Thanks, Frankie.

Whenever you say what you pair the food with, my mouth starts to water.  You guys are doing it right!  Drinking this wine with goooood food.  The only time you have to put your glass down is to open another bottle! ;D

 

 

Cindy has made us very happy.  We just love to hear when people enjoy the work we put into these wines.  Lots of concentration and extraction to get those rich, flavourful wines!  She used LOVELY, love, and loved!  LOVE LOVE LOVE it. 🙂  So good she got a whole other case.  Good times.  We’re very happy that this is her kind of wine.

 

 

Hats off to another customer for an epicly well-written wine review. We love to hear that our wines are easy to drink… perhaps a little TOO easy!! 😀

 

Haha, love hearing this sort of review.  Not only does John enjoy the wine, he disses the silly name, and he shared the bottle with friends!  That’s always the best news.  We like it when people like the wine.  We LOVE it when they share the wine with others!

O’Vineyards: pairs well with friendship.  That’s a great tagline … sort of has an alcoholic carebear vibe to it.

On the 4th of July, I returned from the UK (a daring reenactment of American Independence Day ;D). I had just completed a massive UK wine tour with my UK importer Naked Wines. Looking back, I can’t believe how much fun it was.

Fun, laid back tastings

One important element of the fun is that Naked Wines doesn’t take itself too seriously. Customers could pour their own glasses of wine. This might seem like a small thing, but it’s really important. All too often, tastings get this artificial feeling where winemakers or professionals stand on one side of the table and tasters stand on the other side. This artificial divide really dampens the mood. Plus I always feel like I’m in a zoo, being stared at. And tasters often feel that they are asking permission for the wine.
I much prefer the free and open tasting where everybody’s equal. Anybody can pour a bottle. And winemakers can switch to the other side of the table if we so desire!

Innovative Formats & Weird locations

We also had fun doing weird tastings. I’ve talked about our guerilla pop up wine tastings before.  The general idea is to play with the wine tasting format and spice it up.  We try to make wine less scary and more fun while bringing the delicious fruits of our labor to as many new markets as possible.

And we also had some wacky locations like the Royal Arms Museum. I still think it’s a miracle nobody tried to get on a horse or swing a halberd at a winemaker.

Meeting Angels & Vineshare Owners

Another crucial part of the tour was meeting Angels.  O’Vineyards couldn’t exist if it weren’t for all the support of the Naked Wines Angels.  And we only know a few of them (the more talkative ones).  This tour was an opportunity to meet several hundred angels whose contributions allow me to continue making wine!

Some of the angel encounters were especially exciting since we just launched our new vineyard share program.  100 Angels have rented vines near mine and are paying me to take care of the parcel and make their wines.  I got to meet about a dozen of these angels in person for the first time. 🙂

There was always this terrifying moment when the investor first tasted my wine.  Thankfully, they all loved it!  And here’s a video commentary from one of the angels/investors who had just met me for the first time.

Meeting other winemakers

I got to meet a lot of other winemakers during the tour too.  I honestly expected more violence and argument between the winemakers.  But they’re all really great people to hang out with.  It’s clear that Naked Wines hires based on personality as well as quality of wine.  And that makes sense because ultimately, we all have to be able to interface with their clients on the website’s social network as well as in tastings like these!

It’s also cool to taste so many of the most popular wines on the site.  It gives me real perspective into what angels love.  And that helps inform my winemaking decisions at the vineyard.

Being Part of a Movement

Whenever I see something like this photo of some of the dadaists and constructivists in the early twentieth century all meeting together to take goofy photos… I think it must have been crazy to live at that time. To be surrounded by all that talent and energy.

Toward the end of tour, as all the winemakers and naked staff sat around the dinner table, I felt like I was living in one of those special moments. Like I’m part of a really important movement. All I’m doing is making wine, but I belong to this big group of people who might be changing the way the wine and food world work. I don’t know how important it really is, but it sure feels important.

It feels great.

This post is about a “popup” wine tasting that took place during my UK Tour with Naked Wines in 2011.

What is a pop up tasting?

Whereas most wine tastings are organized weeks or months ahead of time, popups are spontaneous and ephemeral.

Organizers of conventional tastings will spend a lot of energy picking the perfect venue, getting the word out, finding a way to get the wine to the venue, organizing for tables and glasses and spitoons, and a lot of other work.  Pop up tastings however are more guerilla-styled.  They just pop up out of nowhere in the middle of workplaces, parks, and other public places.

How spontaneous is a pop up tasting?

They are usually organized quickly and they are always announced at the last minute.  Like a flash mob with wine.

Our first pop up wine tasting was organized on the bus ride from London to Bristol.  Derek from Naked Wines put out a tweet asking who would be up for a little wine tasting in the afternoon. Less than 140 characters later, we had a cool venue on the line.

It was really kitschy.  We had the tasting outside a couple of retro Airstream campers that had been outfitted to serve food and drinks on the astroturf outside this office park in the creative district of Bristol.

Lots of design firms, communication agencies, and “new media” types.  It’s the perfect setting for this kind of guerilla tasting.

Why pop ups are a good idea?

On one level, they just make good sense because they’re low cost, low investment, and high payout.  You have to realize we were already in Bristol.  We already had the wine.  We had the glasses.  We had the winemakers.  And we have freetime in the afternoon.  So with a couple of tweets and a few phone calls, we get a very fun event with a high level of engagement from the participants.

On another level, popup tastings are just super fun and bring back a feeling of flight and fancy to the wine world which sometimes takes itself too seriously.  Wine tastings can appear to be too formal and a bit pretentious.  Nothing removes the pretense like a couple young guys running around an aluminum caravan shouting “Afternoon wine tasting!”  “Surprise wine tasting!”

After the success of my 2010 UK Villages Tour, I’m really looking forward to the much grander scale of the 2011 Naked Wines Tour, a series of ten wine tastings around different cities in the UK.

Over 20 independent winemakers, funded by online wine retailer Naked Wines, are flying over to the UK at the end of June to thank and meet their customers. As part of a UK-wide Tasting Tour, covering eight different cities in a week, the winemakers will showcase over 100 wines which were made possible through Naked Angel funding.

So I’ll be meeting a lot of the people who drink my wines!  It should be a whole lot of fun.

Here’s a link to an article about the wine tasting tour.

The Tasting Tour itinerary:

• Norwich 25th June: The Kings Centre, King Street, Norwich NR1 1PH.
• Brighton 26th June: The Hilton Metropole Hotel, Kings Road East, Sussex, Brighton, BN1 2FU.
• London 27th June: One Alfred Place, 1 Alfred Place, London, WC1E 7EB.
• Bristol 28th June: Brunel’s Old Station, Clock Tower Yard, Temple Meads, Bristol, BS1 6QH.
• Birmingham 29th June: Maple House, 150 Corporation Street, Birmingham, B4 6TB.
• Manchester 30th June: The Studio, 51 Lever Street, Manchester, M1 1FN
• Leeds 1st July: Royal Armouries Museum, War Gallery, Armouries Drive, Leeds, LS10 1LT
• Edinburgh 2nd July: Our Dynamic Earth, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AS

Every day, we’ll also be doing a popup tasting at lunch time, but you’ll have to follow the chatter on twitter and the like (or get lucky) to discover those. 🙂

See you soon, UK wine drinkers! 🙂

This post belongs to an ongoing series about the Naked MarketPlace, a website that allows any winemaker to pitch wines to the UK market

Another big topic of discussion regarding the Naked Marketplace is how it compares to the Advanced Booking system it replaced.

How Advanced Booking Worked

Naked Wines used to offer one special advanced booking deal at a time.  This would be an opportunity similar to wine futures where customers bought wine that hadn’t even been bottled yet.  Sometimes, they bought wine before it had even been picked.

By buying very early, customers would receive preferential pricing.  The longer they waited, the more the price went up.  Sort of like booking RyanAir flights. 😀

The adjacent screenshot shows what a typical offer interface looked like.

Note that the price in the screenshot is identical for the vine, winery and bottle pricing.  This just means that the wine had already been bottled when the offer went live on the website, so the earliest you could buy was in bottle.  Sorry I couldn’t find a better example in my archives!

Naked Marketplace Similarities

The new MarketPlace system works on a similar concept since winemakers are pitching their wines before the bottles even enter the UK (or before Naked has committed to buying the bottles for that matter).   There’s a similar sense of delayed gratification.  If you commit your money a few weeks ahead of time, you get the wine at a discounted price. And this is rooted in the similar basis of commiting to buying a wine early on to let the winemaker save on the cost of production, bottling, storage and shipping.

There are also smaller technical similarities that will only make sense to people who are used to the NW interface (eg no cashback on advanced bookings, only one case per customer, advanced booking cases can’t be grouped with other orders)

Naked Marketplace Differences

There are a host of differences in the innovative new system too.  Otherwise it wouldn’t be very innovative! 😀

The biggest source of conversation I’ve seen has been this notion that the Marketplace deals don’t always succeed.  In the old Advanced Booking system, if you made a bid, you knew you’d get your case at the price you bid.  Because even if hardly anybody bought the advanced booking, Naked would be able to sell the wine at full price once the shipment arrived.  On the marketplace, if people don’t buy enough wine to hit the winemaker’s minimum quantity, then the deal is cancelled and bids are refunded.  Some people find this is disappointing or frustrating compared to the old system where a bid meant you were getting your wine.

There’s a reason for the system to work this way though.  Customers are dealing directly with winemakers to try to broker a deal.  If the winemaker and angels fail to drive enough support for a wine, that’s life.

And honestly, the results speak for themselves.  Despite the fact that some people are resisting the change, a look at the list of successful purchases on the MarketPlace shows they’ve sold 8916 bottles since the marketplace launched its first deals on the 17th of May (30 days ago).

In the old advanced booking system you had one deal at a time.  And those deals often lasted three weeks on the site.  Often deals were just for a couple hundred cases (as they are on marketplace as well).  That means the advanced booking system would often take two or three weeks to move just 600-1200 bottles.  The marketplace clearly offers more selection.

Gatekeeper versus Platform

Instead of acting as a gatekeeper who selects which deal to feature on the advanced booking section of the site, Naked Wines now allows all the world’s winemakers to simultaneously make offers in the marketplace.  Some people might argue that having more choice is bad, but they can always go to the other section of the site and buy one of the pre-mixed cases that have been selected by Naked Wines or personalities like Jamie Oliver.

I personally love the idea of a wine importer stepping back and giving the market a chance to decide to bring in new wines.

There are hundreds of gatekeepers in the wine business.  Critics, importers, and so on.  But there are virtually no opportunities like this one that are a truly open platform anybody can use to promote their wines in the country.

Sure the site mechanics are a little more sophisticated and therefore complicated.  And auctions are more complicated than retail shops, but there are benefits to auctions that make the model attractive for a lot of people.  Since the wine business is entirely too legislated and closed, it can benefit tremendously from this kind of open platform system.

And the usual suspects at naked wines (winemakers who have already established a fan base) no longer have to wait and hope that their wines go up on advanced booking.  We can choose to offer a special discount whenever we want.  And maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but customers could start reclaiming certain winemakers or wines too.  If enough people posted on my wall asking for a certain wine to come back, I would definitely pitch it on the marketplace.

Innovation is a bumpy road

I know the new system is ruffling some feathers, but I think the sales show that a lot of people are enjoying the new system!  It might be useful to remember that the advanced booking system launched just one year before the marketplace.  It seemed weird and new back then too.  But now we’re used to it.  And I bet that in 12 months, Naked will have discovered some new way to innovate the wine business and we’ll be talking about how we really got used to and love the marketplace! ;D

This post belongs to an ongoing series about the Naked MarketPlace, a website that allows any winemaker to pitch wines to the UK market

Another key aspect of the Naked MarketPlace is the timeframe in which winemakers have to sell their wine.

What is the timeframe?

By timeframe, I just mean the amount of time that a pitch remains on the site before it is determined to be successful or unsuccessful.  The timeframe is clearly displayed on the Marketplace site with countdown clocks that tell you how many days, hours and minutes are left.  And during the last day it goes down to hours minutes and seconds (see the photo above).

Timeframe simultaneously reflects the true economic urgency of wine sales and engenders a sense of urgnecy in the buyers.  I’ll talk about this in more detail below.

Who controls timeframe?

The thing that might be surprising is that Naked Wines controls the timeframe.  Every winemaker is given the same timeframe.  At the application launch, winemakers were given seven days.  As this seemed very short, it was raised to 21 days.  The marketplace is still in beta, so it’s normal for tweaks like this and I do think that 21 days is an amelioration.  As a sidenote, 3 weeks more closely resembles the “advanced booking” sysem which Naked employed before launching the marketplace.

Why have a timeframe?

I’ve got two good reasons.

• Clerical – just to keep clean
• Economic
  • Winemakers face time constraints
  • Customers know it won’t last forever

From a simple clerical point of view, it’s important to set time limits.  Without a time frame, the market would be cluttered with too many old unpopular pitches.  So from that point of view, it’s good to be able to call it a day and archive pitches at a certain point.  (Though I think the current system deletes unsuccessful pitches, another point which will be explored on another day).

Time limits create a sense of urgency.  Rather, they reflect the sense of urgency that winemakers already experience.  Time limits share that urgency with our clients.

The truth is winemakers dread stockpiling wine.  Once wine is bottled, it takes up lots of space.  That space has to be temperature and humidity controlled and it has to be somewhat accessible to the large trucks which will eventually pick up the wine for shipping (or at least accessible by a forklift which can then have a paved path to the trucks).  Even before bottling, wine takes up a lot of space and keeping wine in bulk (tank or barrel) entails a greater number of lab tests and chances that the wine will encounter problems. And the undercurrent here is that there are bills to pay.

For these reasons, along with many others, most winemakers would rather sell their wine today than in two months.  And the timeframe reflects this.  If you put a wine on at a certain price (often discounted), you’re entitled to some conditions.  Saying “x% off as long as you buy at least 100 cases in the next three weeks” is fair.  It’s akin to saying “If you don’t buy this much in the next three weeks, that’s fine but you’ll have to pay the full price like everybody else.”

So that’s the urgency from the winemaker’s perspective.  How does it reflect into the client’s perspective?  Having a time limit creates a chance that they might miss out on the deal.

You see the big banner that proudly displays “This deal has now finished” and shows how much money customers saved by getting on in this deal.  Anybody who missed it will feel regret and will be more likely to buy next time a deal this good comes up on the site.

How else does the time limit affect the marketplace?

As soon as we start talking about risk and reward, chances of missing out, opportunity costs, and so on, we’re entering the realm of game theory.  I already alluded to this in a previous post, and I always hesitate to bring up this sort of complicated stuff… ultimately, you should not think this hard about the marketplace or any other website.  Realistically, you should just go onto marketplace, see if any wine tickles your fancy, and bid on that wine based on what you actually think it’s worth to you.  No games.

That said, there are some fun ways to analyze the system if you like thinking about this sort of thing. 🙂

One angel (that’s a registered member of Naked Wines) had this to say:

From the seller’s perspective, the stated 7 days for a sale creates a jeopardy with regards to volume sold and price point. If the minimum number of bids are not reached at the desired price point, the seller has the decision to lower the price, in response to the market, (which has happened on other sales).

If the sale duration is elastic, then essentially the ability to offer a lower rice is irrelevant, as the seller can extend the sale until they reach the minimum number of bids at at their desired price point. Ultimately this is not in favour of the buyer, and less fun!

I had bid at a lower price, and with a day to go returned to add a case or two more at a lower price, on the basis that if the minimum price order was not reached (it did not look like it would be at the time), the seller may lower the price, or fulfill the lower price orders also – but by adding another 14 days to the sale this aspect of the game dynamics was removed, and the base proposition of the market place was lost.

A shame, as it removes the fun, the opportunity for the buyer, and the gaming dynamics which move the market place beyond a straight volume based discount sale.

James 16:16 09/06/2011

?The elastic duration James refers to is that unique change from 7 days to 21 days that I mentioned above.  But his post illustrates an important general point.  A cemented time limit when the deal expires gives the winemaker an incentive to make the best deal possible in order to increase sales.

Similarly, as a successful deal reaches its expiration, customers who bid low are encouraged to raise their offer.  For example, the Reserve did very well.  By the end of the bidding period, we hardly had 20 cases left.  Logically, there was no reason for me to lower the price significantly in order to sell 100 more cases.  And it’s not even feasible since we only had 20 left to sell.  So some of the lower offers bid up.  And this shows the system works, even in these early days.

You see a similar sort of gamesmanship in the Dragon’s Den, a popular UK television program where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of investors and ask for a certain minimum investment.  The catch is that they must receive at least the full amount of money they asked for from the investors or they leave with nothing at all.  Oftentimes, when a pitch has overestimated the value of the business, the pitcher will give up a more significant percentage of the company just to hit that minimum amount of pounds.  On the other hand, when there’s a really good investment on the table, the investors fight over it and will offer more and more to get in on the deal.

Should the timeframe system change?

Incidentally, we should address James’ questions about whether it’s fair play to change the time limit.  Firstly, I should point out that this change was exceptional.  The duration won’t jump around willy nilly every time a winemaker fails a pitch.  This is a rather unique historical situation where NW changed the duration because it was clear we needed a longer time period in the beta / early-adopter phase of the marketplace.

That said, maybe different deals should be able to have different deadlines.  The same way ebay or kickstarter allow sellers or fundraisers to determine their own deadlines, MarketPlace could allow winemakers to set their own deadlines.

It would work because the urgency winemakers have to sell product quickly would motivate us to pick the shortest time possible.  And this would be checked in the other direction by the minimum amount of time necessary to drum up support for a wine.  Again, ebay and kickstarter are good examples.  Very few people put auctions up on ebay that end two years from now.  They’re selling stuff and they’d rather sell it this week if possible.  All that said, I’d probably pick about 3-4 weeks every time. 😀  So maybe it’s fine with Naked picking the time limit for us.

But then there are some wines on the site that just didn’t work out.  The brilliant effort of Disrupt, a wine blended between three different countries, is an example of something brilliant that just couldn’t find enough support within three weeks.  These three winemakers basically agreed to ship their wines to a central point for blending on the condition that they sold something like 600 cases.  Now, this is a big number for a wine that virtually no members of the site have ever tasted.  So it couldn’t rely on existing NW clients.  Instead, they needed to spread the word amongst their own UK networks, get UK press talking about it, etc.

Again, the similarities to kickstarter are striking.  For those who don’t know, Kickstarter is a fundraising platform.  You put up a project that you’d like to have financed and then you send the link around to all your friends and the Internet and you hope enough people share your passion enough to donate and get your project funded.  And then Kickstarter grabs a commission.  Really, this Disrupt wine could have been a kickstarter project.  And a key element of this model is that it takes time to spread the word and get buzz going.  Maybe Harpers is willing to write a piece on the Disrupt wine, but they’re not doing it within 21 days of the pitch being announced.  They’re monthly and have paper deadlines.  So it would have behooved that project to pick a longer time frame like 60 or 90 days (not uncommon on kickstarter).

On the other hand you don’t want deals languishing on the site.  And some flash sale businesses online really benefit from much shorter time spans.  Weekly sales like woot.com or daily sales like a whole host of American sites.

One last note: even if it is up to Naked Wines to pick the deadline, maybe they should shift over time (and not in the middle of any ongoing bids) to shorter times as the website population grows.  Today, we’re basically pitching to the customers who are already registered on Naked.  But if this gets a lot of press attention, you might see people joining Naked Wines for the sole purpose of shopping in the marketplace.  For example, I have English winemaking friends who complain that they can’t even sell wine to their own family back home.  Well now they can clear it through Naked Wines.  Just put up a pitch and email the link to your friends and family.  If a lot of winemakers start doing things like that, the marketplace population grows and grows.  One day, it could dwarf Naked’s conventional import/retail aspect.  And in that case, we could drop the deadline significantly.

 

This is always nice to hear.  “It should cost more”.  I mean, it’s nice to hear delicious too!  But the fact is that our wines are really inexpensive in the UK.  Sometimes, if wine drinkers are very used to super market prices, they find O’Vineyards a little expensive.  But the fact is that wines of this quality take a lot of work, and they’d be far more expensive in most settings.  Naked Wines’ unique financing opportunities (they pay me long ahead of time, as I’m making the wine) allows me to bring wines to the UK market at much lower prices.

It’s great to hear a happy customer say our wines should be more expensive.  It means that our work with Naked (to bring the wines to the UK at the best values imaginable) is paying off!