Good Grape Wine Company

I’ll address your comments in my post tonight, Ryan.

After reading the post, if you have any questions about protocol or how the program is administered, please feel free to weigh in with an opinion that isn’t created in a vacuum, but right now, I’d say you don’t enough information to assert a “buy off.”

Jeff

Ryan, it’s a game of inches.  I think it’s notable that a well-tenured winery like Rodney Strong would choose to sample bloggers at the same time they sample WS and WA—for a new allocated brand no less.  That’s a story. I don’t think it has been done before.  You have to start somewhere.

Because of the immediacy of blogs, wine reviews of the wine, pre-release, pre-major publication review, will occur before major publications.

This is a coup for wine bloggers and it takes some stones for a winery selling $75 cab on allocation to do this.  I give them credit.

I’ll address this in a post tonight when I give full back story and transparency, but the program, which I led and organized, had no editorial restrictions whatsoever.  The proviso was to participate you had to write something in between 300 - 500 words +.  It could be bad, good, or indifferent, but you had to write. 

So, in that sense, it is journalistic integrity on the sampling, but because of the infinite nature of bits and bytes, there was the stipulation to write something.  Why else would Rockaway send out samples, to a fledgling medium?  They are betting that the wine is good and people will enjoy it.  If somebody didn’t care for it, and said so, then that is the risk the winery takes.

More later on ...

Jeff