web concept: wine tweets
I haven’t written something about the interesting combination of web and wine for a while, but I was recently inspired by an article someone posted on the ThreeMinds blog called Wine Tastings Are Now Just A Tweet Away.
“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.”
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 too 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. Maybe it has to do with the highly social experience wine tasting can be. For some reason, wine just tastes better when I’m drinking with my husband than when I’m drinking alone.
From personal experience, I have also been noticing that “wine tweets” are growing in popularity. I follow several wine bloggers on Twitter, and in addition to getting good restaurant recommendations for business and persona trips, I enjoy seeing their dialogue between each other as they taste wines and compare notes.
Some of my favorite wine Twitters:
http://twitter.com/craigcamp
http://twitter.com/LENNDEVOURS
http://twitter.com/drvino
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 personal 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. I haven’t really thought of an extension for that. It is merely a personal documentation at this point. But whenever the phrase “personal” is used to describe something in the “social” medium, you know that it isn’t realizing its full potential. Using Twitter as a way to coordinate a wine tasting event across the nation, however, is definitely an example of using what Twitter is best at… real-time sharing. In fact, just this week it was used to report the Southern California earthquakes faster than any other news outlet.
Final interesting tidbit for those not addicted to Twitter… as maybe another sign of how web and wine go together, there is actually a word for a tweet sent while drunk called “dweet”. I have on occasion dweeted. It’s the new “drunk dial” of 2008.
technorati tags: twitter, wine tweets
RECENT WINES