I'm a big fan of wine and would love to say that I spend my free time jetting off to the various regions of Italy, Spain and France to taste the latest offerings from the wine producers there. In fact, I would love to say that I spend my free time just making it to a tasting somewhere here in NYC. Unfortunately, my schedule mostly doesn't permit it. If you find yourself in a similar situation at times, you can thank Twitter for helping to change all that for you.
Twitter has been used by a new wine company, Bin Ends, located in Braintree, Massachusetts, to facilitate online wine tastings. Dozens of people, armed with their Twitter accounts, participated recently in the now-monthly tastings that will be held on the third Thursday of every month.
To do this, Bin Ends first sent out the list of wines that were going to be tasted weeks in advance to allow the oenophiles the chance to go out and buy them - preferably through Bin Ends' online or brick-and-mortar store. Then, tweets were sent by Bin Ends from their Twitter account to the other Twitter users that were "following" them to spread the time and date of the tasting. Finally, when the day arrived, additional tweets were sent out from Bin Ends telling the tasters which wine to taste next as well as thoughts from the distributors about the wine.
As each wine was tasted, the comments started pouring in. Overall the response from the tasters was positive. Craig Drollett of Bin Ends said that "there wasn't a single negative comment that came across." To ensure that people were not isolated in their tastings, Drollett says, "[w]e encouraged people to get a group of friends together and pop the laptop up on the table with the bottles of wine."
For more information, or to sign up, check out http://www.binendswine.com/tastings.
Chris Patten
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Strategists & Planners
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The merger between Wine and Web is one of those things that never fails to impress me. When I got a chance to talk with Gary Vaynerchuk at FOWA this year, I actually asked him why he felt that was. He didn’t have to amazing of an answer for me besides… there is a lot of wine and a lot of web on the west coast. I think there has to be much more than that. I wouldn’t mind group theorizing a bit for another ThreeMinds post in follow up to your post.
From personal experience, I too have been noticing Wine Tweets are certainly something that is quite popular. I frequently see tasting notes between all of the Twitter wine bloggers, like:
http://twitter.com/LENNDEVOURS
http://twitter.com/juicecowboy
http://twitter.com/drvino
http://twitter.com/vinquire
http://twitter.com/craigcamp
http://twitter.com/Catavino
Catavino is personally painful to subscribe to, because you get to hear how beautiful Spain is just about every day and what he’s drinking with his delicious tapas.
I also keep a wine tasting Twitter: http://twitter.com/winelovers
Which I used to document my trip to France and Italy, but have since just turned into tasting notes.
Other interesting activity in a similar vein...
Wine Blog Wednesdays
http://www.winebloggingwednesday.org/
Once a month a blog hosts a WBW. They choose a topic that interests them, and then various bloggers send links to their articles on the Wednesday of that month. The host blog writes a longer article that details the results of that WBW. Some even do more interesting things like create a Google Map:
http://www.catavino.net/blog/wbw-38-portuguese-table-wines-wrap-up/
Gary Vaynerchuk Gift Pack Tastings
http://tv.winelibrary.com/2006/12/14/the-gary-vaynerchuk-wltv-gift-pack-2-tasting-episode-147/
I love the use of Twitter though. That is definitely something different.
Posted by Marta Strickland
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July 23, 2008 9:46 PM
Posted on July 23, 2008 21:46
I am also a big wino and think this is a very interesting use of twitter. For a long time I've been looking for a great interactive experience around wine – and while there are a lot of different sites out there, I don’t think any of them really do justice to the potential for creating the very personal experience that wine tasting, drinking, buying and collecting can become. Yes there are a number of sites that blog, review, rank or sell wine, but none that do it in a truly compelling way.
The really interesting opportunity with the binendswine twitter model is what you could do with the results. If there was a way to use the twitters to update some type of ranking around a set criteria, or if you are out browsing for wines and want to get a sense of what the everyone else feels about a particular wine, it would be great to be able to get some type of real-time update that provides an aggregated view. I don’t think it would take anything away from the buying experience, especially in a brick and mortar retail situation where you only have limited input of have a wine tastes, in fact I think it could really add to the experience.
Posted by Baron Conway | July 24, 2008 1:00 AM
Posted on July 24, 2008 01:00
Cool, practical use of Twitter!
We're about to launch something similar with our boutique wines from Israel except....we're going to prep small kits of pre-selected wines (all the same) and send them (FREE) to groups of people who have gathered to learn about the wines, then taste and Tweet, blog, Twitpic, share photos on our Flickr stream, etc.
Richard
Israeli Wine Direct
Posted by Richard Shaffer | July 25, 2008 7:57 AM
Posted on July 25, 2008 07:57