WINE SIPPING: TASTING ROOMS TO SOCIAL COMMUNITIES

Today, being one year older, I head to my most favorite place on earth to taste some wine and turn off my phone. Five years ago, the movie Sideways released and a furor of wine tourists flourished to Los Olivos, Santa Barbara wine country.

I’ll head to my favorite winery, Rusack Vineyards, and like I always do, stand in their tasting room and gush over their Anacapa using such proverbial phrases as “awesome town” and “I dig it.”

Wine tasting is a tradition trending from the 14^thcentury and onward. There are typically four stages in a wine tasting from appearance, smell, mouth feel, and finish.

But in the age of online media, wine tasting has evolved from the traditional tasting room experience to social communities of online wine-drinkers. Here are a few sites helping to transform the industry and introduce wine to a whole new generation.

Online Video

Gary Vaynerchuk, online entrepreneur, debuted the “Thunder Show” in 2006 attracting some 100,000 viewers per episode. Weekly online episodes attempt to deconstruct wine tasting and the entrenched associated wine lingo. I mean, when’s the last time you described a wine as tasting like “wet clay”?

In this, my favorite episode, Gary attempts to pair his favorite cereals with the proper wine. Riesling and Captain Crunch? Yes please.

Social Community

Cork’d allows wine tasters an online tasting room experience. Rate and review wines that you’ve tasting creating a library of your wine tasting experience. Share your notes with friends to get your wine community on.

Twitter Search

While there are sites that aggregate wine tweets like Wine Twits, a simple Twitter search is usually by far more effective and interesting. As I soon plan to be holding a delightful Pinot in my hand, I figured a little Twitter search was in order. @Wine Bistro I’m on board. Let’s go tasting!

Apart from simple searches, some are taking the onslaught of Twitter communication to the tasting room itself. Instead of walking around the winery, pen in hand, now wine tasters can tweet their tasting notes. City Winery in NYC tried their hand at this concept just last week with their Spit & Twit event. Alex Baldwin, Marketing Director at City Winery tells me, “It was a very successful initial effort in connecting the online and offline worlds. Participation was very high during the event and afterwards. All of these things are experimental in the world of the unproven but overall we were very happy with the turn out.”

Wine Blogs

There are several choices to choose from when looking for a good wine blog. Tyler Colman has a PhD in political science and is a wine educator at New York University and the University of Chicago. He has written about wine in many publications from The New York Times to Food & Wine. So, yes, he’s highly accredited. But simply, I like his blog better than the other highly rated wine blogs because he speaks in a manner in which the non-wine educated masses can understand. He also tends to run a visually driven site, which I firmly believe to be the best way to communicate.

So, I tip my glass to you. It’s time for me to go get my birthday party started. Hopefully, this doesn’t all end with me drinking from the spit bucket…

Loving this, bebes!

You can check your user name to see if it is registered on all social media sites, including MySpace, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo, YouTube, etc!

Check your user name!

Creating a brand is one thing…making sure it is marketed virally is another.  Here are a number of services that you might want to check out!

• 12seconds
• Behance
• Blogger
• Brightkite
• Colourlovers
• Corkd
• Dailymotion
• Delicious
• Digg
• Diigo
• Disqus
• Ebay
• Etsy
• Favtape
• Ffffound
• Flickr
• Friendfeed
• Funnyordie
• Gmail
• Hellotxt
• Hexday
• Identica
• Ilike
• ILikeTotallyLoveIt
• Imageshack
• Isfingawesome
• Jaiku
• Koornk
• Kwippy
• Lastfm
• Linkedin
• Livejournal
• Magnolia
• Meemi
• Mixx
• Multiply
• Myspace
• Pandora
• Picasa
• Plurk
• Posterous
• Pownce
• Rejaw
• Smugmug
• Soundcloud
• Steam
• Stumbleupon
• Technorati
• Tinyurl
• Tipd
• Tipjoy
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Typepad
• Uservoice
• Ustream
• Vimeo
• Virb
• Visualizeus
• Vox
• Wakoopa
• WordPress
• Xbox-live
• Xing
• Yahoo
• Yoono
• Yotify
• Youtube
• Zooomr
• http://www.jamespot.com
• http://www.twine.com

Adding more as people let me know about them.

I work for Federated Media which has helped many independent site owners quit their day jobs and live very (some very) well. Some bloggers monetize their media properties as a tool to promote their “real business.” As a guy that loves the wine, I become hooked on Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV recently. This guy has truly embraced “web 2.0″ (I hate the term but it remains very useful) tools to take a traditionally staid business and opened it up to a broad customer base using blogging, social networking, etc. Consider:

- He’s done 458 10+ minute video blogs in the past 2 years. Each post easily gets 200+ posts and most feature wines that you can buy online at Wine Library. His blog must be a powerful ecommerce tool because I’ve clicked on a few wines of interest featured from the show and they have all been sold out.

- He’s embraced Twitter, Pownce, Facebook (he’s maxed out his friend capacity,) myspace, linkedin, and the social network for winos corkd.

- He’s written a book and has mobilized his “Vayniacs” to come to his book signings across the country.

- His various websites all ASK his customers questions. “Where should I go on my book tour?” “What wine did you drink last?” “What wine would you like me to taste on the show?”

If you like wine you will learn a lot from his podcasts. I have found a number of really inexpensive and tasty wines that I wouldn’t have given a chance before I started watching the show. Good stuff.

Like most popular bloggers, he has a bit of the ringmaster in him. He has carefully developed his brand using the talents he’s developed over a life in the wine shop. No different really from any corporate blog but the execution here is truly phenomenal. The value grew over time and I’m sure a less passionate wine operations director would have long thrown in the towel but the Wine Library has created a media property that helps define and extend the Wine Library brand to an audience that was virtually impossible to reach just 10 years ago.

Check it out…

I have been playing with the social wine site Cork’d since right around day one.  Anything that brings wine together with Web 2.0 is great in my book but I have to say the site doesn’t fit or integrate well into my life.

I started off really strong using Cork’d.  I was reviewing wines, adding wines to my “shopping list”, and friending people.  But… alas alack… pretty quickly my level of activity went down dramatically.

I’d drink a glass of wine but by the time I got back to my computer to type in my review I would have forgotten all of my thoughts and review.  I started writing down my thoughts about wine in a little notebook but the thoughts never made there way from the notebook to Cork’d.

Only if I had some type of mobile computing device which allowed me to input data in a simple manner that also had Web access…. just happens that I along with a few others on the planet carry a mobile phone… and mine has Web access.

I think it’d be a completely different story for Cork’d if there were some type of mobile Web site I could access to type in quick thoughts about a wine I just tried.

I find myself taking photos of wine labels with my camera phone all the time.  What if you could take a photo of a wine label, type some thoughts, put it in a MMS message and send it to a service where it’d be store for later?  It seems like that’d be such a simple way of capturing my thoughts about a wine in a way that’d integrate well with my life.

Cork’d can tell me what wines my friends are drinking and even allows me to create a shopping list.  But in order to take the shopping list with you to the wine or grocery store, i’d have to print it off or write it down… that’s so 1995.  What if you could access the wine shopping list from your mobile phone?  Even better… what if your phone knew what wines were being sold or in stock at the store that you were going to and would adjust your shopping list accordingly.

Cork’d has SOOO much potential.  Wine is such a social object.  Someone’s review of the wine is another social object…. I just think that for a service like this the capture of explicit feedback needs to better integrate with my life.

My latest little contribution to the backwaters of t’Internet. http://winefeeds.wordpress.com

As I say in the first post…

Just cos I could I decided to run a third experiment using RSS – it’s simply brilliant (RSS that is). I set out to see how much wine-related information I could aggregate from around t’Internet.

I got the idea from del.icio.us (which I think is fabulous). You see I have a “wine” subscription on del.icio.us which sends me all the links that people tag with “wine”. So I took an RSS feed and put it into wordpress. Then I went off into the wine world to see what feeds I could find. Heaps or should that be vats.

• eRobert Parker wine of the day
• Wine Spectator – Headlines, Daily Picks, Blog Posts
• Decanter News
• Berry Bros & Rudd Fine Wine Blog
• Cork’d’s most popular

I also got a feed out of Flickr of all the photos tagged “wine”.

Separately I have Google alerts for wine. I don’t think they offer RSS. I’ll check. Maybe I’ll use them as a link blog in the body of the page along with my own thoughts on wine (currently on The Displaced Kiwi) . Watch this space.

I suspect I have just created another Internet backwater. But as before I’m having fun. If wordpress would let me have more that nine RSS feeds I’d fill it up; there is heaps of content just waiting to be aggregated. (I’m becoming Newsgator)

Llevo ya un buen rato usando Cork’d que es un sitio web 2.0 muy al estilo Digg, solo que en este se trata de evaluación de vinos, puedes decir que vinos as probado, darles una calificaión y una aproximación del precio en el que lo conseguiste, también puedes tener tu cava virtual en la que seleccionas cuales y cuantos vinos tienes y por su puesto que puedes comprar vinos.

El diseño de la pagina esta muy bien conseguido, y los sistemas de evaluación tambien, claro que también se incluyen opciones comúnes como tener tu perfil con tu avatar y a demas, sin olvidar que tambien podemos agregar invitar amigos(drinking buddies), y tiene soporte RSS.

P.D. este es su blog

Filling out forms online is usually one of those accepted pains in the butt you have to go through when registering for a website.

However, I recently started using Corkd, a service for reviewing/sharing/discovering wine, and I must say that their registration form is fantastic.

I actually enjoyed filling out this form due to the little captions they added. I think my favorite one is “Type it again. Think of it as a test” for entering your password a second time.

[Update] Angelo sends us a link in the comments to Dan Benjamin’s slides on Corkd for RailsConf. I thought I’d also mention that Corkd was acquired, so beyond forms, they obviously have been doing a lot of things right! Thanks for the info, Angelo!

This post contains a list of online services that I wish would give higher importance to non-US users. Why you ask? Well there are services that I cannot fully enjoy since non-US users haven’t got access to all features or even in some cases do not have access at all. Other services are business solutions that I cannot use in my work since I work in France and English cannot be used as the interface language for business solutions (I know I know – but that’s the way it is). Enough reasoning, here’s the list:

How nasty can these Cork’d guys be? They create an amazingly cool web solution for managing wine lists (and of course sharing – it’s web 2.0 you know , but they only allow prices in $ and they only have English as interface language. How can you keep the Frechies out of a solution that let’s you write reviews of wines! It’s even more nail-bitingly-frustrating since I know that they are missing out on such a great market pontential considering that there are no equivalent service in French!

Pandora is a nice music service that allows you to create personalized radio stations (you might know Last.fm that does something similar). After having listened to a few songs you’ll be asked to sign up. With only a six input field long form, you hurry up to get back to the music, only to find that the service only has licenses for US listeners. Not that I would ever do something like that, but you can get access if you’re intelligent enough to enter a valid US zip code

Lovely collaboration solution from the creators of Ruby on Rails. I hate to criticize them now that they’ve gotten a fellow Dane to move in, but considering the age of their solution, it really should be in other major world languages than English by now. Is it really that expensive to add a new language to an ASP type of business solution? Is it support questions in French that is worrying them?

Google’s probably not far from releasing other language versions of their calendar service, but they currently hide the calendar URL if you’re a non English user (and you cannot use it even if you do know the URL). Only way to get access is by choosing English as the interface language for both mail and calendar.

If you know of others then feel free to drop me a comment. Exposing the ones who do not see us Europeans as truly wothy of beta versions can only push European innovators to get started and push US innovators to realize the market they are missing out on.