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April 23 2008
There are a couple of alleged unspoken truths to being a wine enthusiast. These “truths” are like unwritten baseball rules; for example, don’t watch your homer leave the ball park before running to first base and, my favorite in dubiousness, a pitcher can throw some “chin music” high and tight, but not AT a guys head. You know, these are things that occur as rules amongst men.
The first rule in the wine world is the notion that a wine enthusiast presumably drinks mostly red wine. The second is that this wine is presumably on the expensive side.
I find that lately I have been enjoying “talking reds and drinking whites,” and cheap whites at that, completely flying in the face of prevailing wisdom.
Surely, nobody that purports to be a major wine fan would actually drink more whites than reds and they certainly would not be drinking $10 whites from Australia.
Australian vino? You mean an industrial white? Perish the thought, right?
I am a wine polygamist. In fact, I am a wine polygamist with mistresses. Over the winter, I think I drunk whites to reds 2-1 and from all over the place, forsaking my biases. As I have mentioned before, I drink many whites mostly because it is easier to find one under $15 that does not disappoint.
In fact, I can go to Cost Plus World Market, buy a half dozen bottles of whites seemingly at random, each under $15, and have five out of the six bottles turn out to be enjoyable quaffs.
Under the same set of circumstances, it would be about two out six reds.
I am a gambler, but sometimes I do not feel like throwing money away. If I had a nickel for every wine bottle that languished in the fridge under a vacu-vin until my guilt for dumping subsided sufficiently, well, I could probably buy a couple of $15 dollar bottles.
With this in mind, it does not bother me in the least to say that a large production Australian Viognier from Yalumba, Australia’s oldest family-owned winery, is a very nice wine and tremendous value at around US $10 – 11. That truth need not remain unspoken.
April 21 2008
A couple of months removed from the day-to-day wine business, I have noticed a few things:
1) My creative juices are firing on all cylinders
2) My wine passion and passion for blogging has renewed after suffering through a little bit of the “cobbler’s son” syndrome
3) I am starting to see the forest for the trees related to the wine business and that is leading to more business and less wine in my writing. Not sure if this is bad or good.
4) I am back to the roots of this blog and relying on intuition rather than artful insight based on anecdotal evidence
What this all means is I wrote my post yesterday about calling for a merger between Wine 2.0 and the Open Wine Consortium very much in the Malcolm Gladwell “Blink” mode, without a whole lot of analytical thought. It just seems right and the right thing to do at the right time. This type of “by the seat of the pants” writing leads to some breakthroughs and it leads to some holes in logic, as well.
To that end, I somewhat purposefully did not put a whole lot of detail about how I might do a merger because I wanted to get the point across about relativism and absolutism and, well, there is only so much room for minutia before skimming gives way to snoozing.
That said, I can do follow-up posts and based on a couple of comments I received, I am going to comment in-line:
Paul Mabray, CEO of Inertia Beverage Group wrote:
Candidly Jeff, I think these two organizations are so very different they should NOT integrate. As a supporter of both here is the clear distinction I see:
Wine 2.0 is an event.
OWC is a network.
P
My suggestion is to create one organization that can create a business model around a network of people and events. Simply, this is what thousands of non-profits do on a daily basis—they have a mission, they act as thought-leaders, they serve constituents and many marshal an army of volunteers.
Most blogging and social media companies have developed their revenue streams around content creation and live events, so this much is not so much a foreign concept.
And, frankly, social networking is great, but business still is done in person. So, the difference between a network and an event is negliable.
What a combined Wine 2.0/OWC organization can do is become a national Wine Institute-like organizational body/think tank that executes thought-leadership and acts as the pivot at the crossroads of wine and technology.
While it can be argued that Wine 2.0 is expanding their focus to consumers that is only after the first three or four events were geared as wine technology networking events. The event I attended in November of ’06 was purely a business card exchange with all of the attendee’s being folks in and around the business. The owner of Wine 2.0 undoubtedly is trying to monetize the effort and the way to do so is to try to pull consumers in. I don’t begrudge him that, but I think harkening back to his near-term roots, in conjunction with a merger of equals with the OWC can help better chart a unified course that can then map to how to engage the public.
As I noted in my post, the key here is to consider this effort as a part of relativism and keep the best interests of the industry in mind and set aside, for now, the notion of good old capitalism.
Longer term, I am all for capitalism. In fact, being a non-for profit does not mean you cannot make money, and handsome money, it just means you have to spend what you make serving your mission.
As a sidebar note, I am not a fan of the phrase Wine 2.0 because it will seem as antiquated as “Alta Vista” or “Webcrawler” in a couple of years.
Joel Vincent, founder of the Open Wine Consortium said:
I am on my PDA so this will be brief until I get to my desk. 1) OWC is nearly 800 right now. OWC invites partnership and collaboration with any entity that furthers technology in the wine world.
Lastly, having an Electrical Eng background, I have always likened OWC to the IEEE for technology - education, driving projects to conclusion like standards, and educational events with a purpose. Again, for techies, your proposal would be like merging IEEE with the Consumer Electronics Show. Could there be tighter collaboration? Potentially. And we are exploring that with Wine2.0 and other wine related trade and consumer organizations. So thats where my head is at. I’m glad to discuss further when I get back to my desk.
Thoughts?
btw - There is already a European Wine Blogger Conf and it and the NA version are vastly different from Wine2.0 both in content and in purpose. The link to that conference is on the front page of OWC.
In this regard, I have to politely disagree on the IEEE and CSE. Apples and oranges. What I am saying is that Wine 2.0 is barely out of the gate, so let’s not give them too much credit and it started a scant time ago (less than two years) as a networking hub for wine technology companies.
I would encourage Joel and Cornelius to review non profit business models and determine how a fit can be created that will create ONE organization that serves the convergence of wine, technology and social media for the betterment of all parties in the value-chain. Yes, that will include consumers, but only after we figure out what the hell we are doing first. And, really, before it hits consumers it needs to hit the wine industry who remain, largely, in the dark on technology and the value of the web. A rising ride raises all ships and getting everybody on the wine side reconnoitered is a good thing.
The key here is to lead with strategic intent and in doing so you have to have the end in mind and work backwards to present day.
I have the first $100 bucks for 2009 dues. Can I make that out to “Open Wine Consortium” or some other entity name that is mutually agreed upon by the founders of two organizations that NEED to come together?
April 20 2008
For the development, health and wealth of the industry in the quickening convergence between wine and technology, two bodies, the Open Wine Consortium and Wine 2.0, must merge in 2008.
I do not say this in a “maybe think about it, explore it and kick the tires on it” notion. I mean explicitly: Do it. Merge for the benefit of all collective members and the industry.
Set aside entrepreneurial agendas, build a mission, build an organization and do it as a quasi-for profit, non-for profit dedicated to being a central organizational body for the wine and technology space that can act as a central hub for the industry, wine technology companies and new media i.e. bloggers and online businesses.
On the cusp of Wine 2.0’s San Francisco event on April 24th and the Open Wine Consortium’s 700th member in two months time, it is time for the two to merge for a truly beneficial future for the wine industry as thought-leaders and activists in driving positive change.
You have to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that the wine industry is very fragmented—fragmented to the point that the abundance of associations like the Wine Institute and the, “in-need-of-Viagra” WineAmerica, amongst dozens of others, alongside a generally collegial environment, is a self-defense mechanism because naked absolutism, as modeled in the corporate business environment, is not as practical as relativism to the wine business.
Relativism, according to Wikipedia is:
Relativism is the idea that some element or aspect of experience or culture is relative to, i.e., dependent on, some other element or aspect. Some relativists claim that humans can understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of their historical or cultural context. The term often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture.
Absolutism, according to Wikipedia is:
Moral absolutism is the belief that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, devoid of the context of the act. “Absolutism” is often philosophically contrasted with moral relativism, which is a belief that moral truths are relative to social, cultural, historical or personal references, and to situational ethics, which holds that the morality of an act depends on the context of the act.
I bring this up because you can see the differences between two industry titans in those two social science references. Robert Mondavi? Believer is relativism? I would say absolutely. Bill Gates? Is he a believer in the absolute standards of his worldview? Absolutely!
In the limited choice game of evolution or revolution, this is one area where a wine industry revolutionary rise up by our brothers and sisters is beneficial for everybody.
Continued fragmentation serves nobody, but individual self-interest, and frankly, there is not enough diversity in this space for moral absolutism to make sense.
Wine 2.0 has a track record of putting on successful events amongst the digital avant-garde in the wine industry and has recently developed a board of advisors, which includes J. Smoke Wallin, a co-founder of WITS—the Wine Industry Technology Symposium. Wine 2.0, while representing mostly wine technology companies, with strong participation from wineries that “get it” has a developing influence with consumers in the Bay area, as well. Wine 2.0, in their own words is, “Blending the line between wine and technology.” Wine 2.0, as a phrase and name, also has a limited shelf life, as well.
The Open Wine Consortium, a wine social network, came out of nowhere in February of this year and has become the place to see and be seen in the online wine world. Now 700 members strong and growing, its burgeoning group’s portion include wine technology companies, wine bloggers, online wine stores, importers, exporters, and dozens of others. In fact, members are planning a U.S. wine blogger conference sometime later this year.
In such a small vertical like wine and an even smaller sub-vertical with technology, wine and new media, now is the time to unify and diversify instead of perpetuating the increased fragmentation that can kill momentum and hamper progress.
The wine industry manifests relativism, and now is a particularly good time for pockets of the industry to notice this notion and collaborate for the betterment of all.
April 16 2008
Dateline: March 21, 2007: Tim from Winecast starts using Twitter and I profess not to “get it” in our podcast Unfiltered # 3
Dateline: Late summer of 2007: Wine bloggers descend en masse on Facebook.com
Dateline: Mid-February 2008: Wine bloggers flee Facebook.com for the Open Wine Consortium
Dateline: February 29, 2008: Hugh from Gapingvoid.com says:
Yesterday, I joked on Twitter, “Note to World: If you’re not on Twitter, I don’t want to make friends with you.” Like all humor, there is some truth to it. I find people who use Twitter much easier to communicate with, than with people who don’t. As a result, Twitter has become the main engine I use these days for cultivating my social network.
Dateline: April 1, 2008: Tim from Winecast and I do a podcast, Unfiltered 8, and I still don’t get Twitter
Dateline: April 8, 2008: Tom from Fermentation jumps in the Twitter pool
Dateline: April 10, 2008: Hugh from Gapingvoid.com closes his Twitter account
Dateline: April 13, 2007: Tyler from Dr. Vino announces his social networking handles, including Twitter
Dateline: April 16, 2007: Out of defiant iconoclasm, I now refuse to even begin using Twitter, stopping just short of mocking that which I do not understand; electing not to participate in an activity that has been called “the crack cocaine of social media.”
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