March 21 2006
Last week I posted about a wine idea for a mobile tasting room--you could do trade shows, etc. I ultimately suggested that it probably wouldn’t work because the environs--charming concrete floors of convention centers and fluorescent lighting are all counter-intuitive to enjoying a nice glass of vino.
Well, no sooner than I write that then I stumble across this tidy little business that does exactly what I suggested. Hmm ... maybe this is a good business idea ... especially when you consider this company is run by a bunch of limey brits--leaving the whole U.S. to conquer.
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This website: www.winelearningcenter.com is pretty fun. If you want to take the time to go through a quiz or two AND register for the pleasure of the results, it will take you through quizzes like: Which Grape is Most like Your Personality, Would you Be a Good Winemaker and other sidebars. I am, by the way, like the Gamay Noir grape, according to the test.
I am: Fruity, Charming, A Good Worker, Limited in Geographic spread, Slightly high-maintenance, Eager or quickly Ready for Action, doesn’t age well.
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I recently read the Blog book called Naked Conversations, it’s really a very good book and there is the ongoing blog by the same authors here.
Their post on 3/21--Are Blogs at theTipping Point ? is very interesting. An excerpt:
Instead, let me quote from Malcolm Gladwell,an author and speaker who I hold in extremely high regard; whose publicpresentations and two books have influenced how I think and what Iwrite.
"...ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just likeoutbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us."
The answer is Yes. The fact that Malcolm Gladwell started a Blog this year is proof of that. But, also interestingly, one of the Blogs cited on several occasions in the book Naked Conversations is Gaping Void . He does provocative line art on the back of business cards in the form of a blog. (An extra nod and flattery because I’m posting a copyrighted jpeg of his, and, well, some people don’t like that much).
He has a post on his site from December that details a winery called Stormhoek from New Zealand that supposedly doubled their wine sales in 12 months by the use of blogging.
So, the context is this: nobody really knew that the bottom dropped out of the tech market in March of 2001 until, really, with all sensitivity, September of 2001 when we started looking at the year and the unfortunate turn of events. Hindsight is always 20/20.
My question is: is it possible that blogging hit its tipping point in the late fall of last year--2005 and wine blogging (the social epidemic) was the catalyst--several months earlier than what others may be seeing and saying right now?
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001646.html
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Yesterday I wrote about wines and scarcity as a marketing tactic. Today, I read about a company that is applying technology to streamline the process of allocation to customers when supply is limited. I’m not sure they’ll be able to scale to build a real business out of this, but it’s mildly interesting to see that outsider’s are bringing new ideas to the wine industry and not just trying to co-opt the lifestyle.
An Excerpt:
More than 50 wineries—including Vineyard 29, Araujo Estate Wines, Bressler Vineyards, Pahlmeyer Vineyard and Switchback Ridge/Peterson Family Vineyard-- use web-based ASP technology to allocate their wines among wealthycollectors, corporate bigshots, Hollywood stars, and others on theirpreferred customers’ lists, officials at Yountville-based Cultivate Systems,told the San Francisco Business Times on Friday. It provides the onlinetechnology the wineries use to sell their goods online.
And for wines that cost as much as $100 or more per bottle, demandoften far outpaces supply, forcing cult wineries to allocate theirscarce resources carefully.
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