Wine Tourism

Oenotourism is the other big subject Robert Joseph tackled. The presentation was similar to the one Vitisphere reported on in October. And it definitely falls in line with some of the wine tourism concepts I wrote about earlier this year. The gist of the presentation is that we have to change a lot of things in the wine tourism business. But really it’s a big sprawling topic so you might want to look through the slides embedded below:

Here are some random observations I’d like to make:

There are people who want to visit vineyards even though they’re not obsessed with wine.  Wine tourism is supposed to be entertainment.  I agree with all of this and talk about it a lot (most recently in the conclusion of my five minute story at the EWBC).  Visiting a winery should not be a task. It should be fun and entertaining.  It can also be educational and informative, but those are all secondary to the entertainment.  And then he does a semantic analysis of trip advisor reviews (again, I’m getting deja vu here as I just did this type of analysis with the O’Vineyards tripadvisor reviews this year)

Although he also argues that wineries should have pools and movie theaters and daycares and all kinds of peripheral activities.  I think this is smart, but it’s also important to note that not every winery will do all of this.  It’s up to each winemaker to figure out how to intelligently expand their tourism offer without overstretching themselves or falling into a job they don’t actually want to do.

Slide 17 is hilarious/tragic… 99% of Napa wine producers find tourism to be financially viable while 60% of Florentines do not find it financially viable even though the average shopping cart size is actually smaller in Napa (according to this study).  Is this because there are far more visitors at a time in Napa?  Or are Italians/Europeans/Mediterraneans just predisposed to being unhappy about our tourism activity? ;D

The question of merchandise is also raised.  Here too I wholeheartedly agree with Robert.  My parents and I really make a lot of sacrifices to create delicious, unique, life-altering wines and we sometimes make pennies per bottle.  On the other hand, I can buy glassware, corkscrews and hoodies with our logo or Carcassonne written on them and sell those at 400% markup.  It’s absurd, but I make more money selling a bar of soap with my logo (ordered online) than on the bottle of wine that I spent three years on.  And this is a point of contention.  Some people say that a winemaker exists to sell wine, not to sell soap.  I’m not sure, but I think a winemaker exists to make wine.  If I have to sell soap to subsidize my wine sales, then I will sell soap.  It’s what I have to do to make wine.  And I don’t want to imagine a world where I’m not making wine.  So sell soap.

Joseph also cites this article about tasting room sales and it’s pretty interesting.

I don’t really have a well organized mailing list (which is terrible of me. it’s one of the things I need to change in 2012) or any wine club (something I might change).  This was a big topic and I am ashamed at the end of it. :-/

Then he also talked about the R&D potential of visitors at the vineyard.  Why not ask your visitors to try new blends and see if they like it.  Test out ideas on your tourists because they are your final market.  This sparked some controversy in the talks afterwards as many winemakers find it unthinkable that you would make a wine to cater to the public (essentially to the lowest common denominator the way record labels pick singles to go on the radio).  At this extreme, you end up with bland, inoffensive wines that nobody hates (and nobody loves) that can appeal to all markets.  But that is an extreme.  If you actually have a steady flow of tourists, you can draw information from them and choose to use it or ignore it the same way you would use an oenologist or winemaking consultant.  Furthermore, I’d argue that my tourists are not the same as a random sample from the  global population.  People who visit my vineyard tend to be a little like me, weird sense of humor, interested in learning, like a large range of different wine styles, and so on.  Taking their opinions into count is not the same as trying to cater to everybody.

Sorry this post is so rambly.  Hard act to follow.

Robert Joseph at le vin 2.0

Consumer Psychology

Robert Joseph started with a 2 minute biography of himself and then made a funny point. So far, 2 minutes about him and 0 minutes about wine drinkers. How typical of the wine industry! The rest of his presentation focused on consumers, their habits, and what they want in wine.

A large point he made was that we need to treat like wine like every other beverage.  It’s a tough pill to swallow because everybody in the audience loved wine.  But his point is that the majority of consumers don’t revere wine the way we do.  There are split second decisions that people make to have a glass of wine or a beer or a coke or some water.  The majority of consumers are simply pleasure-seekers and wine should try to deliver that pleasure.

The good news is that wine tastes great!  So all we have to do is market its wonderful tastes.  The bad news is that we are awful at conveying how good wine is.  Instead of reassuring our potential customers that the wine they are thinking of purchasing is delicious, we plague them with esoteric region names, unpronounceable words, and intimidating etchings of our estates.  Instead of promising a good time, many wines fill their potential clients with anxiety and dread.

As a result, many people would rather avoid wine entirely (which Joseph uses to explain the dwindling wine consumption numbers in France).  Other people will simply seek different wines that are marketed more simply.  He picks the example of Cupcake Wines who are inanely simple in their marketing.  Everything is Cupcake Merlot or Cupcake Chardonnay or Cupcake Vodka (because once you launch a successful brand, you might as well run with it!)

On the bright side, it doesn’t have to be quite as simple as Cupcake.  We can still try to deliver actual information to the consumer, but we have to be smart about it.  Joseph cites a study he conducted where they put a QR code on a wine bottleneck.  The QR code could send the shopper to a variety of different presentations.  And then people were asked if that information made them want to get the wine or not.  Here are the different presentations starting with the most popular (the number in parentheses is the percentage of people who said it was good information):

• how it tastes (47%)
• grape varieties (44%)
• food & wine pairings (41%)
• how can you save money on it (39%)
• where to buy it (38%)
• how to serve it (38%)
• information about where it was made (38%)
• information about how it was made (28%)
• information about the producer (18%)
• video of the winemaker (12%)
• video of the winery (9%)

People almost don’t care about where the wine is from, who made it, what drives us.  Really, most consumers in this study wanted to know what the wine tasted like.

And the next step is a big ongoing research project called doilikeit that studies the relationship between wine preferences and other food/beverage preferences.  And with that data, one day, we’ll be able to recommend wines based on what sort of food you like or what kind of soda you drink.  Oh you like ginger ale? Try a riesling.  Part of this terrifies me but part of it is also really cool.  Like a last.fm for food.  Oh and why stop there?  Why not combine the last.fm data with doilikeit data!  People who like Tom Waits Bone Machine era looovve O’Vineyards.  Oh you like Tom Waits?  Try some O’Vineyards O’Syrah.

And then combine rottentomatoes data and all the data on your TESCO shopping card.  And suddenly you can tell potential drinkers that if you like Tom Waits AND bought The Muppet Movie there is an 86% chance you’ll enjoy O’Syrah 2009.  Brave new world.

• Official summary, photos, and slideshares
• Ryan O’Connell presents on Opportunities for Winemakers using Mobile Technology
• Robert Joseph talks about wine tourism and consumer psychology
• An overarching theme of thinking less reverently about wine (when marketing)
• Jacques Berthomeau’s summary (in French)
• Míriam Aguiar’s summary (in Portuguese)

View the story “Le Vin 2.0 2011″ on Storify

Link to powerpoint slides

Don’t make an app

When a company decides to develop a mobile strategy, their first instinct is often to make a smartphone application.  But applications are actually one of the heaviest investments you can make with some of the most limited returns.  Apps seem really cool and they seem like the most *mobile* thing you can do because that’s what you always hear about on the news, but you can make an application and then wake up the morning after next to that 10,000€ app and realize you don’t really have the same ambitions in life.  This metaphor got weird.

All I’m trying to say is that most winemakers shouldn’t even think about making an application.

Here are several reasons why:

Application development is expensive.  The lowest dev cost I’ve ever seen for even a simple application that was basically just a PDF that you could flip through was 6,000€.

Application development is restricted to specific platforms. If you make an iPhone app, it only works on iPhones.  And then you need a different app for Android phones.  And you need to constantly maintain the app as the technology changes.  I use a Samsung Wave which has the Bada platform and basically nobody makes apps for me.  I feel left out and end up resenting everybody who is ignoring my phone platform.

The most successful applications are Universal in scope, and most winemakers don’t have the resources to maintain this kind of app.  Almost nobody wants an O’Vineyards app that just tells them about O’Vineyards.  They will open that once and then forget it’s on their phone.  On the other hand, a Love That Languedoc app that tells them about all the Languedoc wines .. that’s a little more interesting, but still not ideal.  Then if you think of a Guide Hachette app that has all French wines.  That’s getting interesting.  Or something like Wine Demon that does all wines available in the UK.  Now you’re providing something useful for your app user and they will come back to it repeatedly and regularly.  But most winemakers don’t have the resources (or motivation) to do that kind of big picture app.

Instead, optimize your website

It makes more sense to make a mobile friendly website.  A good web site can be optimized for all mobile phone users.  It can be done pretty inexpensively.  I have some minor technical skills so I made a separate CSS for this website (heavily based on iPhonsta, a free wordpress theme).  But even if you know nothing about computers, you can hire somebody to make a mobile version of your site for less than 1000€.  The mobile site will also be a good testing ground where you can learn about your mobile users’ habits by watching your site analytics.

In the near future, I imagine mobile commerce will become a realistic option for wineries (Although we’ll face the same issue of universal scope… most consumers would rather be regular shoppers at amazon.com than shop at 28 separate publisher websites).  You can also imagine microlocation once HTML 5 kicks in.  Today, my website detects you’re using a cell phone and I show you my mobile site.  In the near future, I will see you’re using a cell phone and you’re within 20 kilometers of the vineyard so I’ll prominently display a map with directions on arriving at my vineyard.  Or I’ll see you’re on my vineyard and I’ll show you information about the parcel where you’re standing.  Or I’ll see you’re in the UK and I’ll prominently display links to Naked Wines where you can buy my wine online and have it delivered to your home.

The counterargument: Apps are awesome

Several people at Vin 2.0 pointed out that they have very successful applications.  Notably, le Guide Hachette, mentioned above, Intermarché, and idealwine.  While I make apps sound pretty terrible, they pointed out that the app store is a very well-viewed platform.  With the right kind of app and the right kind of PR/marketing, you can get your app featured in one of the app stores’ Top Lists.  And that’s a lot of exposure.  Again, I think this is an unrealistic endeavor for most winemakers.  It’s more appropriate for a universally-scoped guidebook or retailer (with a bit more budget than O’Vineyards).  But I do appreciate that there is this great opportunity to be seen by lots of eyeballs if you play the app game right so I should mention the argument here.

Piggybacking instead of developing your own app

Personally, I’d rather piggyback on already existing applications.  Take Wine Demon for instance.  It’s a customer review database for all wines available in the UK.  Anybody can leave a review and it should be like a tripadvisor for wine that also shows availability.    That’s a great tool that can drive my UK sales if I get good reviews.  Instead of developing my own application to do this (which will cost tons of time and money), I can just spend a tiny bit of time optimizing my presence on Wine Demon.  Encourage people who like my wines to use the app and it will effectively bring my average scores up.  I can make sure there are nice photos of my bottles on the site and all the information is correct and up to date.  This takes little time and I’ll probably reap more from this small expenditure than if I launched my own application that does basically the same thing.

Same with tripadvisor strategy.  Tripadvisor has become really important for hotels, lodging and tourism.  Now how do I react to that?  I don’t try to launch a competing website.  I just try to optimize my presence on the already existing site.

Actually, with the Grand Tasting right around the corner, I was very surprised to learn that he’d be presenting at Vin 2.0 on the same panel as me.  We bookended it.  I started with a talk on how a winemaker can use social media to build a brand, and he finished.  And this was a great boon because he was able to address a lot of what I said in his presentation.  Several parts of his speech are addressed to me, and I think that in some sense, I was a proxy for all the world’s winemakers making good wine and looking for solutions.

I said some things in my presentation that he could have taken the wrong way.  About the high cost of live events and conventional advertising.  But instead he acknowledged that he as a media man has the important job of finding the people who do value old school marketing while simultaneously placing himself in the arena that folks like me value.

He’s talking about his efforts to change the focus of the wine business.   So that everybody focuses on the drinkers instead of each segment catering to some other middle man without ever thinking about our consumers.

I enjoyed the presentation.

And a big thanks to Isabelle from Vizioz Communication who filmed Desseauve’s presentation and put it on youtube.

So let me take a short moment to say it was a blast.

The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is a grand old building with a huge subterranean portion that kept us warm while Paris was blanketed in snow.  It’s also full of hilarious chandeliers and lustres made of various bones, antlers and minerals.  Awesome place.

The food was delicious.  Seriously good.  Probably tied with the Grenache Symposium in that respect (although the GS lasted a few days so they probably still sit in first place).  And the wines at the tasting that night were interesting too.

Vinternet got a good group of people together.  It looked like there were a solid 60-70 people there from various parts of the wine business.  A lot of producers, which I liked.

Tragically, the interprofession was not very present and I think that these big picture organizational types are the ones who could have profited the most from the conference.  In other cases, you have folks like the Vignerons du Luberon, cooperateurs in that part of France.  They loved the presentations but when you ask them how these ideas will be implemented at the cave, they smile knowingly.  Their boss will shoot these web ideas down instantly.  Sad that the boss couldn’t be there.  We might have converted him or galvanized him but the point is there would have been an exchange.

But let’s not get all depressed.  There were some folks there with more instrumental organizational roles.  The national level of les Vignerons Indépendants were present and charming.  I liked their style and they were much more receptive than some of the VI folks who I have met on the departmental level here in Aude.

The Languedoc was well-represented.  At various points throughout the day I discovered I was sitting next to somebody from the region.  I finally got to see Olivier Lebaron (from Terre de Vin / Vitisphere) IRL.  And I met the directeur from Anne de Joyeuse who also had a wine involved in the live tasting that night.  And of course, I’ve already mentioned Midi-Vin’s coverage of the conference.

Other posts that touch on vin 2.0:

• Vindicateur – Is wine criticism turning into stand up comedy?
• Musigny – I don’t know who this is (maybe Grégoire Japiot?) but it seems they streamed the whole conference on their iPhone!!
• Wise Queen – something

Qu’est-ce qui a changé en 15 ans?

A top notch way to start the day. The panel started with James de Roany’s presentation of a study on where the wine world will be in 2050. Then Jacques Berthomeau, who is often given sole credit/blame for the CAP2010 report (often called the “Berthomeau report” or the “Bordeaux plan”), talked about how things have progressed since his commission dared write what they wrote. And then Bernard le Marois and Lionel Cuenca each delivered a testimony from a trade point of view. They talked about changes wine merchants have felt in the world of wine economics.

James de Roany from the CNCCEF (I’ll give a bottle of wine to the first person who can tell me what the hell that stands for without looking it up) spoke to us about a recent wine report that focused on where the wine world would be in the year 2050. Lots of interesting statistics. The numbers that seemed to impact the audience the most were related to how many non-drinkers France has now. A big untapped youthful market. There was also a neat section on economic projections for various countries that showed the US economy stagnating along with a lot of western Europe while China, India, Brazil and Russia all grow. This allows de Roany to suggest that winemakers should be focusing export efforts on countries with growing economies.

Berthomeau’s follow up was entertaining (the guy is a great story teller) and it was poignant as he is a main author of a report that dared to look forward (similar to the CNCCEF report we had just heard about). His team put together opinions as bold as “women are going to buy a lot of wine” and “maybe France shouldn’t try to directly compete with mass produced wines from the New World.” But Berthomeau didn’t just dwell on his glory days. He’s still got a lot of fire in his belly, and he exclaimed that there are still important lessons we have yet to learn.

For example, we need to think less about wine and more about grapes. Small fine wine producers are sort of in the minority around the world. When we talk about macro economics and global trends, it’s much more useful to think about grape production. Interesting stuff. Also, he reminded us that we need to get outside baseball. We’re too insular. A lot of online communication only reaches other wine professionals while the vast majority of the public stays in the dark. And this is one possible explanation for the growing number of nondrinkers in France. We are losing our base by playing omphaloskeptic games (staring at our belly buttons). He made a colorful comparison between American indie films and French indie films. The latter are frequently characterized as art house projects without plot or driving force. While American indie film still strives to reach an audience with a story (just less hollywood gloss). I don’t know if it’s a perfect comparison, but I like it.

A lot of Bernard le Marois’ presentation was lost on me as it dealt with more retail-oriented info. But he served up some juicy information about how he thinks the business has changed in the past 15 years and that is the topic of this panel after all.

Lionel from idealwine gave a great presentation. He’s very charismatic and acted well on his feet. I get the impression that Marois said a lot of the things Lionel was planning on saying. So instead of repeating that, he sort of flowed through his slides and talked about various projects that he’d seen rise and fall since idealwine entered the online retail game back in 2001. The company has an interesting story in that they’re one of the older online wine retailers in France (and the world) and they made it with remarkably little capital and a very small team.

Le Blogueur va-t-il détrôner Parker?

I enjoyed this panel but I feel like they largely ignored the main question: will bloggers dethrone Parker? Sylvain Dadé from SoWine moderated and he didn’t really get people to address the question… but he did get them to talk about interesting stuff. And the talkative Fabrice le Glatin never spoke for more than six or seven minutes at a time, so I’d say the moderator did an amazing job. ;D

Emmanuel Delmas and Fabrice le Glatin were both there as popular French bloggers. While neither totally addressed the main question of the panel, they showed their respective paths to blogging and their rise to popularity. And I’d say they were recognizant of the idea that no single blogger was going to dethrone anybody. Their blogs are just fun ways of interacting with a world they love: the world of wine.

Antonin from Vindicateur and Marc Roisin from VinoGusto also got to speak and they were representative of a new type of wine guide. Vindicateur is sort of like Rotten Tomatoes in that it weights scores of various professional critics along with amateur ratings to give agglomerated meta-scores to a wine. VinoGusto is a lot like snooth but less pitch-y and much French-er (I believe Marc is based out of Belgium). Marc came the closest to actually answering the question of whether somebody will dethrone parker. His answer was plainly No. The Wine Advocate and eRobertParker are both useful tools that add value to wines and make purchasing decisions easier for their readers. And they have a huge audience. He argued that blogs could also benefit the wine world in this way, but they don’t necessarily supercede any wine guide in existence. He also coyly made an argument that VinoGusto was just as good as the Wine Advocate and actually has a larger viewership than eRobertParker but he didn’t try to make this out to mean that he was gunning for Parker’s role.

Pourquoi changer? by Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary spoke about a lot of stuff. He gave a little intro and then went into Q&A. He has a sort of wandering story telling style that works very well for him. It was fun to watch. I guess the first thing I’ll say is that he defended Parker. In reference to the panel that preceded his, he mentioned that Parker never made a play to control the wine market in the US or anywhere. The dude just delivered an honest and helpful opinion about wines. And the real criminals, if there are any, are the retailers and suppliers, according to Gary. And I agree. If anybody gets credit or blame for the ubiquitous nature of Parker’s scores, it’s the gatekeepers who are heavily influenced by him and the shopowners who post WA scores on their shelf talkers instead of handselling wine. But this sort of blame game is not very constructive, so I won’t dwell on it. It was more of a passing moment in Gary’s myriad stories.

Another really interesting thing to me was that Gary had an out in his book deal. Although he signed a 10 book deal, there was a clause that said he was free of contractual obligations if he ever exceeded a certain amount of cumulative sales. And the real kicker is that he exceeded that amount with the very first book. Wow.

He also gave me a shout out while talking. He was arguing that people enjoy wine more if they know and like the winemaker and he used a couple examples from the audience including Beaucastel and O’Vineyards. Good company.

I really can’t do his speech justice as it was the longest and had no central unifying theme. It was instead an awesome collection of high-quality reflections. Watch a couple of the video recordings of his various keynotes and you will get a sense of what I mean.

La prise de parole sur les réseaux sociaux – la communication conversationnelle

This panel was more workshop-y and how-to than most of the other panels.

Mélanie Tarlant, maker of amazing brut Champagne, talked about how her family has approached the Internet… and I’d follow her advice as they’ve got like 10,000+ followers on facebook and a devoted network of fans who regularly share their story…some fans have even translated their website into various foreign languages. The thing that struck me most about Melanie’s presentation is her notion that the website/blog is really a secondary or tertiary tool. The short posts to twitter or the little uploads to facebook and youtube are just as crucial to their online presence.. if not more crucial. And I have to say that I believe that. I almost never go to their website proper. But I always check their updates on twitter and facebook. Intriguing. And she had picked out a few tweets, retweets, facebook shares, etc. to illustrate the point (all messages from the past few days). It was a pretty impressive case study that I’ll certainly steal from in the future when I’m trying to convince people to get online.

Miss Vicky presented her journey with a lot of humor and no pretense. She described how she very quickly became a reference in French wine communication thanks to a series of happy accidents and following her gut.

Francois Desperriers from BourgogneLive talked a bit about their short journey and its resounding success. And again, what strikes me most is this similar idea that the site is secondary to conversation tools like twitter and facebook. Francois’ updates on those “satelitte” sites receive much more feedback than the actual posts on the website proper. Another point of interest was when somebody in the audience brought up that-which-will-not-be-named “MONETIZATION”. Yes, tough question. Hope Francois and Aurelien figure out the answer to that.

Yair Haidu got up and did a good job presenting his project without sounding too pitchy. Although I’ve already seen the project presented several times so I’m less interested in this presentation. I instead key in on the more recent developments. The magazine elements… the API for bloggers…

Anyway, it’s clear that this panel has a lot of tools at their disposal for communicating online. And I’m glad they shared their knowledge. They also did a good job of referring to each other in their presentations. You can really see interactions between these people. Although sometimes it seemed like we were a little TOO interactive… the fine line between clever allusion and blatant mis en scene. But I’m being picky here. It was a great panel.

Développer ses ventes avec les réseaux sociaux – le e-Commerce de proximité

Philippe Hugon from Vinternet moderated my panel. I started things off with one of my wacky presentations about marketing wine online. Before the conference, I was a bit worried that I had too much ground to cover in 15 minutes… but people said a lot of what I wanted to say during the day and laid the foundation for my real arguments… so I got to be a bit of a provocateur, suggesting that folks stop blogging about their own wine. It was fun. And I talked a bit about other more conventional forms of marketing like salons and scores… and my fellow panelists took it the right way: in stride.

Jean David Camus followed me with a brief presentation on how Hospices de Beaunes has used the Internet to further the already outstanding brand of that location and its signature wine auction. It was good timing because my presentation was a bit big picture and Jean David presented some hard numbers to make it more concrete and real.

Rowan gave a great description of his business at Naked Wines, tailored to the audience to show them how Naked is one of the truest examples of a Web 2.0 business… where the clients really do have control in the way the company is run, what wines are imported, and how people interact on the site.

Thierry Desseauve had an excellent presentation which I felt was addressed directly at me. I was sort of worried that I might upset him with my talk, but he took it perfectly. Very tongue in cheek, responding excellently and showing that salons and ratings still have a very active role to play in wine alongside with all this cool Internet stuff. He’s an interesting figure because he and Bettane have both shown an amazing commitment to exploring the Internet while pursuing conventional wine journalism, wine criticism, and wine events. Their Grand Tasting is happening as I type the first draft of this document and I’m sure they’re having a great time.

Wine Library TV live episode

This was a WLTV episode where Gary tasted four wines. I don’t want to spoil it before he posts it on his site, but I will let you know that my wines do not appear. . . this time.

Ces nouvelles technologies qui changent notre rapport au vin

Okay, I’m gonna admit my memory is a bit fuzzy on the final presentations. And the camera was out of batteries… And I was nursing a glass of Chateau Palmer‘s 2000 Alter Ego… and so… I don’t really remember everything. My bad!

We heard a bit about Taste a Wine which is cool software to file away tasting notes. . . ZeVisit did an amazing presentation on a sort of virtual ebook app they made for the Beaujolais region.. and they told us about their plans for augmented reality apps where you hold your phone up and it describes whatever is in front of you. It makes me really jealous that we don’t have that kind of project brewing in my region. And the guys they were working with said they saw tripled sales and tens of thousands of downloads of the app since it went public. Pretty cool.

Grégoire Japiot and Miss Vicky talked about the VinoCamps. More on that soon.

And Philippe did a wrap up of the whole day, citing tons of different tools like Adegga, Cellartracker, tweetawine, everybody who was present, etc. It was pretty solid. I liked his slides.

—————-

Excuse the lack of videos. I left my computer’s power cord in Paris and cannot access the videos until that gets sent to me or somebody bails me out. :-ç

I took the approach that the Internet allows us to publish on any topic and allows us to communicate about things more interesting than our own wines… and if you use the Internet in the way that I describe, you get to make lots of buddies and extend your commercial network.   I think it went pretty well although I had to cut a lot out because of time constraints… hopefully it still packs a punch.

Let me know your thoughts.

I’ll share my thoughts on the entire conference soon and I hope to get more video up… also a big thanks to Vinternet for organizing it and for my fellow panelists for being super-interesting.

I’m trying to troubleshoot my blip.tv account which is misbehaving. This is the same video but embedded on another site that is giving me some trouble.

The tasting takes place at
20h00-22h00
December 8th, 2010

hashtag:
#levin20

facebook page

note: This post has been severely edited as I receive updates about the conference schedule

Vinternet just announced Vin 2.0, it’s big Web 2.0 conference in December.  Last I heard, I’m on a panel with Rowan Gormley, founder of Naked Wines, and Philippe Hugon, director at Vinternet.  Pretty fancy for a mere “vigneron junior“, title I was awarded at Paris Web.

And this conference should be a lot of fun.  Paris will be full of tech gurus for the ultra-famous “Le Web” conference, and it looks like Vin 2.0 managed to skim the best and brightest for their event.  Illustrious and hilarious alike, conference attendees will hear from Gary Vaynerchuk, James de Roamy, Berthomeau, Rowan Gormley, and so on and so on.

The speaking panels and conference audience is limited to about 100 attendees will be aimed at wine professionals who already know a bit about the Internet.  I think it costs like 600 Euros.

There will then be a big live wine tasting and also an episode of Wine Library TV.   The “live studio audience” is invitation only, but Vinternet invites everybody to register for free at the eventbrite page and follow along online.  There’s going to be some sort of interface where you’ll be able to interact with the people on the ground in Paris and it should be neat.  I for one am exceptionally curious to see how this agency runs an online tasting.  To register, scroll down to the bottom of the registration page.  It’s free.

I will be on the panel discussing…“Développer ses ventes avec les réseaux sociaux – le e-commerce de proximité” or “Developing sales through social networks – Making e-commerce feel personal” and they’ve encouraged a special focus on … “les opportunités business du web 2.0 notamment avec l’oenotourisme, les nouveaux modes de commercialisation dans un contexte communautaire etc.”   I’m putting together some of my slightly unconventional slides and I will share this with you all once its done. 

Oh and Vinternet gets a +2 common sense bonus for scheduling the conference in a period when winemakers can comfortably attend.  I’m definitely cutting back on the number of events we do around harvest/vinification next year.