaces offer a wealth of information, from wine availability and price changes to new arrivals and restock alerts, making it easier to make informed decisions when it comes to vintage or limited edition wine. Using page monitoring tools you can stay informed about wine availability, price changes, new arrivals, restocks, auctions, and regional availability.

Distill not only helps beat “notify me” queues that are destined to end up in your spam, it automates the entire monitoring process and provides updates in real time. You can download Distill for free today. It is available as a web app, browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge) and as iOS app and Android app.

Please feel free to contact us on Distill forums if you have any queries or need assistance while setting up monitors.