Wine, too, for the next generation

There are reasons why wine has become more widely available than ever. Eric Asimov of The New York Times’ The Pour is right when he says:

From the chateaux of Bordeaux to the hillside hamlets of Valle d’Aosta, from windswept volcanic rocks of Santorini to foggy ridges of the Sonoma Coast, wine from anywhere can be found almost everywhere.

Yes, there is a lot more wine, and wine magic, to go around these days. It’s not hard to guess the main reason why: many wine lovers use Internet technology in their daily lives. On the consumer side, they’re embracing the web to learn about wine. On the producer side, they’re furthering the ability of wine consumers to have more choices about the wine they consume. These wine lovers come in different flavors of wine geekdom, be they wine merchants, citizen wine bloggers, journalists-turned bloggers, software vendors, the wine-consuming public, or the winemakers themselves.

This evolution toward bringing winemakers and wine drinkers together was inevitable. With more information available about wine than ever before, savvy wine people are capitalizing on new ways to drive consumers of wine information toward their wine and wine-related purchases. And those consumers are buying. They’re discovering new wines, expanding their knowledge, and they’re sharing their experiences about it online. As a result, new communities about wine are constantly developing.

I can tell you this is true just from my own viewpoint as a citizen blogger. Because I write this blog, winemakers are reading it. I’ve met a number of them now, and I plan to meet more. I can’t imagine how I might have begun these relationships without having made the choice to lend my voice to the wine community. And so I am grateful for the kinds of tools we have today — the kinds of tools that the next generation of wine consumers will surely be taking advantage of to pursue the great variety of wine-related experiences they will be seeking.* It’s why I was keen on attending last Friday’s Wine 2.0 event in San Francisco.

You can think of the term Wine 2.0 as a wine-play on Web 2.0 — a term coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly that refers to a perceived second generation (i.e., post dot-com bust era) of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites and wikis, that facilitate collaboration and sharing between Internet users.

At this Wine 2.0 event — a second annual event for San Francisco — two sets of panelists represented each of the facets of this new generation of wine lovers. Each discussed new ways of using current Internet technology to expand wine sales and information into hip new markets. They talked about new changes in the ways winemakers and wine technologists are using the web platform to put more varieties of wine — and ways to buy it — into the hands and onto the dinner tables of the public. But it’s clear that what’s also changing is the variety of social networking websites and tools they are using to do it. It is these tools that are flattening the three-tier hierarchy that has traditionally inserted a middle-tier wholesaler (hence the term middleman) between the winemaker and the consumer, separating them from relationships that many now enjoy, including this winehiker.

It’s about education, it’s about new relationships, and it’s all about having a voice.

Clearly, wine consumers and producers alike have a voice that they didn’t enjoy during the initial Internet boom. Many of those voices were on-hand at Wine 2.0, and it is clear that the audience listening to those voices is growing exponentially.** Together they are breaking down traditional barriers, for they suggest that there’s a new paradigm for winemakers and wine marketers — the very people who must listen to those voices if they intend to tap evolving, web-savvy markets. In a nutshell, this new paradigm means: you’ve got to implement web tools that are easy for wine drinkers to experiment and purchase wine with, and you’ve got to start developing two-way communications tools (i.e., blogs) to get your expertise in front of them. The winemakers, retailers, and software houses who are already doing these things are getting noticed, and many are winning awards because of it. They are, as Eric Asimov says, the vanguard.

Because you read this blog, you need to know that you have a voice, too. After all, blogs are interactive, Web 2.0 communication vehicles that build communities. So, what do you have to say?

For a look at the people who attended Wine 2.0, see my previous post, Brave heroes on the winepath.

~winehiker

*Winehiking, for instance!
**Quite frankly, I love the idea of using computers to get people away from them.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under grape squeezins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.