Wine Blogger Sample Disclosure Double Standard

Are wine bloggers and their traditional media counterparts held to a double standard on sample disclosures?  While it’s old news now, if you ask the FTC, then the answer is yes.  A recent article published by the Boston Globe and then an inquiry on common practice from an academic friend who is moving into a [...]

Wine Blogs Missing Visual and Human Elements

It is hard disputing the “wine blog burnout” that Tom Wark pointed to last month when he wrote “the movement to use the blog publishing format by wine lovers [is] waning. I see fewer new wine blogs launched. The retreat will be slow, but the retreat will be with us.”  Why are wine bloggers losing interest, why [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Crowd Sourcing Content for Commerce: Snooth Wine Pro For iPhone

Snooth’s introduction of the iPhone Wine Pro app gives wine lovers a fun tool that simultaneously permits Snooth to amplify its serious content marketing strategy by expanding crowd sourced wine content to drive search traffic and wine sales revenue.  Snooth’s wide network of wine retailers benefit from the site’s consumer traffic of wine review readers and [...]

Social Media Wine Content Earns Its Stripes In Traditional Media Formats

In two small steps for the wine world’s social media content creators, traditional broadcast and print media recently moved in giant steps towards integrating social media wine content inside traditional media formats.  Camouflaged and stealth like, Gary Vaynerchuk, Alder Yarrow, and Tyler Colman set in motion a series of watershed events that just might debunk [...]

Week of WineZag: The Round World of Social Media and Wine Blogging

Wine blogging at WineZag and staying connected in its parallel social networks involves a time and energy commitment yielding grimaces of sympathetic pain and confusion from just about anyone I unveil the details of my dedication to. Except, of course, fellow bloggers and social media mavericks that live in the very round world of social [...]

Wine Industry, Consumers, and Social Media: A Brand Loyalty Conundrum

I am annoyed and conflicted sorting through the efficacy of social media deployment for wineries intending to build brand loyalty.   My visceral understanding of the raw marketing power unleashed by well deployed social media programs and a personal conviction that wine consumers ought to embrace brand/winery/vineyard/house styles and reject brand loyalty fuels my sloppy moral [...]

Happy Birthday WineZag

Today, WineZag cheers for its first birthday and one full year of steady wine writing to celebrate 25 years of wine appreciation.  The place that fine wine, human experience, and written perspective intersect has turned into a personally sacred way point along an unending path to deeper appreciation of wine as a lifestyle component and the [...]

Authentic Discovery: Rather Drink Wine With Tom Johnson than Stephen Tanzer

It was an amusing week dipping into the online wine-world, witnessing Stephen Tanzer barreling clumsily into the blogosphere with his Winophilia and Tom Johnson striking a chord at Palate Press, accusing wine blogs of failing its readers. Tanzer, an established traditional media wine critic, is Editor and Publisher of the International Wine Cellar while Johnson, a recently converted [...]

Next Page »