A friend of mine, that talented writer David White, recently gave a speech at the 2011 Nederburg Auction in South Africa.  The title of the talk: “The End of the Gatekeeper: How The Online Revolution is Revolutionizing Wine.”

Forgiving the potential redundancy in the title (a revolution does have to revolutionize something, by definition, at least I think it does but maybe we’ve revolutionized the definitions as well and I missed it), David’s speech (which you can read in its entirety) is chock-full of interesting tidbits regarding the state of the on-line wine world.  And if that speech has a theme, it’s this: gatekeepers are largely wasting their time, especially when it comes to wine.

One of the more interesting tidbits from that speech comes from David’s observation of the current market’s combination of social media and the long-tail of how we search for and eventually consume products…

From the “tape”:

“Consumers still need advisors, of course, but when today’s consumers want information, they turn to their friends and their trusted networks — in real life and online. This change represents a remarkable opportunity for everyone in the wine industry. How so? Consumer choice. For all intents and purposes, wine consumers have unlimited selection. With its hundreds of thousands of labels, wine has one of the longest tails in the marketplace. Understanding this Long Tail — and its implications — is critical… What’s the Long Tail have to do with wine? Just like with movies, music, and books, the selection is virtually unlimited — and today’s consumers are eager to be unique, free from the influence of gatekeepers and able to make up their own minds.”

This is spot-on, peeps – at least, it is for the budding geeky wine consumer section of the market, which isn’t enormous but is certainly big enough to support its fair share of fine wine brands. 

Wine, as a product, has a tail longer than the Alaskan pipeline – a crazy number of SKUs, brands, and multiple vintages of each potentially all available and competing with one another in the marketplace at the same time. Long Tail is your friend, and if you are in the wine biz than you need to get a handle on it. For an introduction to the long tail, check out the vid and slide deck from a panel that Doug Cook, Alder Yarrow and I gave at the 2011 Pro Wine Writers Symposium, discussing the long tail and its SEO implications (in this case for wine writing, but the intro. to the concept is relevant in the context of what David discusses in his speech).

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Down With The Gatekeepers, Up With The Long Tail from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Apparently, some of them do – including Joseph Cryan, Assembly majority leader and representative of NJ’s 20th Legislative District. Whoops!

Tom Wark alerted me to this little ditty, an Opinion piece published in the Times of Trenton (that’s in NJ, for all you West Coast people) and written by Cryan, in which he attempts to justify a bill that he sponsored – one that basically doesn’t allow direct wine shipping in NJ. Cryan also goes on to lambast a separate bill that I’m assuming he opposed – one that does allow for direct shipment of wine to NJ consumers.  Here’s an excerpt of Cryan’s OpEd:

“…in New Jersey, we have a three-tier distribution system in place to protect our great state’s citizens, children, safety and revenue. The system has worked since 1933, and we should not be bullied by out-of-state wineries that seek to destroy it. The three-tier system has led to 60,000 retail jobs in our state; if we were to allow direct shipping, those New Jersey jobs could all but disappear.”

Wow.  So, let’s get this straight: according to Cryan, if they allow direct shipping in NJ, then they not only succumb to the “bullying” of out-of-state wineries, but will lose upwards of 60K jobs, will put the state’s children into rehab (supposedly they’re getting smashed on La Tache at, like, $3K/bottle?) and will miss out on an ungodly amount of revenue?

Save the children! Board the windows!! Annie, GET YER GUN!!!…

The trouble I have with all this nonsense is not so much that it’s nonsense, or that Cryan got it all wrong – which he did: direct shipping experience in other states has shown that none of those things are likely to happen (for more on why Cryan’s take is off the mark, see my friend David White’s rebuttal).

No, what irks me is that Cryan apparently thinks that his own constituents are dumber than bag of hammers.  Part of the fun of jokes about NJ is that we now the people who live there are actually smart, and nice, and that the state isn’t a toxic waste dump, etc. (nothing personal, NJ people… it’s just that making fun of NJ is kind of what we do sometimes in NY and PA when we’ve had too many beers… I know, it’s terrible…).

Anyway…

Why do that?  Why even go there? Why treat your own constituents like dim watt bulbs? I mean, if they’re savvy enough to want to order wine from their favorite producers, wines they couldn’t otherwise get in NJ, then aren’t the smart enough to search on the Internet and find information and study results that refute Cryan’s scare-tactic defense?

There is certainly something stupid going on in NJ, but it’s not on the part of their wine consumers – it’s on the part of some of their legislators.  You deserve better, Jersey, and you know what to do if you’re a wine lover: vote ‘em out!

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at NJ Assembly Majority Leader Disses His Own Wine-Buying Constituents from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

I seem to be in ‘book mode’ the last week or two.  I’m a bit of a bookworm, so it’s fun for me to mess  around at the intersection of wine and the printed word.  I still don’t own an eReader device, by the way – I prefer Book 1.0 – you know, the kind with actual pages that you can stick a bookmark between.

Anyway, here’s another piece of printed word that intersects with the wacky world  of wine.

David White’s Sippin’ on Top of the World: Toasting Good Times and Better Days, of which I recently received a sample copy, is a bit of a strange book. 

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s being misrepresented. 

Sippin’ on Top of the World isn’t so much a list of wine toasts (as the subtitle would lead you to believe) as it is a series of spiritual wine meditations.  Which makes sense when you consider that its author, David White, is the co-founder of the “WineSpirit Institute for the Study of Wine and Spirituality.”

Uh-ohhhhh.

At this point, your mind may be screaming “CULT! CULT!” and planning to run away as quickly as you can lest you be tainted by the odiferous funk of the religious cook.  It would be an understandable reaction, though one that I’d argue was totally incorrect.

In fact, depending on your point of view, dismiss Sippin’ on Top of the World too readily and you’d be missing out on some potentially enthralling conversation topics, not to mention possible sources of inspiration…

Sippin’ on Top of the World is arranged not so much in chapters as it is around questions.  Each question, or “sip",” is intended to be discussed, or contemplated over a glass of vino, and the sips deal with topics such as “A Lifetime of Grace Bestowed in a Moment,” “What Wines Contribute to Great Memories?,” and “What is Wonderful About Clinking Glasses.”

These are not the musings of an unbalanced, new age cook.  Most of the ‘sips’ are thought-provoking alternatives for looking at everyday events connected to wine, and in that way they deftly combine the fun and liveliness of sharing wine and conversation with our collective societal urge to connect our daily lives to the divine, (thankfully) without bringing in the wet blanket of any specific religious beliefs.

The topics touched on in White’s collection are diverse and cover a broad range of everyday life (for most Western societies, anyway), including health, how to best approach wine, gratitude, mental wellbeing, holidays, grace, sustainability, values, and aging.  While it certainly approaches the precipice of new age spirituality,  Sippin’ on Top of the World does so cautiously and never forgets that its audience might include wine lovers among the devoutly religious, moderately spiritual, or skeptically agnostic (I consider myself somewhere between the latter two groups, by the way).  The last group will probably find fewer gems in the book, but only the most spiritually skeptical would write it off entirely, and I’m impressed that White and company were able to navigate such potentially treacherous territory without watering-down the essence of the messages.

Religious views aside, there is something positive about the approach White takes in this book that many budding wine enthusiasts would do well to remember:

“Ironically, wine… can be intimidating to some people.  But wine should not be feared – it can be an important ally on the path to spirituality, and an avenue to the more important things in life.”

I can certainly ‘sip’ to that.

Cheers!

(images: amazon.com)

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Zen Wine: David White’s Sippin’ On Top Of The World from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!