Now that harvest is getting into high gear in California, it’s time to make some decisions on the winemaking plan for the Roussanne we will be making together at Crushpad. Being a late ripening varietal, our Roussanne will not be ready to harvest until mid-October but there are 30 decisions to make in the coming 4-5 weeks before the grapes are picked.

So everyday from now to harvest, I will blog about each decision and invite readers to comment that will influence our decisions for each item. Those who join the Winecast Crushnet group will have inside access and directly effect these decisions because this is our wine, not my wine. The first 50 members will be assured a one-case allocation of the final product and the opportunity to lend a hand directly in San Francisco or virtually via the internet. Should the group exceed 50 by harvest, I will work with the folks at Crushpad to increase production.

To join the group, just sign up over at Crushnet and request to join the Winecast group. It’s free and easy to do in just a couple of minutes. Depending on the timing of the harvest, I will be on hand for the sorting and crushing of the grapes at Crushpad. I hope to see many group members there. We’ll also get together for barrel tastings in San Francisco and Minneapolis as the wine develops.

When I first announced this project a few weeks ago, I knew there was another blogger/podcaster working with Crushpad on a wine but had no idea it was Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library. I think this is great and will definitely join his group to make a Napa Cab. I also hope to be able to get Gary on Winecast to compare notes on our approaches in making our first commercial wines.

A very interesting Wine 2.0 adventure awaits, join us.

Several weeks back I proposed a standardized wine rating scale for the wine blogosphere which generated a bit of discussion. Since then I’ve been thinking about how to implement this scale here and have decided to start rating all wines on the following scale with half-stars added for a bit more granularity:

Rating: Flawed, Not Recommended
Rating: Average
Rating: Very good, Recommended
Rating: Delicious, A Wine of Distinction
Rating: Outstanding, A Classic Wine

Note that this is an overall reflection of a wine’s quality and value as having a second scale for value seems too complicated.

It’s great to see other Wine 2.0 sites support this proposal (thanks, Philip, and great Facebook app!) and I expect others to follow. For devotees of the 100-point scale, I will also include that score in all reviews for the foreseeable future along with this 5-star rating.

I know this is somewhat of a contentious issue but I’m hoping some other wine bloggers join me by adopting the 5-star scale (I have noticed Andy begin to use this scale recently). Perhaps we might have some standardization in the wine blog world that seems to exist in the established wine press.

Editors note: This is a cross-post of my “weekly” post over at Jeff Lefevere’s Good Grape blog. Since I’ve been silent there for a while, expect some more frequent posts some of which I’ll cross-post here.

It’s been a while since I posted here at Good Grape so I thought I would get back into action with a meaty topic I think a lot about in my day job as a wine marketer.

How has wine marketing changed in the era of consumer generated content?

At one end of the spectrum is the ground-breaking work by Hugh MacLeod harnessing the power of social media to reposition Stormhoek as a “social object.” You can check out Hugh’s account of his campaign by viewing a 25 minute video of a talk recorded at the PSFK Conference in London last month.

What is most interesting about Hugh’s story is how simply — and almost by accident — he implemented a global marketing campaign in a very fragmented and traditional industry. Like a lot of wine brands, Stormhoek is a volume play where critic’s scores, aggressive sales practices and shelf-talkers are the standard marketing approach. So what did Hugh and Company do? They engaged the blogosphere and started a global conversation about their brand. The result was more than doubling sales in less than 2 years for an investment of about £20,000 (approx. $41,000 USD).

The other end of the spectrum is where 99% of the wine industry is at the moment with their heads in the sand about the internet and little clue about social media. They live in fear someone uneducated consumer will bad mouth their wine on one of the new Wine 2.0 sites such as Cork’d. This level of spin control and anxiety is understandable given the subjective subject of wine tasting where a $2 Chardonnay could be judged superior to a $40 Chardonnay.

But I have three words of advice for winery owners - Join the conversation!

We have seen a few brave wineries start blogging and engage the growing wine blogosphere. Although the jury is still out on their efforts, I know wine has been sold and word of mouth has resulted in new customers.

Don’t have a tasting room? Use your blog to create a “virtual porch.”

Have a limited marketing budget? Spend some time reading and responding to wine bloggers and they will say some good things about your wine and drive traffic to your blog.

The theme of this week’s Wine Industry Technology Symposium underscores the urgency of wineries adopting new online marketing strategies. My favorite quote was from wine podcast superstar Gary Vaynerchuk from Winelibrary.com who said in his talk to , “Embrace your website as your business.” Amen, brother; I hope a few wineries there got the message.

So the bottom line is that wineries who are not part of the social media conversation are doomed to let consumers determine their word of mouth. Like any online endeavor there are trolls but if you engage and extend the conversation you are more likely to encourage partisan customers to come to your aid. If you do nothing, you are likely to suffer in “Google Hell” for some time.

All it takes is a bit of time and focus. The rest — like what Stormhoek has done — could be history.

Earlier this week, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs delivered a keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. With his famous reality distortion field fully engaged, his “one more thing” at the end of his announcements was devoted to the über-hyped iPhone and how developers could write applications for it.

As Om Malik posted Tuesday, the iPhone will change the mobile phone landscape but it will also power Wine 2.0 because the application programming interface (API) for the iPhone is the web itself. At first, I thought this was pretty insignificant; in fact, my first reaction was “so what” but the more I think about a mobile phone running a fully featured desktop web browser the possibilities for interesting Wine 2.0 applications come to mind.

Want to post a tasting note to Cork’d or Bottletalk while sitting in a restaurant? No problem. Check prices or scores via Snooth or WineZap while in the aisle of your wine store? Go for it. Read your wine blogs? Of course.

Anything you can do on the web can now be consumed on the iPhone which will be great for Wine 2.0 usage and innovation. Sure, the pricing for this device is way too high now but the same could be said for my Motorola RAZR a few years ago; now they are free with contract.

Give this a couple years and you will really see some interesting traction in the marketplace and anyone with online wine information, recommendations and a wine store will benefit. As long as they make their user interface simple and easy to navigate with a mouse, that is.

For a taste of what’s to come, just fire up Safari on your Mac, and now Windows PC, and check out some of the early iPhone sites.

Photo credit: Engadget

I’ll start back after a bit of an unintended blog hiatus with a simple request to Wine 2.0 tasting notes site entrepreneurs.

Please either publish an API to your tasting notes feature or build a Wordpress plug-in so I don’t have to cut and paste my reviews into your site.

Whoever delivers this first will be the exclusive site for republishing my reviews for a period of time. This is my main gripe about all these sites as it creates more work for me. I’d rather create more content than spend time pasting it into other site(s).

I’m even open collaborating with a site in order to build such a plug-in (yes, I have decent php coding chops). What I want to do is publish the review here and have it tagged in such a way to automatically be imported into your site in my ‘winecast’ account. Microformats would be a nice touch, but not required in the first release.

Who’s game?

BTW, I have about a hundred unpublished tasting notes that I will be posting on a more or less daily basis this summer starting today. I’m planning on tasting quite a bit more this summer on a few road-trips but that’s a post for another day

The folks at RadCru and Inertia Beverage are holding another Wine 2.0 event in San Francisco on Friday, June 1st starting at 5 p.m. This meetup looks to be the best yet with podcaster Gary Vaynerchuk from Winelibrary.tv speaking along with Alder Yarrow from Vinography and Tom Wark from FERMENTATION. Winemakers and several Wine 2.0 entrepreneurs are also on the program.

Since I get to the Bay Area on a regular basis these days, I was planning a trip around the same time frame in order to attend. Unfortunately my trip was moved up to the week before so I’ll only be there in spirit unless they rig up an iChat or Skype video setup for me (hint, hint; this is Wine 2.0 after all).

If you are in San Francisco June 1st and have an interest in the intersection of Web 2.0 and wine, this will be the event to attend. I’m hoping to be able to attend the next event.

Last night I posted a proposal for other wine bloggers to start microblogging tasting notes on Twitter. Since then Dr. Debs from Good Wine Under $20 and Andrew Barrow from Spittoon have joined me and others have put my Winecast Twitter feed on their friends list.

A bit of clarification about how I will manage the friends vs. followers on this account since I think this might become somewhat larger over time. All bloggers who put me as a friend will be added as a friend only if they Twitter wine related subjects. For example, I will most likely use this for micro tasting notes of wines I am drinking at any given time but others might use it as sort of a mini email system about wine. An exchange between Dr. Debs in California and Andrew in the UK shows the power of such discussion. Everyone else will be added to my friends list on my personal account but you will still get notifications of my wine posts as a follower. Or you could just subscribe to the combined feed. I’ve added the Twitter feed to my right sidebar here for you to follow along, too.

Let’s see how many others will join the wine twitter movement… you don’t even have to be a blogger to join us.

I’ve been using Twitter for the past few weeks and while I think there are some interesting aspects to it’s intended purpose of telling friends and the world what you are doing, the true utility is microblogging. Your “posts” are 140 characters in length and can be entered from a web browser, instant messaging client or even a mobile phone via SMS.

So I mashed up this idea in a Wine 2.0 sort of way and started to post short reviews of the wine I am drinking right now. These will be posted well before formal reviews and will sometimes have scores if my description is short enough. I invite anyone else to join me and add their Twitter feed to my friends list. If there are enough wine loving Twitter users, I might even create a community blog to aggregate all our posts. A domain has been purchased for the purpose. I think this has a lot of potential but could be just too geeky to see the truth

Will anyone else join me?

It’s time to circle the virtual Wine 2.0 wagons for another monthly online chat relating to Web 2.0 and wine. This month it will be held this Thursday, March 8th at 7:00 pm EST/4:00 pm PST/12:00 am GMT (Fri.)/ 11:00 am AEST (Fri.). in the Campfire room generously provided by the folks at WineQ.

Like last month, we will ask each participant to post their question for the group in our Google Group sometime before Thursday (preferably as early in the week as possible so we have time to think about it). I’ll moderate and anyone who didn’t get in on the last chat will be put to the front of the queue with their question. Anyone with an interest in the intersection of Web 2.0 and wine is welcome but we do have limited space so please indicate your attendance by posting a comment here or in our Google Group.

My question will be more of a presentation of the meta-data scheme for the hReview wine tasting note plug-in I’m writing for Wordpress. Pretty geeky stuff, but there are others who are more business model focused so I’m sure there will be some balance to the discussion. And maybe we can find out what’s behind the holding page at the Wine 2.0 site...

El Jefe, proprietor of Twisted Oak Winery and frequent Winecast commenter, has just posted a contest to write the back label of one of his wines. This is a great marketing idea similar to the Fortune Corkies I wrote about earlier in the month.

Basically, Twisted Oak is asking it’s customers to write the back label of the soon to be released white Rhone-style blend called %@#$! Customers have plenty of ideas to inspire their writing from past examples on the Twisted Oak blog. All entries must be received by March 16th and the winner will be announced March 19th and their back label will be printed on the back of the next release of %@#$! later this summer. Everyone entering the contest will receive a 20% off coupon for wine purchases and the winner will receive a full case of %@#$! with their custom label.

Like other promotions that invite customers to co-create the product, I think this one will be successful in spreading the word about Twisted Oak and get more people to try their wines. Current customers will tell their friends and this word-of-mouth will spread virally. All without expensive ads in Wine Spectator and the like. Very Wine 2.0, El Jefe.