What is wine? The distilled and matured juice of grapes. It's also, according to the aficionado (of whom there are a rapidly growing number, thanks in large part to the topic about to get under way), a sublime drink, a liquid of as many characters and incarnations as there are stars in the heavens. Wine, the aficionado will tell you, is unparalleled. A cornucopia of flavours, styles, varietals, and all those other wine buff words. How does he or she know all this? Wine online. The new world way to get into one of the oldest hobbies on earth.

Wine never used to be only for the rich, the posh and the exclusive. It was, originally, a peasant drink - the kind of thing monks brewed to get all the workers drunk after a hard day spent building the Abbey/Cathedral/castle. It was only once the ruling classes - then, mostly priests and lords - took hold of the idea that the rich should have certain things that the poor weren't allowed, that wine became segregated. That went on for centuries, that myth of wine as the province of the privileged - right up until the invention of the Internet, in fact. Now, wine online has brought the drink of the masses back to the masses - by doing the thing the Internet has always done best- sharing information.

What, after all, is wine buffery all about? It's about the same thing that being an admirer of anything is about. Access to knowledge. The aficionado is an aficionado precisely because he or she has gained access to knowledge that non-aficionados don't have. A wine enthusiast, until recently, was someone who had been inculcated into an arcane and slightly peculiar society, able to talk about noses, bouquets and floral notes and actually mean it. Now, with online wine stores making that kind of information available to anyone with a computer, the century's old segregation of wine and normal person has ended.

How did wine online go from just being a way of getting booze without leaving the house, to being an emancipation of a historic relationship between the normal classes of the UK and their ancestral drink? Simple. People who sell wine online know that a lot of wine drinking is done out of aspiration- that is, in order to become more like the classes one aspires to join. They also know that the classes wine has been incorrectly associated with for the last 700 years or so have based as much of their wine relationship on "knowing" about the drink as actually drinking it. So they have simply opened the stores of industry knowledge to the masses, supplying all sorts of tasting notes and information in every site that sells wine online.

The result? Anyone who buys wine on a web site starts feeling like a proper wine buff. Users' forums spread that feeling and that knowledge. Soon, everyone's an expert - and the age-old segregation of wine snobbery has fallen apart. Vive le revolution; vive le Internet: vive le wine online.