During the Symposium of Masters of Wine in Bordeaux last June, the first panel was on “Wine on the Web”. The moderator was Christophe Macra, one of the four French MW. Christophe invited four prestigious panelists to talk about Wine and Web: Jancis Robinson, Rowan Gormley, founder and CEO of NakedWines.com, Eric LeVine, founder and CEO of cellartracker.com, Mike Linton, consultant for Peet’s Coffee and Tea and now on the advisory board of venture capital companies.

I will not bother you with a longer text as the panel was filmed and is now available on the symposium site:

I just finished reading The Wine Trials 2010 by Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch. I must confess I’m very perplexed by this book. The authors blame the “lifestyle marketing” for overpriced wines. They also condemn the fact that a group like LVMH invest more money on marketing than to produce the goods, without mentioning that this marketing strategy covers all products manufactured by LVMH and not only their wine and spirits business. Because they reject marketing (they call it the “enemy” of the wine drinker) and the “taste of money”, they promote wines widely available in supermarkets and under $15. But, among the 150 selected wines, there are Two Buck Chuck, Norton, Almaden, Barefoot wines, to mention just a few. Do the authors sincerely think those wines are so widely available without heavy marketing and a lot of money? This selection by two main criteria – under $15 and widely available in supermarkets – is counterproductive for the wine industry. Wine drinkers and consumers need wines under $15 but original and well crafted. There are so many of them all over the world. It’s true it requires a little effort on the part of the consumers but it is well worth it. The Web 2.0 provides tools to look for, find and now locate affordable and not so easy-to-find wines.

All the selection of wines is based on blind tasting. I won’t make any comment on this choice: I’m not an enologist or a wine critic and have no opinion on the subject worth of mention. When they say blind tasting gets the truth out of a wine, I’m a little skeptical: why is it right to prefer a $15 cava over a $150 Dom Perignon and wrong to like a Dom Perignon? It’s just a matter of taste and education. I’m the last one to condemn somebody who likes a $3 Two Buck Chuck. As I already wrote, a wine is like a book: some people like reading detective stories or chick lit and others poetry or essays. There’s nothing wrong with it. But don’t tell me it is “un-American” to drink expensive wines because of their marketing strategy!

The Wine Trials 2010 is also very critic of wine critics and established magazines, such as The Wine Spectator. Critics of critics have been going on for many years. One of the answers provided by the Web 2.0 is the peer-to-peer recommendation system. Consumers have now a huge array of information through social media, forums, blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter. They can access this information instantly on their phone or through Internet.

Did I dislike this book? Not really. While reading it, I went from smiling to raising a perplexed eyebrow or being mildly offended. This said, I respect the effort behind the work: it is certainly very hard to carry such a tasting, even if I have a lot of reservations about the result. I also respect the thinking behind the work. Goldstein’s introductory chapters are worth reading thoroughly. As he says all along his book, the reader has to make up his/her own mind on the ideas and principles behind the book as well as on wine. Maybe the authors and I have to agree we disagree!

Twitter and Crushpad winery partnered to create two wines to support Room to Read,
a San Francisco-based non-profit which aims to empower millions of children in the developing world through education.

This is the first Corporate Social Innovation initiative of Twitter. The label is dubbed Fledgling Wine. In addition to its Web site, the project has a Twitter page launched a few hours ago.

“As a company that’s only one percent into its journey, we’re always thinking about our long term impact on the world,” Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone wrote on Fledgling Wine’s home page. “The Fledgling Initiative embodies two things that are at the core of Twitter’s mission: providing access to information and highlighting the power of open communication to bring about positive change.”

Crushpad is associated to the project as the winemaking facility. It will help create the two wines, a Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay recently harvested. According to Michael Brill, CEO of Crushpad, Crushpad’s “goal is to seriously over-deliver on both quality and experience.”

The Fledging Wine site will provide multimedia content documenting the wine’s development step by step, in-person events at the winery, tweet ups (of course!), and even chances to taste the wine as well as the news and updates.

The Fledging Project is significant to the social media development for several reasons:

- it’s initiated by a very young company, Twitter, that gave itself the best way to explain its mission. Indeed, for many people, Twitter is just this micro-chat where privileged and educated people with time on their hands tell the world they just had their capuccino or they’re depressed because it rains in their part of the world. Twitter is a lot more than just a micro-chat for over-spoiled people. It has a social value and can expand its benefits to developing countries. Indeed, without reading skills, no tweets and no access to the world. It also has a professional value that is very often overlooked by people.
- it shows that the technological world is not cold and heartless: two technological advanced companies – Twitter and Crushpad – partnered to help Room to Read and to extend their hand to the world. Their partnership gives an other dimension and meaning to the expression “social media”. Technology is not self serving: it is at the service of mankind.
- Wine is the best link between people. When wine is often diabolised, this project shows it also links people together from the US to Europe, to Africa and to Asia. Wine might not be a world language like music, but it carries positive values.

Web 2.0 is about sharing not only knowledge but also riches. I wish the best to the three partners of this beautiful adventure and I hope there will be a lot of pre-ordering those bottles of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, lovingly made by all contributors.

I’m fascinated by the use of the Web 2.0 tools made by consultants, wineries, start-ups in the wine business. Everyday there is a new site, a new application, a new idea by someone or a company. We know VinTank and its super innovative process, Cruvee, ablegrape.com, snooth.com, thewinespies.com, vinobilia.com and many many others. Don’t be offended if I didn’t mention you: I’d like to finish writing my post before breakfast tomorrow morning!

Is the user of the Net – you, me, anybody who is not in the business of producing wine or communicating/selling/marketing wine – as innovative and creative? Do we use those tools to organize a trip to a wine country? I just read the post of Rebecca Kelley on her trip to Napa Valley. She used yelp.com and an iPhone to identify the wineries she’d like to visit. This strategy requires from the wineries to be social media savvy. And it worked! Rebecca had a wonderful time.

Could we do the same thing in Europe? Why not? More and more wineries are now now using social media for marketing and branding: some have blogs regularly updated, some have mobile sites available from iPods or 3G phones, a lot have Facebook and/or Twitter accounts. They’re accessible also on various wine communities who share tasting notes or trip experiences. Unfortunately we don’t have any yelp.com – yet! – but it could be a good idea for an European entrepreneur to start such a site.

Whatever the outcome of this idea among European start-ups, it seems the European wine world is getting more and more Web 2.0 savvy. My next travel trip will be done only using Web 2.0 tools and I’m sure it will be a great adventure!

Who said this? French State Secretary for Prospectives and Evaluation of Public Policies and Internet, Eric Besson when asked why French wines couldn’t advertise on the Internet at LeWeb8 conference. This rather silly statement went around the world through various web sites, twitter and videos on the conference.

Unfortunately, as soon as this statement was made public, various reports showed that the French wine industry was loosing shares on most international markets: in England, American wines supplanted French wines; the export figures for the US went down and so on.

French wines are so good they don’t need to be advertised? Thank you for ruining our wine culture, Monsieur Besson!

When writing Wine Brands, I met several wine entrepreneurs of the Web 1.0 generation – people who started their company or their venture in the mid-90s like Peter Granoff with wine.com. Those people were the pioneers of the industry and younger entrepreneurs – the wine entrepreneurs of Web 2.0 – owe them a lot because those guys opened the road to innovation and creativity.

But these entrepreneurs of Web 2.0 are very different from those of the first generation. They are younger, sometimes don’t come from the wine business and they are passionate about two things, wine and new technologies. They usually have a lot of innovative ideas, such as adegga.com, a site we talked about with one of its founders, Andre, on our Internet live radio show. There are also those names you might recognize as I mentioned them along the months in this blog: Crushpad, snooth, thewinespies, ablegrape, americanwinery, ewinewatch, TheMutineer, redpinkwhite and many others. There are also the authors of many blogs related to wine and new technology whose contacts you’ll find on openwineconsortium.

What is amazing is that most of those new adventures are… American, with the exception of Andre who is Portuguese. Is it that Americans are less afraid to be entrepreneurs than their European peers? Or is it a tradition in anglo-saxon countries to have a more entrepreneurial spirit? Or is it because the American market is so wide and so open it makes it easy? I don’t know. I’m not an economist but I saw this new generation of wine entrepreneurs grow and develop with a pleasure I meant to share with you.