When Rowan Gormley was running Virgin Wine, he conducted a simple experiment. He took ten pairs of different bottles of wine and carefully wrapped them in paper so that the labels were unreadable.

He took four professional wine experts. Each was asked to write notes on each bottle, tasted blind. There should have been some correlation between the notes on the two identical bottles. From three out of four tasters, there was not.

“One was a winemaker, the only one who knew what he was doing. Three were completely random. What these people actually do is look at the label, make a mental calculation on price and extrapolate from that for their taste buds.”

Mr Gormley is not a fan of professional wine shippers, nor of the mail-order firms that dominate that part of the market that does not go into the supermarkets. As for the latter, most are deliberately misleading the public with the “half price” productions they depend on.

As part of his work, he has tracked the price of wine on sale at supermarkets and confirmed what many had suspected and consumer organisations had claimed. The price is £4, then £8 for a week, and then mysteriously, half price at £4 again. It is, possibly, a coincidence that the average price for a bottle of wine bought at a supermarket is ... £4.08.

Mr Gormley founded Virgin Wines in 2000. He departed acrimoniously in June, the company having been sold to Direct Wine in 2005 on the understanding that he would stay on. “That's the subject of a High Court writ, so I can't say much about it - which I'm bringing against them.”

His new venture, Naked Wines, takes its first orders on its website on Monday. This is an odd hybrid of online wine retailer - Virgin did nearly all its business online at first - and a social networking site, on which those with a shared interest in wine can contact each other and the small-time growers identified by a network of locals on the ground in various wine-growing regions.

There is also an Amazon-type “if you liked that, you may also like this” algorithm that makes suggestions to customers, on the basis of their stated preferences or previous purchases. Those with a fondness for the over-priced Cloudy Bay of New Zealand, which has grown from a minor cult to a huge shipper, might consider a Loire Sauvignon or, more obscurely, a white from the Alberino region in north-west Spain.

His aim is to source direct from very small but enthusiastic growers around the world. “There are hundreds who would rather be winemakers than international wine sellers. They would rather be with their vines than in a Travelodge waiting for an appointment with Tesco.” He has 32 of these “little people”. “They are often interesting, charismatic people who have made a lifestyle choice. They are often foodies.” Some are very little people, indeed. One, a Catalan so local that he does not even speak Spanish, has 120 vines, each known to him by name. These produce two bunches each year, enough for 120 bottles. “He potters around squeezing the pests personally.”

The first batch of 96 wines come from around the world, but Mr Gormley is especially excited by three areas - Chile, Argentina and his native South Africa. In Chile a posse of multimillionaires, enriched by the natural resources boom, are buying or creating vineyards with no great interest in turning a profit. These are hobby viticulturalists, “on their second yacht, second plane, second wife and second wine”. Their concern is producing prize-winners. It is reminiscent of California's Napa Valley a couple of decades ago, when emergent computer millionaires were buying up old vineyards - but now the sort of quality that will cost you £100 a bottle from Napa is available for £6 or £7 from Valle del Maipo, say.

In Argentina, there are little-known and unexploited regions such as the high, arid, volcanic Tupungato in the far west. Here the sunshine is relentless, but the mercury drops below freezing at night, preventing the build-up of too much sugar in the grapes, which are irrigated by snow melt.

South Africa has the advantages of having virtually the only currency going the wrong way against the pound and other undiscovered vineyards. The country was known initially for producing huge amounts of very cheap, not very good wine. Prices and quality in the proven areas have risen sharply. “But you go two mountain ranges back and there are guys doing really exciting stuff without access to the market.”

Mr Gormley funded the venture with a sum in the low millions from Wein International, a German shipper, and an unspecified contribution from himself. It employs 22 people and operates from a warehouse in Northampton. Orders placed online are delivered the next day and most wines are priced about the £6-to-£7-a- bottle level. Because there is little marketing cost, the customer gets a lot of wine for his or her money, he says - once the Chancellor and the VAT man take their £2.50 a bottle between them. There is a team of 100 “Naked Tasters” to start with, supplied with free bottles to drink with food and friends. “It's in a real-life environment, which is how you get proper feedback,” he says. This avoids the sterility of the average tasting session. Not surprisingly, when the job was advertised, there were 5,000 applicants.

“It's an awful time to be starting up a new business,” he admits, “but historically, in a recession people drink more wine at home.”

Mr Gormley qualified as a chartered accountant with Arthur Andersen in Johannesburg and followed his future wife to London, starting work at Electra Capital Partners as the 1987 stock market crash hit. “I left South Africa because of the army - to stay, I would have to have walked around Namibia with a gun in hand for a cause I didn't believe in.” At Electra, he turned down an investment in an obscure American start-up selling computers direct by phone. The company is now quite well known as Dell Computers.

He slipped into Sir Richard Branson's orbit when Electra was thinking of investing in a joint venture with Virgin. “He rang up and I went to see him. We stared at each other for a while, because I was expecting to be interviewed. I asked: ‘What do you want me to do?' He said: - What can you do?'” The interview fizzled out. “I went home and talked to my wife and said: ‘I'm not sure if he's offered me a job. We haven't even talked salary.'”

Mr Gormley was hired with the vague idea that he might start a business at Virgin. He was trying to sort out his pension and realised that he had no idea what he was doing, and nor did much of the industry selling him financial products. “We launched Virgin Direct in ten weeks.”

He got the idea for Virgin Wines and subsequently Naked Wines from Amazon in the late 1990s. He was intrigued by the idea of finding others by recommendations from the site based on earlier purchases. “What was great about it was you got a piece of information you couldn't get in a shop.”

It also strips away the mystique of dealing with traditional shippers. There is a parallel with financial services, he says. Both are run by “self-appointed experts” who intimidate their customers.

The middle classes, in particular, have taken to wine over the past three decades, but they still suffer from an inferiority complex about it. Take the average well-educated person, who is used to making decisions about their job, where they live and other important issues in their lives: “You give them the wine list in a restaurant and watch them squirm. We are supposed to know about wine. It's a middle-class rite of passage.”

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