Good Grape Wine Company

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On the cusp of the 2nd Annual American Wine Blog Awards, one of the interesting things happening is the fact that, in my humble opinion, online wine content has reached a critical tipping point. It feels like a saturation point, but I think that is underestimating the movement because the cup will continue to overflow for the foreseeable future.  Simply, there are A LOT of wine blogs, many of whom are providing excellent content, and in fact, there are almost too many for a reader pool to keep up with on a sane level.  There has been an explosion and this looks to continue unabated for some time to come. The only alternative is for all of this content to niche itself out to a stratified consumer base.  I think in the short-term, what this means is that wine blogs will have to focus, focus, focus on what their niche is, sometimes a daunting task for me, and a lot of other people that like to blog around what takes their whim. With that in mind, I like to stop occasionally and do a digest post, or a couple of digest posts, to comment, provide a pointer and generally look at things happening in this little pocket of the wine universe.  Social Network for Wine Industry and Wine-Technology Affinity Group A couple of months back there was a palpable migration of wine bloggers and wine aficionados to Facebook.com.  Many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people that are in and around the wine industry and wine blogging and wine blog reading made their way to Facebook.com, yours truly included. Facebook is a fun tool and I made some new connections, but there is a missing ingredient with the site.  It is great to have 100 friends, but it seemed more social than business oriented.  Scrabulous and movie quizzes are fun, but as a tableau for making connections that can pay off as a benefit to your wine blogging site or your wine business it just seems a little too fun-oriented.  If Myspace.com is like a keg party, Facebook.com is a young twenty-something micro-brew and cheese party.  That is not bad by any means; it is what it is, despite the open technology hooks that allow developers to create programs that add value.  So, it was with interest that I saw and joined a social network that just started called, the OpenWine Consortium.  Found here. The OWC is positioned very inclusively for everybody, but with a focus around the new guard in the wine industry and those that appreciate wine: OpenWine Consortium is a global, non-profit wine industry association featuring the newest generation of emerging companies, wineries, publishers, services and a motivated community dedicated to changing the world of wine. Joel Vincent from winelifetoday.com has taken the lead on organization and I encourage anybody with a passing interest in wine blogging, online wine commerce or just general wine enthusiasm to sign-up and engage today.  With Superpokes out of the way (inside joke for Facebook users), this could be a powerful tool in taking wine and technology to the next level. Online Wine Video Continues to Explode The online wine technology niche has seen several entrants over the course of the last couple of years—folks like Wine Spies, Radcru.com, Americanwinery.com and Appellationamerica.com come to mind.  Leveraging a mail list or general consumer visits, these companies present wines for sale.  There are some tweaks to the business model on how they are executed, some do it on a commission basis, and others take in inventory.  It is a variation on the wine.com’s of the world and a little bit closer to the high-end enthusiast. If you couple this with the explosion of video blogging and podcasting, what has not emerged is an entrant that provides video-based contextual information on the winery itself, from the winery participants. That is, until now.  Jon G. from the very popular wine review site Quaffability has launched a new site called, Web Tasting Room. It’s an interesting concept and still early in the process, but the business model for engaging consumers with an inside out view of the winery, via video blogging, from the winery itself is new, fresh and seemingly the right thing at the right time. Elsewhere, tackling video from a retail perspective, joining WineLibrary TV as the gold standard, is Just Grapes (found here), a Chicago retailer.  It looks as if they are re-purposing their existing retail activities by videotaping and putting it online.  In this case, currency will be integral as it looks like their last video update is from the holidays, but keep an eye on them as an example of retail adopting new marketing techniques in engaging us, consumers.  My sense tells me that the wine blogosphere –writing and video-- is pre-disposed to a very organic path to providing information.  The Just Grapes of the world are swimming upstream against a perception that their video/web marketing efforts are too slick.  One of the things that make Wine Library TV a winner is its vitality and authenticity.  Does Gary sell wine based on his video blogging?  Absolutely, but he is smart about not mixing art and commerce in a heavy-handed way. That notion of keeping art and commerce separate makes the Fleming’s Steakhouse wine site, VineVoyages, a very interesting proposition.  Like the Web Tasting Room, the Fleming’s site focuses on the producers in a very polished way with the intent to create mindshare for the steak house, as opposed to direct sales.  Keep an eye on this site. Separate from these relatively new entrants, an ongoing thread of conversation in the online wine world has been a level of anticipation for The Winemakers, a PBS reality show that is one part Survivor, one part Top Chef and two heaping portions of The Apprentice. While the show has not premiered, you can go to YouTube and get a preview dose of the participants and the show scheduled to air in the late spring and Early Summer of this year.  Check it out here and here. Finally, if you noted that Al Gore recently lauded the wine industry for its green ways, then you may want to check out another Al Gore project—Current TV – a sort of millennial generation public access network where all of the content is user generated.  Current TV is on many cable networks, but you can check out the web site and search for “wine” to get a bunch of content of varying degrees of professionalism.  One of my favorite videos on the Current site is this guy that plays sweet music using water filled wine glasses. Long a staple of the late night television, I find this completely fascinating.  In terms of party tricks, forget slinging an acoustic guitar or sidling up to the piano.  I would love to learn how to do this.  One thing is certain for the rest of 2008 and the coming years for the wine industry and wine consumers, while industry vets are focusing on price pressures, imports, and wine industry mechanics, the marketing game is completely changing.  I hope the existing industry is paying close enough attention, because many new entrants certainly are.  http://www.goodgrape.com/index.php/604/