Now you can enjoy a random wine-inspired quote every time your MyQ page is loaded. Some will delight, some will inspire, some will make you LYAO!

As part of our recent efforts to upgrade our order fulfillment system, WineQ is doing away with antiquated styrofoam shipping containers (how 20th century!) on 99% of our shipments in favor of a new packaging technology consisting of 100% recycled material. In other words, you can toss your entire Q shipment, bottles and all, into the recycling bin once you’ve polished off the last of your vino. (Those members that confuse us with Netflix and ship their empty wine bottles back should especially take note!)

Contrary to commonly-held misconceptions, these containers have protective qualities comparable to fossil-fuel-based styrofoam, both for impact and for temperature. In fact, while styrofoam is a superior temperature-insulating material, that unfortunately means it’s better at trapping heat inside, increasing the likelihood of your wine being cooked. We hope our members enjoy their new, environment-friendly club shipments.

No word yet on whether FedEx or UPS plan to hybridize their delivery vehicles.

We’ve recently received a few questions from members regarding how to keep track of the wines in their queue, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to show off the super-snazzy WineQ console.

Unfortunately, we aren’t yet able to display the console on our blog, so I’ll post a screenshot here for you to use a reference until you can get back to the wines and start playing with it.

The console is the horizontal box below the tabs that keeps track of how many wines are in your queue, how many are in your shopping cart, your current shipping state and then our contact number.

The number for your queue will update automatically (using Ajax technology) and flash yellow whenever you add a wine to your queue. Same with the shopping cart.

Be sure to check it out in action (you don’t need an account) — it will definitely awe, amaze and inspire.

As part of our effort to be the most web-savvy wine wetailer awound, we’re pleased to announce the arrival of two hot new web 2.0 features for our blog!

The first is our streamlined, jewel-encrusted RSS icon in the top right corner, hovering above a shiny, reflective surface (polished marble, to be exact). Be sure to try it out when you sign up for our frequently-updated RSS feed!

The second Web 2.0 feature uses sophisticated technology to integrate our posts with social bookmarking sites. At the bottom of each blog post, you’ll see icons for all your favorite social bookmarking sites, so your friends can hear about our latest updates through the grapevine.

Yes, I’m being facetious! While we would love for you to subscribe to our RSS feed and bookmark our site, we know much better than to tout these as genuine web 2.0 features! We’ve already implemented several genuine web 2.0 concepts and principles on our website and you can look foward to a post in the near future about those features, as well as new ones to come.

In the meantime, please try not to put fingerprints on the marble.

We’ve wrestled some with whether to keep the “beta” designation for our site once we launch publicly (currently scheduled for later this week). Right now it looks like we will keep it, for a few different reasons:

1. Our selection of wines will be expanding steadily over the coming months.

Our current lineup includes six different brands of premium wines, all produced by small Northern California wineries — each bottling less than 10,000 cases annually. Later this week we will be uploading selections from two additional wineries.

And in the coming months, we’re committed to adding at least two new wineries per month, providing an ever-growing selection of new, delicious wines for you to enjoy.

2. Our current Web 2.0 feature set only scratches the surface of what we have in store.

We’ll be providing plenty o’ user-generated tags for our wines and all kinds of functionality for filtering member ratings and reviews to make them more useful.

And, eventually, we will pursue the holy grail of Wine 2.0: sophisticated functionality for providing personalized wine recommendations — the kind that can be statistically tested for their accuracy and usefulness.

And that’s before we receive all the incredibly innovative suggestions you’re going to be sending us! Right??

We’re webheads — we get excited by this stuff.

3. We are less of a conventional e-tailer and more like a kind of utility, or tool, for finding delicious new wines to enjoy regularly.

Technically, we neither buy nor sell wine. But our software is intended to make it easier than ever for you to try new wines on a regular basis, always purchased and shipped directly from the wineries — while allowing you to combine bottles from different wineries into the same order.

And then there’s the whole queue thing — providing our members with a degree of flexibility and convenience and selection that no conventional wine club can match.

We plan to have many iterations of this site, often rolling out new features on a weekly basis — and it may be a few months before our software lives up to the promise that our small team saw when when we started the ball rolling earlier this year.

So will the “beta” moniker be around for long? No — but we’ll probably keep it next to our name until we look at the site one day and realize we’re looking at a rock-solid v1.0.

Meantime, we look forward to your help and guidance in getting there. We’re very serious about incorporating member feedback, so please don’t be shy about offering your suggestions for how we can improve our service.