Fabio helps you to plan your Puglia trip ;)

Here's my great wine tasting of a rosè wine from Puglia. I am togheter with Mattie Bamman writer for EuropeUpClose.com. The wine tasted is a rosè called Diciotto Fanali made by Massimiliano Apollonio (Apollonio Winery). We are in front of a trullo between Ceglie Messapica and Martina Franca (Valle d'Itria). You can read the considerations of Mattie here. Bless you!

I took a lot of picture of this villa. It's in Torre Lapillo, Porto Cesareo, in the south of Puglia. The area is called Salento. To watch a movie click here and let me know what you think. The villa is for rent (short period) in July 2010 and in September 2010. Maybe next here too. Contact me if you're interested in it.

This is a nice villa on the sea of Puglia, on the Ionio sea. The owner is a friend of mine and he is a taste for the gardening. I am describing the villa in italian, you can watch the movie although you don't understand my language, just to sea how is the villa.

The Academy of Wine Communications has changed is look: new website, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedind group, even a Ustream channel. What's happening? I have interviewd Michael Wangbickler, the Executive Director.

1. Hi Michael. I have seen the new website of the Academy of Wine Communications. It looks completely different from the past one. Which are the most important changes?
One of the major goals, when I took over management of the Academy of Wine Communications earlier this year, is to bring the organization into the 21st Century and make it relevant to today’s wine communication professionals. While the previous website served us well, containing basic information about the AWC, it was one-dimensional and not very interactive. With the recent advent of social media tools, a new world of possibilities is open to us. Our intention is to leverage the new website as an interactive resource and information hub available to ANYONE involved in wine communications. Our hope is that it becomes a central meeting place for not only Wine PR and marketing professionals, but also winemakers, educators, sales people, or anyone else who communicates about wine. Ultimately though, we wish to be a “go-to” resource for wine writers, bloggers, and broadcasters.

Some of the key changes include the ability join online and sign up for events online. This was previously done manually. Perhaps the greatest addition to the site is a RESOURCES section which has a wine PR directory where anyone involved in wine communications may add their name; a user forum where members can discuss key issues and topics; a job board where wineries and agencies can post current openings; useful links to key publications to trade organizations; images of current and past AWC activities; and relevant videos of AWC activities and productions. Future functionality may include whitepapers, case studies, and a blog.

2. Sounds really interesting. Do these changes reflect also a change into the wine communnication sector? I mean, we're living revolutionary times when it comes to wine marketing, wine PR, ...
We are indeed living in revolutionary times. The world of wine communications is evolving. The change is two-fold. First, with print publications cutting back on staff or closing altogether, traditional wine writers are finding themselves looking for work or having to move their activities exclusively online. Second, a whole new generation of wine bloggers has emerged and are having a greater impact on how consumers get their information about wine. Wine criticism is no longer the purview of a select few. Now, with Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, anyone can be a critic. In fact, Mike Steinberger wrote a recent article about this very fact in Slate

Where does that leave wine PR and marketing professionals? Scrambling to catch up. Now, instead of a focusing on a list of 10-20 magazine and newspaper writers as we have in the past, we are now required to interact with hundreds of individuals. It can be a daunting task.

3. Why should I join the Academy? Tom Wark suggests to do it, which are the real benefits?
As I’ve said, the world of wine communications is evolving and we need to evolve with it. The Academy of Wine Communications serves as a resource for wine PR and marketing professionals to interact and network with peers, learn about current trends and best practices, and generally find the information they need to succeed.

4. On your sidebar there are some social media links: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Ustream. How do you use them?
We use Twitter and Facebook to share news about the AWC and the world of wine communications in general. They also act as informal avenues of communication for members. While anyone can see the AWC Facebook Fan page or Twitter Stream, the LinkedIn Group is meant as a more exclusive tool for members to communicate. You can only join the LinkedIn Group by sending an invitation request to the administrator. Finally, it is our intention to live video stream future AWC events, so that non-local members (wherever the event is) can join in. As of now we will use Ustream for this purpose..

5. Will you use also service like Pitchengine for your social media press release?
Yes. In fact, every public announcement we have made this year has been on PitchEngine. It is a great way to distribute your news without having to go through one of the traditional wire services. You can see the most current release here

6. Are you going to be present in Europe, too?
I’d like to. Ideally, I’d like to see AWC chapters all over the world. It will require a certain critical mass of members to be able to make this happen. Currently, we have about 100 members.  It will also require someone to head the local chapter and mobilize the local membership. I’m happy to discuss it with anyone who wishes to volunteer. J

7. Suggest me one bottle to drink while I will translate this interview in italian for my audience ;)
Berlucchi Franciacorta Brut 25

We have interviewed the Chief Executive of Vinexpo to know more about the fair blog

You have just opened the Vinexpo Blog. Can you describe it in few words?
The Vinexpo Blog has been created to share Vinexpo information on wine and spirit’s world which is in constant evolution. The aim is in a few clicks to find the latest wine and spirits industry news, market trend, business news, products, issues from “the responsible drinking”debate and of course regular bulletins about the exhibition.

Why a blog without the possibility to leave comments?

Vinexpo Blog isn’t a forum, it’s a blog.

On a company Blog can exist without the possibility to leave comments (see the real definition of a company blog). Furthermore, information available on the Vinexpo Blog comes from our press review, except those about the exhibition. The Vinexpo Blog is just a tool for our internet visitors to be aware of what’s happen in the wine and spirit’s world. Vinexpo doesn’t comment the actuality, the information is factual.

Do you want to create a Vinexpo social space to share opinions, information, data, … exclusively for the winemakers or also for the wine lovers?
No! Vinexpo is and stay an international professional wine and spirits exhibition. The social space is on the exhibition, every other year in Bordeaux since 1981.

Are you planning to develop your communication strategy? I mean: what about social network and all the other web 2.0 tools?
Each communication is important. Internet is now one of the easiest way to develop communication but always in addition to our promotion and communication plan. Concerning the Blog, of course it will be developed and we will try to use all the web tools in the future…. Just keep a look to the Vinexpo Blog and you will see in few months some evolutions…

A look at the Far East market, China in primis: do you think a blog could be a strong way to get visibility there among the Asian consumer, buyer, importer, …?
Of course, a blog will necessary help to get visibility, but Vinexpo Blog treats on subject which could interest internet users from everywhere in the world, and it has not been created specially for the Far East market. Wine consumer need information, especially in China because Chinese wine lovers really want to be educated to wines… And I heard that the number of email address is now more important in China that in the USA …

I have this question in my mind from several weeks, just after I interviewed Robert Beynat, Chief Executive of the wine fair:

Is Vinexpo’s Blog a blog?

I mean, is it a real blog? Now: the title is blog, ok. But if we analyse better we can find something that is all but not a blog. Although the explanation is:

Vinexpo is the international wine and spirits exhibition, which is also the venue for people to meet and exchange ideas. It constitutes a focus point where all knowledge and expertise in the sector converges. We seek to use this international recognition that has been built up over the years here for your benefit. We have created the Vinexpo blog to share information on this constantly evolving world with you.

… in fact things are different. Let’s see.

Readers can’t post comments
So it seems to be a unilateral sharing action.

Posts have no links
One problem I had yesterday was with this post: Record exports in Uruguay. I was interested in the news, but I did’t find more, only:

In 2008, exports of Uruguayan wines, whose production is currently being developed, should break an all-time record at 13 to 14 million litres. The main importer of this small producer is Russia. (Source VSB)

The source is not linked! If I am interested I have to go on Google and find by myself. But this is not always possible for time, skill in searching, … Finally: I didn’t find more

The same situation happened with the post Russia begins to turn to its own vineyards. Very interesting, but nothing more. So, I went on Google and fortunately I found the news here. Why not a link? I still have a question:

Is Vinexpo blog a blog?

Social networks are going mainstream on the wave of the advance of MySpace and Facebook. We can divide them into two groups:

- General social networks: they are social networks like Facebook, in which users can talk about whatever they want (music, food, wine, personal opinion on brands, …), can share information, pictures, songs, posts, articles, … And, overall, users can build a personal network of relations.

- Niche social networks: they are social networks on a single topic of common interest. There are several examples of this kind of social networks, for instance ASmallWorld, … Also the wine world has them and we can call them wine social networks (WSN), in which the common interest is wine in all its aspects: reviews, recommendations, tasting notes, personal information, networking, sharing of knowledge, …

I have found 15 wine social networks, probabily the most important in terms of use by thousands of internet users and wine lovers. I think, also, that a winery should check its presence inside a WSN, if some users has posted a review and so on. Even be part of a WSN should be an interesting hypothesis for a winery.

15 wine social network a winery should monitor (quotes from the “about” pages)

Adegga

Adegga is a Social Wine Discovery service. The idea is to take the complexity out of wine and allow people to discover wines based on other people’s choice. Adegga also helps you organize your wines. You can keep track of wines you taste, make a wish list or organize your home cellar. Adegga lets you build a personalized watch list so that you can keep track of what people on your list are choosing and tasting. You can add friends, wine bloggers, producers and just about anyone else. You can also add wine producers and wine shops to your personalized watch list so that you keep track of when a producer releases a new wine or a wine shop makes a promotion. More info here

AmericanWinery

The American Winery LLC (Walla Walla, Washington) is a group of dedicated individuals who are connecting American wineries with wine enthusiasts through the online marketplace at AmericanWinery.com. AmericanWinery.com does not sell wine. The company provides marketing support and services to wineries throughout the U.S. and enables direct-to-consumer sales by its winery partners of thousands of wine selections. The Website provides the most direct way for American wineries to reach wine consumers online and the easiest way for wine enthusiasts to gain access to wine ratings, wine reviews, food and wine information as well as be able to buy wine online. Any American winery can partner with AmericanWinery.com in a non-exclusive arrangement with no upfront costs or monthly fees. Anyone who has an interest in American-made wines is welcome to become part of this community. More info here

Bottlenotes

Bottlenotes is a customized wine club service tailored to consumers’ personal taste preferences, and a retail wine website offering wines from small and boutique producers around the world. We use cutting-edge matching technology (an algorithm) to help people learn and keep track of what styles of wine, varieties, and regions they truly like. More info here

Bottletalk

Bottletalk is a free online service for people who love wine. Bottletalk makes it easy to:
- store details of the wines you have drunk and what you thought of them in your personalised area
- share your wine experiences with friends, family and other wine lovers
- rate and tag wines for easy reference
- discover new wines you’d like to drink and store these in your ‘wanted’ section
- buy wines easily from online retailers

More info here

Calwineries

Calwineries’ mission is to address this: making California’s wine country accessible to everyone. (Philosophy) Wine cannot be explained by one person. Each person has different tastes and preferences, and a large part of the wine experience is deciding for yourself what you like or dislike. Rather than tell you what to think about a particular wine, our aim is to introduce the major factors that make wine what it is, then allow you come to your own conclusions based on your tastes and preferences. More info here

CellarTracker

Cellar Inventory Management (Report and search by producer, vintage, varietal, drinkability, etc; Purchase price and valuation data; Consumption history; Barcode support; Restaurant-quality printed wine lists; Per-bottle location & bin tracking; Personal tasting notes; Uploadable label images; Wish lists and shopping lists; Track pending deliveries; Premium feature: Automatic valuation of your cellar including data from WineBid.com; Express import tools for existing spreadsheets). Tasting Notes (Record your own notes; Group a series of notes into tasting events; Read community tasting notes; See what others say about wine in your cellar; Automated integration with Stephen Tanzer’s IWC; Store other professional reviews and scores; Community bulletin board). More info here

Cork’d

Cork’d is a free service for wine aficionados. You can use Cork’d to catalog, rate and review wines you’ve tasted. You can also keep track of wines you’d like to try and buy as well as subscribe to what your buddies have reviewed. It’s a new way to discover and share wine. More info here

Guru Del Vino

It’s a bit difficult to find information about this WSN, its “about” page doesn’t exist. Anyway, I found this: Guru del Vino S.L. is an enterprise dedicated to the operation of a virtual community in which wine lovers from all over the world can take part. More info here

OpenBottles

Our mission is to be the indispensable resource for wine enthusiasts. Our members share their wine experiences, learn about wine from other members, build new friendship and manage their wine collections - for free! Find about more about our member features … We also help wineries manage information about their winery and wines and interact with the community. This is how we have the latest, most accurate wine and winery information anywhere on the Internet. More info here

Open Wine Consortium

OWC is a global wine industry association, featuring the leading online wine business network, on a mission to improve the world of wine. More info here

Snooth

Snooth is a revolutionary web-based social shopping experience that is simplifying how people select, interact with and purchase their favorite wines. Snooth is the world’s most comprehensive wine database, featuring millions of reviews and hundreds of thousands of wines. It offers both casual and aspiring wine drinkers personalized wine recommendations, ratings & reviews, as well as a wine information search tool that seamlessly connects users to the websites of top online merchants and wineries worldwide. More info here

Vinorati

The vinorati website was built by Lisa and Frédéric Roskam. It is intended to be a place where they and other wine lovers can keep track of wines they have tasted, easily and efficiently. The secondary goal is to create a reference of wines, wineries and regions using tagging technology. More info here

WineLog

WineLog keeps a record of wines that you have tried: When you venture to try a new type or variety of wine, you are taking the risk that you will either love it or hate it. WineLog provides you with a free way to track your preferences on new wines, including the specific information about the wine, as well as personal and public comments and one to five-star rating. After trying a new wine, simply login and select “Add wine to log.” You will fill out a simple form about the wine and then it will be added to your log. With this feature, you can remember which wines you enjoyed and purchase them again, and you can also remember which wines to avoid in the future.
WineLog proposes custom wine recommendations: Most people base their wine decisions on magazine reviews and ratings. The problem with this approach is that general reviews and ratings do not take your wine preferences into account. Using our wine recommendation system, we are able to compare your recorded comments and ratings to those of other WineLog users. If you and another WineLog user both highly rate one brand of chardonnay, then it is likely that you and that user both enjoy similar qualities of chardonnay. Your WineLog displays the other chardonnays highly rated by that user and proposes them as wines you may also enjoy. The more wines you enter into your log, the more specific you wine recommendations will be. More info here

Vinix

Vinix allows you to create, personalise and share your contacts and contents quickly and for free. More info here

This is the first interview of men and women who are changing the wine world, at least according to me. I think we can learn a lot reading their thoughts, their projects and their activities, so go read the first talk with Donata and Marc, founders of Terravino.TV.

Hi Donata and Marc, can you describe in few words Terravino.TV?
Terravino.TV is a video hosting website and video sharing community about wine which enables wineries and wine enthusiasts, after registering, to upload, share and comment on their personal videos. Terravino.TV is an instrument whose goal is to orientate promotion directly to the consumer and so create an effective video marketing strategy.

Who will be the user of Terravino.TV?
Terravino.TV is directed straight to the consumer. Those who are invited to register and upload their videos are wine enthusiasts, tasters, journalists, bloggers, university professors, experts, sommeliers, oenologists, agronomists, wine routes, wineries, corporations from all over the world. Wine TV are also invited to create their own account on Terravino.TV and embed their own video.

Which are the most interesting features of the website?
I want to point out three features:

1) Terravino.Tv is the first video hosting and video sharing community expressly built for Video Search Engine Optimization. That means that we work hard to place your videos on top of Google searches.

2) Terravino.TV is a powerful tool for direct marketing. From Terravino.TV you can share your videos on sites, blogs, and social networks.

3) We are also interested in selling your wine. We will soon integrate on Terravino.TV advanced e-commerce solutions.

Do you think online videos could be effective also in the wine business?
Internet video jumped from 12% of global consumer internet traffic in 2006 to nearly 50% in 2008. Projections indicate that video traffic is doubling every two years. In 2012 internet video traffic alone will be 90% of the whole traffic.

Videos reduce the distance between producer and consumer. They are phenomenal instruments for influencing purchasing decisions. Your clients are already online and we have created an effective instrument to intercept them.

Videos are right now a key and distinctive solution in the wine business of the most active wineries in USA, Argentina, Australia, South Africa; Europe is following the same path. Every winery should understand the kind of video they need and how to integrate it in their global communication. This is very important. There is an affordable solution for every kind of winery.

Video production trends are clear; top wineries with high budgets are pointing to very emotional and evocative short films, while small-medium wineries are pointing to multiple short informative videos (presentation - production - harvest - wine making - wines description - events). Small-medium wineries are using videos to better adapt to very fast-changing markets investing more in direct marketing to be closer to their clients and to attract new consumers.

Traditional wineries should force themselves to understand the real potential of the so-called web 2.0 (blogging, video sharing, social media marketing, e-commerce), because in the next 2 to 4 years it will be really expensive to bridge the gap.

Is Terravino.TV free?
You can register as a FREE user and upload a maximum of three videos. The size of each video is limited to 50 MB and 10 minutes for bandwidth cost control reasons. Terravino.TV offers its users the ability to purchase “professional accounts” - Terravino PREMIUM and Teravino PRO - that offer additional and advanced functionality for a fee.

Is Terravino.TV accessible through other social media? Can you tell us where?
You can find us on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook (the FB group is here) and LinkedIn.

Donata and Marc sent me this answers. I talked with Marc too, via phone, and it was a nice conversation about web 2.0 and is impact on the wine world. I think this is the first experience of a video hosting website and video sharing community about wine (am I right?) and just for this it is quite interesting to follow it. I will conclude this interviews I am going to publish in the future with some key concepts under the form of tagg, key concepts that emerge from each interview to keep in mind the focus of this men and women who are changing the wine world in a way or another. These are the tags of Marc and Donata:

- video hosting website and video sharing community about wine
- promotion directly to the consumer
- video marketing strategy
- Video Search Engine Optimization
- share your videos
- advanced e-commerce solutions
- In 2012 internet video traffic alone will be 90% of the whole traffic
- in the next 2 to 4 years it will be really expensive to bridge the gap

Before my considerations, go read the following eBook I wrote few months ago: How Internet is re-shaping wine marketing and PR. If you have problems in visualising it, go directly to SlideShare (I suggest you to read it in full screen modality).

As you have just red, internet is going to re-shape the way of thinking about marketing and PR. Not only in other sectors, but in our (wine) too. I think it’s time to start thinking seriously on how to take advantage from this change, which means start using social media and then start doing social media marketing.

In my opinion, some instruments are becoming a standard: blog, microblog (Twitter), social networks (Facebook, Linkedin), photo and video sharing (Flickr, Youtube), podcast and social media press release. By using one of them or a combination of them, a winery can have a great success for his business in terms of image, reputation or wine sells. Then, there are other instruments which are important too: emails, feeds, …

As you can see on the first slide, the eBook is named “Version 1.0″, which means that it wants to be the beginning of a wide and deep conversation with all the people involved in this topic to develop this knowledge and learn more. I have published this eBook in italian language first, around two months ago, and I really had a lot of inputs from the italian wine business sectors (wineries, associations, bloggers, …). Your feedbacks (suggestions, critics, doubts, …) are welcome.

Stefano Bonilli wrote a short post that gave me the idea for this one. The post is about Il merito, le regole, that is merit and rules. Stefano was at en event organized by the Alma Graduate School of the University of Bologna in which there were the first 50 graduates of Italy.

At a certain point Stefano asked two things to the audience of young people:

Who has a blog?

Only four graduates showed their hands. Then:

Who has a Facebook account?

Almost everyone!

More about the social network in this two post: Facebook Hits 100 Million Users and “Facebook Helped Me Win,” Claims Politician. Times are changing, this is only one example. It means that also wineries has to change. Who knows how many wineries are on Facebook?