I want to change the way winemakers think about participation in social media. I want them to stop treating twitter and facebook like some alien ritual that just goes against the grain of their character. I need them to start thinking about social media the same way they think about every other kind [...]

This post is going to sound a little strange to people who know me and realize how much time I spend trying to get more and more winemakers online.  But I recently read an article and heard a flurry of tweets that have me thinking about an interesting double standard that exists in a lot [...]

Thanks to Pierrick from MySocialWinery who video recorded the conference with Rick Bakas from St. Supery in Napa Valley.

The presentation is a little dry if you’re not in the biz, but I think Rick has some very interesting experience and he shares some truly outstanding numbers. In a time when everybody in California was hurting, [...]

It’s been a week or so now and I watched a great video recap of what went down in the Access Zone at the London International Wine Fair.  As you can see, I’m not the only one talking about social media and new technology.  Quite the contrary, I was just a small part of a [...]

Is it part of our job as winemakers in a rural area to assess the current Internet landscape and retool some of the services out their to serve our needs? I’m working on this idea and I’ll keep coming back to it. For sure, there are ways that social media can sell wine like when Twitter-ers bid on wine at a Toques et Clochers auction in rural France. But we might have to actively study these examples if we want to replicate their success.

Unless you’re already insanely famous, very few people will devote time to you on a regular basis just to find out what the weather is like on YOUR vineyard.

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.

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.