Thanks for your comment.

Inertia – Powering the Wine Revolution

—Paul Mabray – CEO

I suggest that the scope of #2 be broadened to include wineries as well. A great wine tasting experience is also something that our sites seek to highlight.

I agree with El Jefe that consumers look for value, not just low price. Low prices are something any search engine can find (as you point out), but value can only be communicated based on experiences. That’s the beauty of what we’re doing.

I think that a combination of #2 and #8 would be appropriate because a writer only gets a following if the community bands around him/her. We need technology to quantify who the community trusts in the same way that we need the technology to help us find the values (and the great wineries).

I’m sorry I cannot attend the Virtual Wine2.0. I look forward to reading about it though.

My comments about the various operating systems and web browsers adopting RSS and making it very easy to subscribe to blogs was a bit aspirational but I do think readers will come from outside the tech geek community in 2007. Mac OS does this today with Safari’s RSS reader; this will only get better with 10.5 “Leopard”. IE7 added RSS that works pretty well and Windows Vista will ship with this as the default browser. Firefox 2 has RSS built-in as well, so all the groundwork is in place for more people to discover our blogs.

My guess is we will see more of the wine message board crowd subscribe than the average consumer, but even some of them will join us… at least I hope so.

Thanks for the comments.

A good post though; glad you leaped in and did one.

This is definitely true. I’ve recently been interviewing consumers and they constantly cite word-of-mouth as one the keys to discovering new wines. Wine 2.0 needs to enable this.

-Kevin

Ethan: What I’m trying to say in both points 1 and 9 are the same thing from slightly different angles. In point 1 I’m suggesting that Parker, Tanzer, Laube, et. al. are still important and useful points of view to be consulted but these are now supplemented by online sources that are not always from “professionals”. Point 9 is suggesting that customers are making more of their own decisions and not blindly following the critics scores. I think more people of all levels of wine knowledge are trusting their own palate these days. So I don’t think these are opposite points, but the same point with a slightly different spin. None the less I’ll add some words around each in the next version to make this more clear.

El Jefe: Good point in #1 about wine tourism posts and not just us wine geek types. I agree with your point on value in point 4 and will expand to encompass this idea. I have quite a few values in my cellar that cost me $50. I’ll link to the blog post which documents Stormhoek’s success in point 11. I like your number 13, as well, and will either add it or graft it into one of the previous points.

A great start on v1.1, guys; thanks again… looking forward to more viewpoints once this gets linked around the blogosphere. Pass the word

#3. I’ll be happy to believe it when I see it.

#4. Customers are looking for -value-, which is not quite the same thing. Value can happen at $5 and at $50.

#5. No, it travels faster

#6. This has always been true. Any one bottle customer today can be a 10 case customer tomorrow.

#7. Agreed. It’s not about selling the bottle, it is about selling the experience. Somewhere within the last week someone (wish I could remember who) made the general point that you are not selling a product, you are selling an idea. Even more so in our business.

#10. Roger that!

#11. Show me the money!

#12. Exactly!

Nice post. Just always remember that everything old is new again…

thanks! – j

ps: #13, people -will- buy wine based on the label – once. It better be good juice for ‘twice’ to happen… point being to attract them any way you can, but your product better be able to bring them back.

At the risk of coming off all pissy, I’m thinking Wine whatever-you-wanna-call-it needs a manifesto like it needs more spoiled bottles. I’m guessing Wine [whatever] needs this stuff as a rallying cry…? I dunno, I’m too far outside of all of that stuff to really lose sleep over it.

Not having read Hugh’s post, I’ll submit #13 anyway: People don’t necessarily buy wines purely on the label design alone.

Carry on then…