5 Reasons Winery Mailing Lists Fail Consumers

Winery mailing lists live at the crossroads of privileged access and blind consumerism.  High demand, limited release, and cult wines combined with unnavigable distribution challenges to spawn a “mailing list” culture that left some wineries with powerful sets of marketing and distribution crutches. At its most functional, direct to consumer marketing makes it easier for [...]

Wine, Google, & Zagat

Google plays a centerpiece role with wine enthusiasts searching the web for quality wine content.  Google is not always efficient though, since wine sites figuring neatly into the search engine’s algorithms are too often commercial content aggregation sites. It’s predictable and annoying.  These sites are more suited to sell you a wine than tell you what [...]

Wine Knowledge and Australia

I just received an interesting email from the Wine Australia representative I met at the Wine Bloggers Conference last month. Antonia Muir is memorable because, among other things, she gave me a very cool grey promotional t-shirt with only one line across the chest proclaiming “Everyone Has A Story.” While I am happy to fly [...]

Sell Wine, Ban Water in New York Supermarkets

A bill is about to hit the floors of both the New York State Assembly and Senate that would permit supermarkets to start selling wine statewide.  If the bill happens to pass, it would close out a thirty year argument in New York, one that has been neatly opposed by the state’s local independent wine shop lobby. [...]

Olivier B Cotes du Ventoux Winery Rescued By Bloggers

A wine story rightfully deserving its own screenplay has unfolded in the Cotes du Ventoux. Scripted by French wine bloggers leveraging the social web, then serially turbocharged by social media’s influence on traditional media, the Olivier B Winery has apparently been rescued from the edge of wine making extinction.  Any film highlighting this southeastern Rhone wine producer’s story [...]

Bordeaux First Growths Fund Alternative Wines

In early 2006 the Bordeaux price-value line was breached and began its transgression towards complete collapse, erasing all justification for drinking the first growths and other similarly coveted wines that sat in my cellar for decades.  Just look at the blue line to the right, representing relative fine wine price escalation compared to the major [...]

NJ Wine Consumers and Growers Facing Direct Shipment Legislation

Current New Jersey wine law affords its in state, small, fledgling wine producing industry the right to sell direct to consumers from their own showrooms. That’s a good thing because wholesalers will not handle these small production wines and 90% of the state’s local winery sales occur just this way. Practically all New Jersey wineries, [...]

Wine Bottega and Clos Rougeard: Case for Social Media Wine Marketing

The ever present fragility of my inflated confidence born from half a life of wine enthusiasm can be awfully humbling.  Every year I discover a winery, region, or pool of knowledge that showers self doubt on the veracity of my commitment for exploring and learning about wine; “How could I claim to know anything, really, [...]

Costco Wine: Neither 90 Points Nor $15 and Under

90 Points of Costco Wine, written on June 9, 2009, turned out to be the most popular WineZag post yet. Untold sums of people search multiple forms of a “Costco Wine” phrase every day and the post drives a high volume of “wine aware” organic search traffic to this blog. Some of those vistors poke around [...]

US Wine Labels and Hong Kong Wine Auctions: Tale of Two Wine Worlds

While the US domestic wine industry continues its painful recessionary adjustments in response to the $50-plus wine category implosion and the consolidation of its distribution channels, the picture looks very different in Asia where this year’s Sotheby’s and Christie’s Hong Kong wine auction sales will outstrip their own combined New York and London volumes.  As [...]

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