The European Wine Bloggers’ Conference is full of really cool panels and seminars. SO many that you have to make some tough choices about which to see. I opted toward seeing panels that were not being filmed figuring I’d be able to enjoy the more mainstream ones from the comfort of my computer chair. And I got a wonderful surprise!
The online wine commerce seminar had three people talking about some of the different ways to monetize wine on the web. Evelyn Resnick, author of Wine Brands and wearer of the technicolor dreamcoat, Andre from Adegga, and Rowan from Naked Wines.
The nice surprise is that O’Vineyards was mentioned multiple times by multiple panelists! So this post is going to be a little narcissistic and personal, but you can watch the video and form your own nerdy academic impressions this time. Instead, I’m focusing this post on my emotional rollercoaster and the birth of a humorous comic book rivalry between me and another winemaker!
Yes, you heard right, this exciting post will reveal the secret origins of The Winemaker.
Evelyn talked about how few wineries try to communicate directly with their clients with the Internet. But she did include a slide about some winemakers who are doing it right and O’Vineyards was on the top of the list. What a nice surprise. 🙂 Very good to see Evelyn recognize my family’s work as she’s a point man (point person?) for wine branding.
And then Andre got up and talked about different solutions he’s found to monetize his wine-based social network, Adegga. I was enjoying hearing about some of the cool projects underway in Portugal. Adegga is doing event promotion and finding ways to feature wines on the site in a way that is a lot more engaging than a banner ad. And just as I was coming down from the high of being mentioned by Evelyn, Andre starts talking about AVIN codes.
Now I think AVIN codes are awesome. They’re like an ISBN number for wines. The dorky librarian in me thinks this is great and even indispensable for the cataloging of wine. One day, we will not understand how wines went so long without having numeric codes. And Andre mentions some wineries that have AVIN codes on their labels, and BOOM, O’Vineyards get mentioned there too. Look at that! You cannot talk about wine commerce online without mentioning O’Vineyards. Pretty flattering!
Now I see Rowan get up and I think to myself… oh boy… my importer.. I’m gonna get a hat trick. I’m going to get three references in a row on the same panel. I feel it in my bones. Rowan’s progressing through his slides, explaining his amazing business model. Naked Wines is devoted to real innovation. They constantly try out new ideas, they embrace their clients’ opinions, and they aren’t afraid to stumble now and then on their sprint down the road to greatness. And they have cultivated a clientelle that understands the way the company works. It’s all very cool to be a part of it. And then Rowan gets to it. A slide where he explains how Naked puts wine lovers (photo of pretty wine drinkers pops up) in touch with wine makers (DRUMROLL AS I AWAIT MY GLORIOUS PORTRAIT TO APPEAR)… JOCK HARVEY?! YOU’LL RUE THE DAY YOU CROSSED ME, JOCK HARVEY!!
haha, okay so Jock is a Naked Wines star. And he deserves it. I tasted three of his wines while touring the UK and he makes some really interesting wine with a sort of exuberance and joie de vivre that is typically new world. But I’m getting distracted…this post is about our newly born rivalry! The best kind of rivalry, one where the other person doesn’t even know I exist! Bwahahaha
In the coming weeks, events would unfold to fan the flames of this one-sided rivalry. But I don’t want to spoil it all at once. Part 2 in the saga will come soon enough.
So I went to ParisWeb, an amazing technology conference where some of the most gifted coders and technicians in France and from around the world came together to share massive amounts of information. I was given the fantastic opportunity to share some of my web insights and I thank everybody at the conference who sat through my presentation and laughed at my dumb jokes. And my gift to you and the world is that I have more dumb jokes.
Everybody’s starting to publish their thoughts on the various conferences and workshops. I wanted to do this as a video, but my internet connection is just too slow on the road. So imagine I’m reading this in a very excited way.
When I hear a presentation, there is a voice in my head that imitates the person presenting. This is direct access to that voice in my head. If it sounds like I’m belittling an orator, remember that it is just the limit of the voice in my head. All the presentations were actually super top notch. The troll is an annoying voice that is sometimes in my head and sometimes in somebody else’s head or sometimes on twitter. And if any of this seems mean in any way, I will gladly take parts down so just let me know. I really thought the world of all these presentations. I just don’t know how to begin repeating most of the brilliant stuff that was said.
Matt May
Is universal conception still a possibility? Here’s some brief history of web development. In the 90s the web was hideous. We cleaned it up, but now there are a lot of tools and new restrictions. Don’t think that you can just make a version for each piece of hardware. Try to make shit that looks good on everything. Building for ie is like building on a foundation of mud. But sometimes you have to build on mud. So uhh ya, Universality is still possible. Also, Flash is still relevant.
Troll: So I’m not the only American who got browbeat into speaking in French
Amelie Boucher
I tape people’s eyes open and force them to look at websites while I track their iris movements. It’s hilarious because they suck at using the websites we build. THEY REALLY SUCK AT IT A LOT. But it’s not their fault. It’s actually really obviously our job to make it way easier for people.
Troll: glad she isn’t tracking my eye movements
Christian Heilmann
[the voice in my head adopts a terrible impersonation of a German accent]
Ya, apps are so cool, but reading api documentation is like rolling around on a bed of rusty roofing nails so I just take the api and I make it do something awesome and then everybody knows that it’s awesome and wants to use it. Maybe you can be an evangelist too! We get lots of girls.
Troll: maybe I can be an evangelist too!
Jean Marc Hardy
With the omnipresence of video, it seems like people are pretty down on text. But note that text is actually pretty cool. It’s still like… pretty much everything. Even images are referenced through text. There’s some stuff coming out with color filters now or Google Goggles, but that’s still totally irrelevant compared to the power of text. Even ads tend to work better when they’re textual instead of more complicated banners. A picture is worth 1000 words but we still measure it in words. DEEP THOUGHTS, RIGHT?
Troll: You have reached your character limit
W3C guys
[I don’t remember the names of the guys who present next but they are awesome.]
In the future, dudes are as hilarious as us. In the future, Terminator bots use various elements of HTML5 to target and destroy you. In an alternate future, there is only one font: comic sans ms. In the future, we can use CSS without rhythm and we won’t attract the worm.
Troll: In the future, there are actually some things we will do with HTML5 that we can’t explain with kitschy 1980s film references.
Jake Archibald
Look, you might be thinking that clean, readable, and consistent reusable code is only sort of important. But the fact is that if you fuck this shit up, Patrick Stewart will hate you and little kids will watch documentaries about cocks with their mums. Also, I’m batman. Together, we are Captain Planet. And For the love of god, clean up your cock. Err. code. See how easy that was?
Troll: Nothing’s more reusable than historical phalluses
Olivier Thereaux
You don’t have to quit your day job to innovate. You can just do crazy shit at work like encourage people to talk around the water cooler. CRAAAYYYZY Or make people work through lunch. They love that and it makes them innovate like crazy. But not too crazy. Sometimes, you have cool ideas that end up becoming useful down the road. Like this app that tracks public bicycles and … yes, they are all way down the road and down the hill. We also made a tv channel get a social network but they hated it so maybe don’t make your clients do things they hate. But encourage people to have ideas. And make mistakes. And then use those mistakes.
Troll: Step 1: innovate. Step 3: profit!
That night we drank a lot, but everybody showed up the next day ready at like 8 AM to talk about fonts! WOOOOOO !!! FONTS!
David Rault
I know so much shit about the history of fonts! It is crazy! I love it. I talk about fonts like most french people talk about wine. This one is strong, and reminds us of stones and minerality. If I can be so freaking passionate about fonts, maybe you can start to give a crap? Also, we’ve got some cool new ways to use fonts online, but do they really work? What about intellectual property rights? Haven’t I done a pretty good job of reminding you that most of these fonts were crafted by some master artisan in a small shack in the 1930s? What gives you the right to just give away their fonts online?
Troll: Giramond is a MAN. HE HAS MOUTHS TO FEED.
Anne Sophie Fradier
How much do I love grids? You know how that last guy loved fonts? Well I am that much into grids and Macrotypographie and grids. Seriously, they’re awesome. I mean you can do other awesome-looking things without using any grids. But if you’re not super good at coming up with great-looking ideas, might I offer… oh I don’t know … a grid. How hard is it to make your websites look good? It’s not hard. Line things up properly, like… like they’re on some sort of grid. Don’t trick your reader into thinking ads are photos that have to do with the text. Sometimes it’s better to think of websites as scrolls than as books. Also, serif feet are bourgeois.
Troll: I’m terrified that she’s going to hate my wine labels
Dave Shae
Stop asking me about CSS Zen Garden! I’m a man DAMMIT! A man with interests and I have done tons of cool shit with my life! Look at this other website I made: It is awesome. And it degrades gracefully all the way to ie 6 or dudes who access the internet by banging rocks together near a fax machine. It’s BEAUTIFUL! Stop whining about when shit will be implemented and fully integrated. Just start exploring and making cooler websites. Also, is anybody else depressed that ie 9 looks so good? Who will our children disparage?
Troll: Will there be a CSS3 Zen Garden?
Ryan O’Connell
Hey I make wine. If you all laugh a couple times during this presentation I will feed you wine later. I am Russell Crowe. HAHAHA. Yes, you want wine? YOU WILL LAUGH. That is the secret to integrating into a new community. Also, don’t use the Internet just to stalk your exes on facebook. Use it to build a community. Also, WTF racists? WTF, Glenn Beck? I’m so hungry, can we eat now?
You forgot to put your website or twitter handle in your powerpoint.
Then we ate and I poured some wine and I totally missed a presentation where they were like “Hey don’t be a dick; make websites accessible.” Sorry I missed it, IBM dudes.
Paul Rouget
I am going to try to do like six live demos and expect maybe one of them to work. Oh snap, they are all working. You can follow the power point presentation from the comfort of your own laptop. I can ask you poll questions over the wifi. How does the future feel? I hope it feels good. Now look at me go. Dragging and dropping shit all over the place. Editing photos. Rendering 3D images. Modifying audio. And wait for it: it’s all happening user side. Ya I’m blowing your freaking mind. Cloud computing blah blah. This is so cool it actually deserves a buzzword like web 2.0
Troll: [somebody in the audience actually tried to crash the server by looping 800 join requests or something]
Stephanie Troeth
Would you give it a break with deliverables? Designing is just the product of design. Production is the produce of … … productivity … designers are the design of intelligent design… or something… Occasionally, consider the User Experience. Are you considering it yet? You should be. There are lots of ways to do it. You don’t have to attach lasers to your users’ retinae. Sometimes, it makes more sense to do paper prototyping or just drawing shit on blackboards.
Tippex’s interactive youtube ad has a lot of people talking. It’s a “choose your own adventure” ad with a lot of possibilities.
For those who haven’t seen the ad:
It seems like a video of a hunter who shoots a bear. But the hunter decides he doesn’t want to shoot the bear. He reaches out of the video’s frame and grabs a large Tippex white out dispenser from the ads on the side of the page, and he whites out the title of the video. He asks you, the viewer, to rewrite the story by typing in an action. And you can type in a lot of different stuff.
The ad:
This viral ad campaign from Tippex has a lot of geeks scraping their brains for strange phrases to type in.
I wanted to let you know that “A hunter drinks wine with a bear” does work. It leads to a video of the hunter and bear drunkenly stumbling around and peeing in the woods. There’s also an offcolor comment about the size of the bear’s junk. Weird, and funny.
The wine/drunk option:
I was catching up on my favorite webcomics last night and I read this beauty from Wondermark:
It’s not his drop-dead funniest work, but it is awesome and its appearance on the site illustrates a classic web comic phenomenon. He offhandedly made up an academic theory and then a bunch of nerds like me responded with a whole slew of already existing theories in the realms of mathematics, economics, philosophy.
So I thought I would chime in because I am an oenophile and a winemaker to boot. Hey, David Malki, did you know French winemakers read your comics?
Oh, by the way, this is one of those drunken run-away posts that ends up being way too long.
—
The comic
The comic’s heroine suggests that there is a behavioral quandary related to how a person manages a finite supply of a consumable object which increases in quality over time. The heroine further suggests that in the face of a difficult choice, it might be best to show a healthy amount of restraint.
Now, after being flooded with all that information, author David Malki asks:
Is the quality of improvement over time a necessary condition of the Oenophile’s Quandary? Is the question of enjoyment one that can be answered with economics, or should it be left to philosophy? What occasions have caused you to crack open a special bottle of whatever?
Aha, questions that I will take it upon myself to answer.
Is the quality of improvement over time a necessary condition of the Oenophile’s Quandary?
Complicated! Without the quality of improvement over time, the Oenophile’s Quandary is reduced to a simple expression of optimal stopping. However, if we accept the quality of improvement over time to be real, then the Oenophile’s Quandary becomes a totally different problem.
Let’s explain why everybody is trying to compare the Oenophile’s Quandary to the Fussy Suitor Problem. There are similarities but the fact is that wine is nothing like suitors. In the Fussy Suitor problem, you can only pick one person to marry. But there are so many candidates for marriage that you worry you will settle on the wrong one. That’s why it’s interesting for the fussy suitor to study optimal stopping. The Fussy Suitor needs to study when it is most advantageous to stop shopping and settle on a suitor, parking place, dice roll, etc.
If you want to translate the Oenophile’s dilemma in terms of stopping problems like the fussy suitor, you have to realize that the bottles are not the suitors. Oenophiles know exactly what their bottles are at the start of the game. Whereas a part of the stopping problem is that you don’t know if there will be a better suitor, parking place, dice roll, etc. later on. Also, oenophiles can eventually consume all the bottles whereas the suitor has to stop once they’ve made a selection. Hell, the oenophile even has the option of drinking all their wine at once. Needless to say, this is not an option to the fussy suitors who will be breaking a lot of sodomy and decency laws if they try. 😀
If optimal stopping applies to the oenophile’s quandary, it’s because the oenophile must settle on a date to consume each bottle. In that sense, each bottle has a stopping problem where the oenophile must decide to wait for a better occasion to drink the wine. So really, you’re not choosing wines. You’re choosing dates. And the quality of the wine has very little to do with the enjoyment. It’s more the context in which you consume the wine. In this sense, the quality of improvement over time is less relevant and the oenophile’s quandary is reduced to an expression of optimal stopping. Is quality of improvement over time a necessary condition? No. You can lose quality of improvment over time and you’ll still have a basic stopping problem because some days will be better than others for drinking that special bottle.
On the other hand, if you accept that a wine can get better over time (and many wines do, for a certain span of time), then the Oenophile’s Quandary is in no way an expression of optimal stopping. You see, in optimal stopping, the sequence of choices (of suitors, parking places, etc) must be random or at least unknown. If the fussy suitor knows that each suitor will be better than the last, it becomes an exercise in dating as many people as possible in quick succession and then just marrying because you’re so tired of working your way up the pyramid of suitors. If you know that the wine gets better every day, then the mathematician says “This is not a problem of optimal stopping at all. Just wait til the very last minute of your life when the wines will be at their best and drink all the bottles at once.”
Which brings us to the next question:
Is the question of enjoyment one that can be answered with economics, or should it be left to philosophy?
A lot of people will say that economics is the study of enjoyment, or at least the study of choices which are driven by enjoyment and desire. But for every cool dilemma and thought experiment economists contrive to make us think about our desires and our choices, it is important to remember that alcohol deserves a special thought experiment all on its own.
If we allow economists to answer these questions, we need to remember the complex nature of alcohol consumption, which involves a special kind of diminishing return. Economists will quickly admit that the richer you are, the less you can derive from each additional dollar earned. But their dilemmas rarely take into account that one more dollar will make you vomit all over Monty Hall‘s shoes and you’ll wake up hung over next to a goat and a huge orange door with the number three on it. And you won’t understand anything. And you’ll want to know why that goat is being so loud.
So perhaps the solution is to realize that wine requires us to balance two important factors: the quality of the wine and the context in which we drink. The Oenophile with only one case of wine left must balance the optimal stopping decision about the special occasions to drink with the Oenophile’s Quandary of the wine getting better and better. Don’t go too extreme in either direction as you don’t want to be sick as you guzzle all the wine or be a teetotaller who will only toast to celebrate the end of the world.
What occasions have caused you to crack open a special bottle of whatever?
Aha! I knew this moment would come. You’re asking me to use personal experience to demonstrate that balance I was just talking about. Well I have an interesting answer.
While I advocate a reasoned route avoiding extremes of saving all your wine or binge drinking all of it, I also advocate a bit of epicureanism.
Let’s put our mathematician hat back on to see if we can make this work. Oenophiles can’t drink all of their wine immediately because they won’t have any bottles for future special occasions. But oenophiles shouldn’t wait too long lest they miss out on several opportunities. The whole problem is really based on a scarcity of time and wine. Well it’s tough to control the amount of time we have on earth, but we can definitely increase the amount of wine we own. Increase the amount of wine in the oenophile’s collection and the quandary becomes negligble.
That’s why I became a winemaker. I make 50,000 bottles of wine each year. WAY more than I can drink even if I invite all of my friends to every semi-special occasion for the rest of my life.
What occasions have caused me to crack open a special bottle of wine? Is waking up an occasion? It is now.
Additional Notes:
Another expression of optimal stopping that an oenophile might face is the act of shopping for a special bottle. Let’s say the oenophile has a big celebration coming up and has a small budget to buy a very special bottle. He keeps an eye on online auctions. Each time a special bottle comes up, he has to decide whether he will buy that one or wait a little longer to see if a better special bottle comes along. I think that is a more classic presentation of optimal stopping.
—
You can argue that the oenophile is uncertain of how each bottle will age, and that is reasonable. Since we don’t know when a wine peaks or even if its spoiled, the decision becomes slightly more random. But it’s not sooo random that it becomes an expression of optimal stopping. You can have a decent idea of the quality of the bottle without opening it; ESPECIALLY in the case of oenophiles who tend to buy a whole case of that special bottle and check in by drinking one every few years, decades, or whatever.
—
I would object to using the link from Professional Friends of Wine regarding the Myth of Wine Aging to disprove the oenophile’s quandary. While “most wine” in terms of volume does not age well, a huge amount of wine still does benefit from aging. And the article is addressed to “directed to the average consumer, that sometime-wine-drinker whose contact with wine is mostly on special occasions and holidays” while the Oenophile’s Quandary relates specifically to Oenophiles. I’m pretty sure the grandparents of the heroine of our comic know that oenophiles run into age-able wines with a great frequency than the “sometimes-wine-drinker”.
You might recall my previous delight at discovering that there is an entire association of French towns with rude or silly names. And I tried to add to the wonderment of that discovery by sharing my favorite Languedoc-Roussillon town names like Saint Arnac (saint ripoff) and Conas (which sounds just like Connasse since we often pronounce S at the end of words in the south).
What I didn’t realize is that there was a wine cooperative in Saint Arnac. According to a friend who runs that Minervois Coop blog, the unfortunately named winery was founded in 1931. And the records he found show that they produced 2,594 hectolitres of “Corbières supérieurs du Roussillon” [sic]. Appropriate for a homophone of arnaque? Of course, that name isn’t SOOO wacky since the Corbieres do extend a little over the border between the Pyrenees Orientales and l’Aude. So it’s conceivable that these guys weren’t a bunch of arnaquers.
Either way, Saint Ripoff is no longer in business. The buildings have been taken over by a new association of winemakers but they rather intelligently chose to change the name to La Preceptorie de Centernach. Centernach doesn’t sound nearly as bad as Saint Arnac. Oh and here’s a cool flickr stream I found with a lot of photos of the harvest at La Preceptorie de Centernach.
M6 Ran a historical farce short called Kaamelott recently. Like a French version of Black Adder or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I just stumbled across this video on the French winemaker blog from Chateau des Bachelards. Some of these characters seem very familiar to me, blaming the poor quality of their wine on a crise paysane and the terroir.
Well, this means I get to expand my list of favorite town names. Maybe we should do a wine tasting of wines that come from burlesque villages.
;D
Most of the following aren’t so much naughty as they are slightly pejorative or just silly-sounding. And they’re all in the Languedoc Roussillon:
Bourg-Madame (Get the Mrs. drunk)
Saint-Arnac (Saint Ripoff)
Saint Jean de Cuculles (just naughty-sounding)
Conas (since we pronounce the S’s at the end of words, bitch)
Fourtou (an out of the way place where you put all your crap)
Les Cassés (the broken ones)
Getting into the neighboring region of Midi-Pyrenées, we get a little naughtier:
Seix
Salau
Arnac-sur-Dourdou
Cornus
Oô
Condom
Montcuq
Belbèse
I was wondering if there’s a smelling contest that rates how well people can recognize and match smells to each other. And I did some research and most of the competitions I found are about being smelly.
So ya, no more of those. Let’s make a smellER contest.
If you are the kind of nerd who is already thinking of scientifically accurate ways of judging a person’s olfactory capabilities without being overly reliant on language, you should be emailing me. I will want help organizing this.
If you are the kind of nerd who is already pondering about the sociological implications of the contest, you too should email me.
If you are a member of a group that gets together and smells things, let me know that you exist. As a matter of fact, this might be a smarter place to start. Let’s just make a super smellers club.
Super Smellers When we smell pears, it’s like we smell a thousand pears.
So withoutfurther ado, I am founding the first chapter of the Languedoc Roussillon Super Smellers. If you would like to start a chapter of the Super Smellers in YOUR community, email Ryan O’Connell today.
If you would like to join a chapter of the Super Smellers, that will also be done by email until I get a decent site up and running. And don’t tell me that this is a bad idea because I already bought the domain name. supersmellers.com COMING SOON.
How to find us
Domaine O’Vineyards, located in the North Arrondissement of Carcassonne, is just minutes from the Carcassonne train station, the Medieval City, and the Carcassonne Airport.
GPS coordinates: 43.259622, 2.340387
O’Vineyards
Wine, Dine, Relax at our Boutique Vineyard
Unique thing to do in Carcassonne
Wine Cellar. Winery Visits. Wine Tasting.
Wine & Food Pairing
North Arrondissement of Carcassonne
885 Avenue de la Montagne Noire
11620 Villemoustaussou, France
Tel: +33(0) 630 189 910
Best by GPS.
Follow the signs to Mazamet/ Villemoustaussou using the D118. At the end of the last straight part of D118, you will come to a roundabout with the Dyneff gas station.
Take the exit towards Pennautier. Continue 500m to a small roundabout and go straight over.
Look out for the second road on your right, Avenue des Cévennes which curves up hill (about 1km) to Avenue de la Montagne Noire on the left.
At the last juction, bear left. the road sign “Ave de la Montagne Noire” (confusing as it seems to show a right turn)
After another 500m you will see our red brick color building in the middle of the vines.
You might recall my previous delight at discovering that there is an 
