At Vinisud, I had the pleasure of introducing an alternative wine tasting for the Outsiders.

The Alternative Tasting

Basically, we just did a fun wine tasting where we encouraged people to describe our wines with images that Louise Hurren had picked out for our tasting booklet.  Forcing people to think about a wine with images instead of words gets them to think outside the box instead of falling back on the oft repeated tasting note vocab like rich, balanced, and a laundry list of fruit.

Furthermore, it empowers novice drinkers to review wines without worrying that they’re using the wrong word.  The experts can make us feel inadequate about language sometimes, but they pretty much have no dominion in the land of photo reviews.

Why was this tasting on the Pavillion 2.0 space?

This tasting was held at the Internet space of Vinisud and there’s a good reason for that!  The reason for the prominence of the tasting note is largely grounded in the limitations of print media.  Limited space means we talk in pure descriptors without any conjugation.  But the Internet doesn’t pose the same challenge.  We can have infinite words and infinite photos in full color.  And heck we can even use moving pictures, music, and other media that were previously impossible to include in printed wine journalism.  The Internet provides us with a path to escape the tyranny of the tasting note!

So I did a little presentation on this topic to get everybody thinking outside the box before we got to drinking outside the box:

All the slides are available on slideshare with relevant links to related articles in the penultimate slide.

Results

I’d say everybody had a blast.  Including a lot of wine journalists (showing once again that even they can be fed up with tasting note format).  I originally wanted to do a tasting with music and video and all sorts of crazy stuff.  Thankfully, our group’s organizer Louise had the good sense to rein it in and focus on photos.

We had less than an hour to run the event so it was good to keep it simple and focused.  We got insanely good feedback about the event and it has already spawned several requests for similarly styled “alternative tastings”.  We also got several good ideas from our tasters who offered up ways to evolve the program and make it even more interesting.  Doing physical touchy feely tastings, doing musical tastings, tasting in darkness, drawings instead of photos, and so on.

In terms of tasting notes, I think we all received a wide range of notes.  I got everything from Lego man to Dutch masters.  I got several of the He/She picture that makes me wonder if I shouldn’t change my look.  Some of the outsiders noted that certain age groups tended to pick certain pictures (the more daring ones) more frequently than other demographics.  I’m sure we’ll compile more on this at our next meeting.

Everybody had fun tasting and I think this sort of event gets people to think and talk about wine in a new and stimulating way without feeling overly stuffy or pretentious.  A success!

Francois Druel spoke at the Université de la Vigne et du Vin in 2011 in Ferrals-les-Corbieres.  This is a synopsis of his talk and my reaction to what he’s saying.  This is one post in an ongoing series about the Universite de la Vigne et du Vin.

Francois introduced himself as a consultant who has been working on the Internet since before the web existed.  He gave a very brief glimpse of a few simple tools and included some of the usual impressive statistics.  Over x-hundred messages per second on Twitter, and if Facebook were a country it would have the third largest population on earth, that type of thing.

He showed us a graph of the diffusion of innovation curve.  He talked about how mobile was now the #1 way to access the Inernet.

I was hoping that this presentation would be an amazing call to action that inspires winemakers to use free online tools to communicate their stories with the entire world.  I’m afraid I came with the wrong expectations.

Francois Druel explained there were three possible strategies (see my comments on oversimplification during Rigaux’s talk).   Branding, Dialogue and Prospection.  Here is a summary according to my notes on Druel’s talk:

Branding is about communication and instant recognition. And brands tend to be community-owned.  Once you put a brand out there, it will be co-opted and that’s a powerful tool.

Dialogue is about listening to what’s being said, involving clients in the conversation, and hoping that your efforts go viral (?).

Prospection is about presales, creating buzz, communication (I thought that was for Branding?) and it is generally less suited to wine.  He cites examples like every time a new generation of iPhone comes out, there are months of speculation, waiting in lines, etc.

He has a slide about the wisdom of crowds.  Another slide about information sharing, using coyote as a prime example of how quickly good products spread on the web.

So then he did a “case study” of Chateau Leoube.  Unfortunately, I guess he was pressed for time because he didn’t really get to conclude this.  He explained Leoube’s goals to triple sales by making good wine, developing their brand, and doing premium branding.  But I don’t really know which online efforts resulted in the tripled sales.  Or any metrics they used to know how much of it was traced to their internet efforts as opposed to their conventional efforts.  Or even the nature of the internet effort according to Druel’s three options.  Was it branding, dialogue or prospection (Francois’ own methodology?).  I left this talk a little confused.  Which is a shame since you know I get excited about this subject.

At the same time, it should be mentioned that Francois has a difficult job.  A lot of people in the audience have no idea what he’s talking about and the sort of news headline statistics like the ones I mentioned above might be the best way of getting people interested.  So he can’t appeal to everybody in the room.

But you know it might have been much more effective to just look at a few individual case studies from the region and show what they do online.  Obviously, I’d like to flatter myself and say that I’m a decent example.  He could talk about other wineries that use the Internet effectively in the region.  Or alternatively, if you want to stick to delivering statistics, at least make them relevant to wine.  Does that make sense?  It’s obviously impressive that tons of tweets go out every second.  Maybe it’s more impressive to mention how many specifically mention a wine brand name each day?

Maybe I’m too harsh because I’m jealous!  I wish I could have spoken to a room full of winemakers and shared my hopes and dreams.  Of a region united and represented online!  Think if just 1 percent of our winemakers and grape growers wrote something online once a week, we’d flood the Internet with Languedoc branding.  We’re such a big region that we could accomplish nearly anything with a little collective effort.

Oh, incidentally, Chateau Leoube, the case study in this talk, is in fact using a lot of internet tools.  Follow them on Twitter for constant updates about their own wines.  Or get your groove on to youtube videos about the domaine:

Yes, the internet is a marvelous thing.

 

Jacques Berthomeau spoke at the Université de la Vigne et du Vin in 2011 in Ferrals les Corbieres.  This is a synopsis of his talk and my reaction to what he’s saying.  This is one post in an ongoing series about the Universite de la Vigne et du Vin.

In his typical way, Berthomeau presents a rambling but cohesive message about the opportunities the Internet provides to winemakers and wine drinkers alike.  It’s hard to take notes or outline this speaking style so just consult the video above if you want the most accurate portrayal of his talk.

If you’re short on time, here are some notes:

Starting with a joke about not being a tribun (somebody who gets on their soapbox frequently) like everybody from the Languedoc, Berthomeau sets the stage for a talk about identity.  Where is Berthomeau from?  And who is he?  For many people in the wine business, he’s the author of a famous report on French wine that was published about 10 years ago.  Often times, people talk about “le Rapport Berthomeau” which drives the man to say “My first name isn’t Rapport”.  So for many people, he’s just this old report commissioned by the ministry of agriculutre.  This report made him pretty unpopular because he and his colleagues made crazy claims like “women will drink wine too” and “we should adapt our communication and branding to new export markets”.

The Ministry pulled him off of all wine related projects, stuck him in a closet and put his report on a back catalog of some obsucre website on this thing called Internet.  Jacques started a blog and discovered that the closet he’d been placed in actually had a pretty far reach.

He goes on in his talk to explain that his blog works because he doesn’t cater to the wine elite.  He just tells fun stories peripherally related to wine, and lots of people want that.  People who aren’t obsessed with wine and who have no idea what mineralité means.

Berthomeau then agrees with a point in Juarez’s talk about how some winemakers will have to be at the head of the charge to bring notoriety to the Languedoc.  Previously in his presentation, he speaks about Embres & Castelmaure.  Toward the end, he mentions me and my little camera (very flattering).  And I would like to think I’m one of the lucky ones who carries the burden of representing this region to uninitiated (read: normal) wine drinkers.

There’s a digression about how wine drinking habits are shifting.  Even if French people drink less wine than they used to, there are different drinkers now that provide new opportunities.  Women.  People getting off of work and having a glass at a cafe to relax.  These ideas weren’t that common twenty years ago.  Wine has new ways of infiltrating our daily routines and it’s presumably up to the aforementioned leading voices to make sure that people think of our region when they’re looking for wine.

Berthomeau takes a moment to address the previous talks during the day.  Namely, noting that the new world didn’t invent industrialized or branded wine.  The French have been doing it for a while.  He talks about how young drinkers or new drinkers often start with simpler wines.  But he also mentions that even children are intelligent.  You often see kids playing incredibly complicated games or memorizing entire pantheons of pokemon or superpowers, so complexity in and of itself isn’t intimidating to people.  But wine has to capture the imagination before people are willing to learn all the complexities.

The Internet, to Berthomeau, is a cheap way to communicate with the grand publique and capture their imagination in a way that a Paris Metro billboard can never replace.  His advice quoted from Michel-Édouard Leclerc, “Durez, durez, durez”.  Tell your stories, create original content, be happy, be colorful, and little by little you’ll leave the closed community of wine professionals to reach real drinkers!

So don’t just listen.  Speak up!  If you’ve got an issue and you don’t want to start your own website, ask Berthomeau to publish your thoughts on his website, an espace libre!

This is my summary of the conference speeches I heard at Vin 2.0, the conference on wine and the Internet organized by Vinternet. It was a good group with some solid presentations. The organizers motivated a lot of people who don’t normally speak in public, and it’s interesting to see your friends on stage for the first time. And a keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk is always worth sitting in on. I’m really looking forward to his new book.

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’m very excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at Paris Web 2010 in mid-October.  We’ll be talking about my experiences with coming to the south of France as an outsider and how I simultaneously used the Internet to highlight that difference (separate myself intentionally from other winemakers) and also to integrate myself (truly becoming part of the winemaking community in the Languedoc).

On a related note, this presentation will also discuss the huge differences between how Parisians use the Internet and how country bumpkins like me use the Internet.  This is related to a Palate Press article that will be published soon on how wineries have had trouble incorporating a lot of web 2.0 technology because of our rural settings.

The presentation will also allude to various bits of pop culture like Louise Hurren’s Outsider Tasting, the Survive France Network, Dave Sedaris, David Lebovitz, and Love That Languedoc (naturally).

I’m so excited. My biggest, most serious audience since my long lost courtroom days (I wasn’t on the stand, for those who think the worst of me. :D)

— also, adding the blog to AvenueEmpire EAVB_XCFFXPCMZV —

VinoCamp Paris:séance sur l’oenotourisme. Je reviendrai d’une manière un peu plus éditoriale avec mes opinions sur ce qui a été dit. Mais pour l’instant, je voulais au moins télécharger l’enregistrement inédit de la discussion qui a eu lieu à VinoCamp Paris sur l’oenotourisme et le tourisme à distance / la réalité augmentée.

Partie 1 de “Oenotourisme, l’Internet et la réalite augmentée”:

Partie 2 de “Oenotourisme, l’Internet et la réalite augmentée”:

Merci à tous les participants, et spécialement à ceux qui m’ont aidé à déplacer la camera pendant toute la séance.

More coverage of VinoCamp Paris:

• Session on Winery Interaction
• Session on Geolocalisation and cartography

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”…………