I’m very excited about my upcoming trip to Catalunya and the Alimentaria conference in Barcelona.  The Catalan govnernment and Catavino have teamed up to organize a really exciting trip around an already exciting conference.

And a few people are casting a curious eye at Love That Languedoc because my readers are very perceptive and they realize that Catalunya is distinctly not in the Languedoc Roussillon.  But the Roussillon and Catalunya share a lot in common.  For example, certain communities in the Roussillon consider me to be more of a gabatch (outsider) than their neighbors to the south.

And I want to take a moment to remind everybody that wine’s not a zero sum game.  I love that Languedoc.  But there’s a little secret: I love other places too sometimes.

And when we have the opportunity to travel to new places and experience new things, we also have an opportunity to exchange cultures.  And I am all about that.  A little mixing and matching to make something altogether new.  And I can try some new wines while I’m down there.   And you better believe I’m bringing some of my wine for others to taste.  And by the end of the week, we’ll all be fans of things we didn’t know much about before.

photo by CarbonNYC via Flickr

It’s important not to think of wine marketing as a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos.  Where there are only 20 marbles on the playing field and getting one more marble is the same as taking it out of your starving starving opponent’s mouth.  There are tons of people who have little to no knowledge of our regions and blogging or otherwise communicating about our cultural exchange can pique a stranger’s interest!  Somebody who loves Catalan wines and knows nothing about Languedoc might discover me next week.  Or the reverse!?

In case you’re curious, I prefer to think of life as a game of Crossfire.  Every shot you take at your “opponent” only gives them more ammunition to shoot right back at you.  It is only when we realize that the game is not nearly as cool as the commercial and that we abandon the notion of competition entirely that we have truly won.  Or if you shoot the little pucks into your opponent’s tray.  One of those two things is the win scenario.

So I set up Wine Everybody as my home page for a week.  Wine Everybody is a feed aggregator and social media platform specifically oriented toward wine.  It takes all the feeds from good wine blogs, tweets related to wine, message boards, etc.  and puts them in one place.  It is currently in beta.

The Short version:

Pros

• fast-loading
• no bugs
• responsive design team
• flexible search parameters
• highly customizable
• winnows out affiliate marketers and spam
• does everything you expect (e.g. link to facebook and twitter accounts, one click publishing)

Cons

• doesn’t track what I’ve already read
• I personally dislike some of the CSS (buttons pop up when you point your cursor at a block of text. it moves everything in the column downward and disorients me)
• goofy name (I’m one to talk, right?)

Suggestions

• Add a “follow this person on twitter” button
• Add a “rss url” field so that I can add good feeds to other aggregators I use
• Find out if I’m the only person who hates the popup buttons

The Long Version:

I wanted to give it an honest try to see if it would become a permanent part of my life or not.   My impression is that it’s an overall worthwhile website that works remarkably well considering it’s only in beta.

Now, technically, I set up a specific search query as my homepage.  Rather than loading the generic “Tons of articles about wine” page, I load specifically to a narrowed down search for the term “Languedoc” or “Roussillon”.  This is more pertinent to my work so I said to myself it would be more useful.  And it’s a better point of comparison to the tools I already use (like google alerts for the phrases “Languedoc vin” “Languedoc wine” “Roussillon vin” and “Roussillon wine”).

Immediately, I have to say it’s pretty cool that I don’t need FOUR separate search queries on Wine Everybody.  They have a really simple interface that lets me search for articles with Languedoc or Roussillon and then the entire website only reads stuff about wine and vin, so I get all four of my usual feeds in one little bundle.

Also, it’s pretty admirable that most of the content from my google alerts also pops up in the Wine Everybody interface.  I was worried that some news feeds like local Languedoc papers might not be included in their feed, but I generally saw the same stories published in both Wine Everybody and my google alerts.  Wine Everybody runs a lot faster than Google Reader too.

The only real downside is that Wine Everybody doesn’t track which articles I’ve read quite as clearly as Reader does. . . but that might just be because I haven’t explored the site enough.  Plus the site designers at Vinternet are pretty savvy, so there is still time for them to add features like this one.

While I haven’t fully explored it, I also enjoy Wine Everybody’s level of interaction with message boards.  Internet forums often get overlooked by the feeds I currently have aggregated.  I think a lot of the time new posts don’t have all the same keywords in them and that’s how they get ignored.

Anyway, I’m kind of rambling.  But I wanted to write up a little review of my first experiences with Wine Everybody.  I think the name is sort of goofy.  But I like what the website does.  Will it stay as my homepage?  For now, yes.  On one of my computers.  Although I feel bad because this experiment is adding like ten minutes to my dad’s computer time each morning as he struggles to type G-O-O-G-L-E-.-C-O-M every time he opens a new window.  Bless him.

I took clips from George Frêche’s speech at ViniSud to explain why he should adore my website.  The video’s in French, so I wrote up the whole thing in English for you!

Six reasons Georges Frêche loves Love That Languedoc.

1. “You don’t need seniority to be good. You just need to be smart”I get a lot of crap because I’m only 24, I’ve only been a winemaker 5 years, and the website isn’t even 4 months old. Yet I want to come in and change everything like some inexperiencd upstart.  Well, Georges knows that you don’t need seniority!  Heck, there are NO fourteenth generation web designers.  Also, I think a large part of our success on Love That Languedoc can be contributed to our cooperation with individuals and groups that DO bring some wisdom and seniority to the table.
2. “Take what works and throw out what doesn’t work.”I know, right!  This sort of try everything and keep what works is founded in an empiricism that I can really get into.  I didn’t know how Love That Languedoc would play out (and I still don’t! It could go a lot of different directions!)  But I knew that I couldn’t wade through the administrative back channels, building a project through conventional means.  I just launched. And it worked.  So… he’s gotta keep me now, right?
3. “It’s our fault if we’re in a crisis.  We are the masters of our fate.”Georges comes down on winemakers a little hard on this point.  But let’s say that I agree that collectively, we are responsible for the crisis.  It’s not you or me or that guy… but all of us.  And I also agree that we are masters of our fate.  The entire wine industry (not just Languedoc-Roussillon or France) leaves its fate in the hands of journalists and critics.  A few exceptions exist.  Most of the exceptions are massive corporations that have found ways to leverage their size into selling power.  Very few winemaking regions have a public image that they control.  Or our idea of control is to send press releases all the time.  But today, it’s our responsibility to cultivate an audience and give our message to them directly!  (e.g. Love That Languedoc)
4. “Manifestations turn the majority of people against our message by annoying them.”This just reminds me of my wine-alerts project.  We have to get our winemakers to take our infamous street-blocking manifestations to the web.  In the real world, only the French see our manifs and it just annoys most of them.  We alienate.   On the web, we can manifest with a positive message with our clients overseas.  That is so much better than alienating/annoying your neighbors and tourists.
5. “Today, we need to be on the GLOBAL market.”If you want to talk global, you have to talk web.  It’s just stupid simple.  If you have the budget to put billboards and print ads and Maisons du Languedoc everywhere, that’s great.  You should totally continue doing that.  However you should ALSO do the web thing which costs like pennies by comparison.  And if you have no budget but you have fifteen minutes per week, it’s time to start going online.  There are people around the world who will listen to you.  And that’s Love That Languedoc.  I want to bring wine from the region to monitors around the world. And it’s working. So… you gotta love me, right?
6. “Politics bedamned, we need smart people.”I bet you thought I was going to say I’m super smart.  But that is not my point.  Freche says he needs smart PEOPLE, not just one smart person.  Love That Languedoc is succeeding because it brings together tons of smart people.  There are smart people in this region and they have opened their doors to this new project because they see the potential power of communicating our message to the world!  If I have convinced you that Georges Freche loves Love That Languedoc, or if I’ve convinced YOU to Love That Languedoc, please please please visit the website and talk about it to all the smart people you know.  Link that thing up.

I really hate manifestos.  I think that most of my favorite movements start to die the day they write down what they’re really trying to do… like defining the movement is overly restrictive and dogmatic.  But I was busy writing up a general presentation of Love That Languedoc, and I found myself falling into this militant prose that sounds a ton like a manifesto.  Well, if I go around saying “no manifesto” all the time, then I’m still being just as dogmatic and restrictive as if I had written down my goals.  OH WELL.  Here it is:

I refuse to leave our fate in the hands of the global press who are, at best, mildly curious about our region.  And, at worst, totally oblivious to it.  Aside from a few rare examples, the world’s largest wine producer is also the world’s most ignored beauty.

Well this is the part of the movie where the downtrodden Languedoc takes off her horn-rimmed glasses and lets her hair down and the popular kid (or Henry Higgins, depending on what age you are) suddenly realizes that the coolest girl he knows was there under his nose all along.

Love That Languedoc is my personal project to show the world what it’s missing and now it’s developing a new branch.  I want to teach our winemakers how to communicate (without relying on journalists or  critics or ME) to a world that is ready to hear them.

I guess I’m thankful that the region needs me.  But the day I’m unnecessary will be a great day indeed.  We have an amazing advantage in sheer number of winemakers.  And our wines are distributed globally as both prestigious cult winesand large volume convenience store wines.  So people are already talking about us and our wines.

The next step is responding to that conversation.  We need to start training our winemakers to check email and set up a google alert for every estate in the Languedoc-Roussillon.  If only 1% of our winemakers spoke up every time somebody mentions their wines online, we would flood the Internet with our voices.  We could show our consumers that we appreciate their drinking habits.

And once winemakers start communicating successfully with the consumer, it’s much more likely that they will be willing to adopt more advanced online tools like a blog or a twitter.  And they’ll be much more likely to “get it” because it’s part of an authentic foray into communication and not some contrived business effort with no ROI.

And on that day, I’ll just be a happy little winemaker who runs a video blog for the fun of it.  And who will laugh about the old days when he would accidentally write a manifesto while trying to explain why he blogs.

There.  So I guess the conclusion is nice because it points out why this manifesto is silly.  I only blog because it’s fun.  I’m happy that it’s increasing my exposure and wine sales and I’m definitely finding ways to maximize the synergy between my blog and my website.  But ultimately, the blog is for fun.  And sometimes I get these lofty goals to sign everybody up for Google Alerts or whatever.  But ultimately, even those initiatives are an attempt to make my blog redundant.  One day, when everybody does their own online promotion, I’ll be useless.  And it’ll just be for fun again.

Until then, sign up for a freaking Google Alert.

A success  and many great compliments  adressed to Ryan by the net readers, the tweeter and facebook users……and more.

The article signed irishherault says it all.

“ViniSud 2010
Or take a young winemaker based just north of Carcassonne in the Aude, called Ryan O’Connell. On Thursday Ryan posted another new video to one of his sites (yes, he has several), Love That Languedoc.
It was about a presentation he gave at ViniSud 2010, about the first steps winemakers can take to get into Vin 2.0.

Ryan’s talk came at the end of the annual show in Montpellier, and while he didn’t get much of a crowd on the day, his presentation lives on through this video (isn’t the Internet great!), and it is now doing the rounds of wine blogs and finding a much wider audience.
He also sent a message out on his Twitter feed yesterday.

It’s a great little call to arms. As he puts it, we can OWN the Internet (or “this interweb thing” as us old-timers still call it).

As Vinternet.net puts it, “Ryan est un pragmatique, il sait communiquer son enthousiasme et ça lui réussit.”

Ryan is very young – less than half our age. The two of us are old enough to be his parents. He’s American, and moved over to the Languedoc in 2005 with his mum and dad when he was only 19.

Yet he has a fantastic command of French that has us green with envy. He is enthusiastic and prolific and has the adventurousness, courage and sheer neck of youth to question the old ways and get out there and do things rather differently in the Vin 2.0 era.

It will be an uphill struggle, step by step, and there’s no point in getting seduced by apparently instant results, but this is where it’s all going.

Vin 2.0 is the new rock ‘n’ roll, with wonderful new tales being told by people like Ryan”…………

Lauren Buzzeo, a writer for the Wine Enthusiast, stopped by the Domaine O’Vineyards stand and tasted through our wines at ViniSud this week.  A lot of great people stopped by, but Lauren wins the contest for first person to pop up in my google alerts with her article for the Wine Enthusiast.  She likes our wines with their distinctive Atlantic influence, unique in the Languedoc.  But she talks about a lot of great winemakers that she met at the salon!  I can’t wait to see all the articles and posts that roll in as a result of ViniSud 2010 which was a fantastic experience.  I got to put a lot of faces to the names and goofy avatars of my online friends.

This is one of the two tables full of food.

We had one of those epic lunches that lasts until way after sunset.  Our friends from l’Oustal Blanc in Minervois La Liviniere came over and we had a lot of great food and delicious wines.  The Fonquerle’s brought us a pretty epic Rhone wine from Plan de Dieu called Calendal (Philippe Cambie & Gilles Ferran).  It accompanied some of these lovely platters of charcuterie quite nicely!  Everything prepared by mom, as usual!

Soon, I’ll post some post video footage of a couple conversations in the winery. For now, I just wanted to post some food pictures before it all spoils.

I attended the general assembly of indie winemakers for the departement de l’Aude. It was okay. They’re in good financial shape and they get a lot done for indie winemakers. And these speeches seem to indicate that everybody wants more wine projects like Love That Languedoc. So that’s good! I’ve started talking to their commercial office about urging winemakers to participate. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s a video of Anne-Marie Charvet, Prefect of Aude, starting the assembly:

And a video of the National Director of the Vignerons Indépendants:

Roland Courteau, Senator of Aude, speaks about the anti-wine lobby in Paris:

The DDTM (Direction Départementale des Territoires et de la Mer) did the closing speech which proved to be just a bit too long for me to capture.  These guys had way more batteries than my poor little Flip.

The starling birds migrated south a few months ago but I never posted this. It’s so wintry and I have to prune. I wish I could fly south sometimes. But the wine is delicious up here, so I stay put.

Anyway, a few months ago, I was having a business lunch at the winery when this huge flock of starlings passed over the vineyard to fly south for the winter. But they stopped at the vines and flew back and forth. I ran out into the vines and caught some of the migration on my flip. Pretty awesome footage! What a lucky experience. The birds formed a perfect dome over me.

It’s worth going to fullscreen!

O'Vineyards winemaker dinner

We were interviewed for Food and Wine Talk, a radio program based out of Miami and hosted by Simone Diament and Carole Kotkin.

Winemaker interview for Domaine O’Vineyards

This was an event organized about a year ago by the CIVL and they had a little winemaker dinner with some American press.  Since our wines had been selected for the US Ambassador tour, we were poked to do this very fun dinner in the medieval castle city of Carcassonne.  There was another larger producer in the Malpere present, so it was a fun western-Languedoc dinner.  Not enough focus on the Malpere and Cabardes, two Languedoc appelations with very peculiar varietals available to them (eg. Merlot, Cabernet)

Here’s the full article about Carole’s Languedoc travels.