(Forbes) - Jay Levy and Greg Scheinfeld didn’t have a famous winemaker. They didn’t have a winery. They didn’t even have a vineyard.

But Levy is co-founder and partner of Zelkova Ventures, a New York-based venture capital firm. And Scheinfeld is a financial industry refugee who built a new life in Napa working for the likes of Joseph Phelps Vineyards, Cakebread Cellars, and Vineyard 29.

Together, they saw an opportunity to build a lifestyle brand for the next generation of wine consumers, one that’s focused on the customer experience and modeled after the loyalty-building strategies of major market players like Zappos, Amazon, and Warby Parker.

Less than two years ago they launched Uproot Wines as a hybrid company that blends wine and ecommerce.

And it’s working, despite the notoriously low success rate of wine-based business initiatives.

What’s their secret?

They’re thinking about wine as a business, rather than a romantic ideal.

In practice, that means:

• They’re delivering the kind of customer experience that their demographic has come to expect.
• They’re working with marketing partners who don’t have preconceived ideas or biases of what a wine brand should be. That’s led to collateral like bottle labels that don’t even mention the name of the brand.
• They’re building an ecommerce platform that handles the stickiest issues in their industry.

Here are five hands-on insights on what happens when wine meets venture capital.