Good Grape Wine Company

April 21 2008

Postscript on Call for a Merger in the Wine + Technology Space

A couple of months removed from the day-to-day wine business, I have noticed a few things:

1) My creative juices are firing on all cylinders
2) My wine passion and passion for blogging has renewed after suffering through a little bit of the “cobbler’s son” syndrome
3) I am starting to see the forest for the trees related to the wine business and that is leading to more business and less wine in my writing.  Not sure if this is bad or good.
4) I am back to the roots of this blog and relying on intuition rather than artful insight based on anecdotal evidence

What this all means is I wrote my post yesterday about calling for a merger between Wine 2.0 and the Open Wine Consortium very much in the Malcolm Gladwell “Blink” mode, without a whole lot of analytical thought. It just seems right and the right thing to do at the right time.  This type of “by the seat of the pants” writing leads to some breakthroughs and it leads to some holes in logic, as well.

To that end, I somewhat purposefully did not put a whole lot of detail about how I might do a merger because I wanted to get the point across about relativism and absolutism and, well, there is only so much room for minutia before skimming gives way to snoozing. 

That said, I can do follow-up posts and based on a couple of comments I received, I am going to comment in-line:
Paul Mabray, CEO of Inertia Beverage Group wrote:

Candidly Jeff, I think these two organizations are so very different they should NOT integrate.  As a supporter of both here is the clear distinction I see:
Wine 2.0 is an event.
OWC is a network.
P

My suggestion is to create one organization that can create a business model around a network of people and events.  Simply, this is what thousands of non-profits do on a daily basis—they have a mission, they act as thought-leaders, they serve constituents and many marshal an army of volunteers.

Most blogging and social media companies have developed their revenue streams around content creation and live events, so this much is not so much a foreign concept. 
And, frankly, social networking is great, but business still is done in person.  So, the difference between a network and an event is negliable.

What a combined Wine 2.0/OWC organization can do is become a national Wine Institute-like organizational body/think tank that executes thought-leadership and acts as the pivot at the crossroads of wine and technology. 

While it can be argued that Wine 2.0 is expanding their focus to consumers that is only after the first three or four events were geared as wine technology networking events.  The event I attended in November of ’06 was purely a business card exchange with all of the attendee’s being folks in and around the business.  The owner of Wine 2.0 undoubtedly is trying to monetize the effort and the way to do so is to try to pull consumers in.  I don’t begrudge him that, but I think harkening back to his near-term roots, in conjunction with a merger of equals with the OWC can help better chart a unified course that can then map to how to engage the public. 

As I noted in my post, the key here is to consider this effort as a part of relativism and keep the best interests of the industry in mind and set aside, for now, the notion of good old capitalism.
Longer term, I am all for capitalism.  In fact, being a non-for profit does not mean you cannot make money, and handsome money, it just means you have to spend what you make serving your mission.

As a sidebar note, I am not a fan of the phrase Wine 2.0 because it will seem as antiquated as “Alta Vista” or “Webcrawler” in a couple of years. 

Joel Vincent, founder of the Open Wine Consortium said:

I am on my PDA so this will be brief until I get to my desk.  1) OWC is nearly 800 right now.  OWC invites partnership and collaboration with any entity that furthers technology in the wine world.
Lastly, having an Electrical Eng background, I have always likened OWC to the IEEE for technology - education, driving projects to conclusion like standards, and educational events with a purpose.  Again, for techies, your proposal would be like merging IEEE with the Consumer Electronics Show.  Could there be tighter collaboration?  Potentially.  And we are exploring that with Wine2.0 and other wine related trade and consumer organizations. So thats where my head is at.  I’m glad to discuss further when I get back to my desk.

btw - There is already a European Wine Blogger Conf and it and the NA version are vastly different from Wine2.0 both in content and in purpose.  The link to that conference is on the front page of OWC.

In this regard, I have to politely disagree on the IEEE and CSE.  Apples and oranges.  What I am saying is that Wine 2.0 is barely out of the gate, so let’s not give them too much credit and it started a scant time ago (less than two years) as a networking hub for wine technology companies. 

I would encourage Joel and Cornelius to review non profit business models and determine how a fit can be created that will create ONE organization that serves the convergence of wine, technology and social media for the betterment of all parties in the value-chain.  Yes, that will include consumers, but only after we figure out what the hell we are doing first.  And, really, before it hits consumers it needs to hit the wine industry who remain, largely, in the dark on technology and the value of the web.  A rising ride raises all ships and getting everybody on the wine side reconnoitered is a good thing.

The key here is to lead with strategic intent and in doing so you have to have the end in mind and work backwards to present day. 

I have the first $100 bucks for 2009 dues.  Can I make that out to “Open Wine Consortium” or some other entity name that is mutually agreed upon by the founders of two organizations that NEED to come together? 

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