I am happy to have been a part of Evan Cover and Cruvee’s latest project, playfully called Own It.  This site organizes all wine data and product information from a single location; and can be managed, accessed and published as needed to best represent your products across these multiple online locations.

Ultimately, this allows wineries and wine companies to have control over their message and brands, essentially ‘owning’ their brand again.

As Paul Mabray, CEO of Vintank said:  “With more than 30 wine-related social networks, 50 mobile wine applications, 300 online wine retailers, and 250,000 offline wine retailers it is nearly impossible to provide consistent and quality wine information to everyone and OwnIT solves this problem.”

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As my eyes opened on the morning of January 1, 2010, I realized that I had survived what Time Magazine described as ‘The Decade from Hell.’ Oh, a bit beaten-up and feeling a little like one of John Stewart’s Black Pig Meats salumis at the end of the sausage making process. Yes, the economic events of the past 10 years have put most of us through the grinder, but here we are at the other end, having survived to make, market and sell wine another day. A little more than 9 months ago, I started writing the Think Wine Marketing blog. (more…)

Way back in the Fall of 2006 we thought it would be fun to launch a Napa Valley-focused blog. Surely there were already dozens of them out there we thought.

However, after doing a bit of research, we were shocked (OK, maybe appalled is the better word) to find the number of such blogs could be counted on a single hand.

Fast forward to 2010 and things have certainly changed, albeit relatively slowly. Sure, there are now thousands of winery blogs, there’s a strong and growing community of wine industry-related Twitterers and just about every winery now has the obligatory Facebook Fan Page and/or YouTube channel.

The thing is, in many other industries all these things are merely table-stakes at this point. So, can 2010 be the year the wine industry goes from following to leading in social media?

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