Those of you planning on attending the upcoming 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference in Charlottesville, VA will have your choice of interesting break-out session panels during the afternoon of July 22nd. I’ll be moderating one of them, titled Millennials and Wine.
Millennials are Democratic (by a slight majority), thoroughly on-line and plugged daily into social networking tools, and (by a huge majority) sleep with their cellphones (really?) . They are young enough that they might not get the reference mentioned in the title of today’s post. They are fast becoming the wine consumers of the modern era, drinking a lot of the stuff (even in the shower… not sure I get that one entirely), especially if it has bubbles.
And there are nearly 25 million more of them than there are Gen Xers.
With a potential market that big, if you’re even thinking about wine writing, wine blogging, wine sales, wine marketing, or wine making, you’d better start to understand what makes Millennials tick when it comes to wine.
And you’d better do it quickly…
I’m not a Millenial, but 1WineDude.com has proven somewhat popular among that group of wine aficionados, and while I’ve no idea why (or exactly how) it happened, I count myself fortunate to have been unofficially anointed by some in (and out of) their generation as a sort of Gen X-er spokesperson on their behalf, when it comes to how Millennials interact with wine in the online world.
Nocturnal cell phone habits aside, I’m deeply indebted to the wine drinkers of the Millennial generation – they have, after all, helped to make this blog as successful as it is. More importantly (for me, anyway), Millennials have profoundly influenced my worldview with their cosmopolitan approach to new experiences, endless thirst for geeky knowledge, sense of global interconnectedness, and their unwavering confidence that they can embark on any path of discovery (vinous included) with near reckless abandon (hey, if you came into adulthood with the totality of collective human experience available online, at your fingertips, you’d have the confidence that you’d be able to figure out the other 999 steps of the one thousand on any journey on the fly, too).
My deep-seated gratitude to what what Millennials have taught me was the impetus behind why I volunteered to be involved in the Millennials and Wine panel – so I was thrilled to be asked to moderate it. I just hope I do a good enough job of keeping out of the way of the discussion so that we maximize the value that the panel members will bring to those of you attending the conference in VA!
The panel itself is 100%-certified Millennial, and will focus on key items that wine media peeps and citizens blogger need to know in order to be able to reach that generation – namely, how young people view and experience wine, the wine industry, and social media related to wine.
The panel members are a young and talented bunch:
- Pia Mara Finkell (originator of the panel, blogger at The Booze Bin and wine PR specialist at CRT/Tanaka)
- Hunter Smith (of family-owned Charlottesville winery Afton Mountain Vineyards)
- Leah Hennessy (one of my fave bloggers, and owner of digital marketing firm Millennier, Inc.)
Here’s hoping you’ll join us – and if you have questions or topic you’d like to see covered in the panel at WBC11, shout ‘em out!
Cheers!
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