Good Grape Wine Company

October 31 2009

News, Notes and Dusty Bottle Items

Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass …

What the heck is a Vook?

I read an article about a hybrid video/book concept called a “Vook.”  One of the first examples of this utilization is “Crush it” by Gary Vaynerchuk, a seemingly natural fit.
This video/text application with non-fiction books is pregnant, and, in my opinion, the combination of bringing alive words with visuals is particularly potent for the world of wine – not just books, or so-called “Vooks,” but general winery storytelling.

While it’s seemingly head-scratching in its no-brainer nature, we forget that text and visual-based storytelling haven’t converged to great effect on the Internet, still staying in their respective corners.  This fact becomes important as you consider the Kindle and other digital reading devices and where content may be heading with the decline of newspaper readership, et al.

This is a rapidly changing area with a lot of innovation.  If you’re interested in gaining more context, check out this article from Fast Company magazine and an op-ed piece from Newsweek on Apple’s forthcoming tablet computing.  Taken together, they provide a lot of insight into what the next couple of years will bring.

What they don’t tell you

Over the course of the last six months, I’ve tried to secure more original quotes for posts, getting them directly from the source as opposed to derivations.  For me, this is a natural evolution—the more people read, the more you owe in raising quality.  While I am a journalist by education, much of my knowledge hasn’t been practiced into wisdom, until now. That said, this has been enjoyable and gives me greater control over the direction of pieces, however what other writers don’t tell you when they excoriate blogs is this is damn hard work fraught with a lot of frustration.

Simply, I’ve run into: 

1) Message control – you can’t get somebody to answer the question, instead they give you a non-answer to a question you didn’t ask

2) Statements – sometimes they don’t even give you a non-answer – they give you a statement that says nothing to nobody

3) Pocket veto – sometimes they don’t answer or they’ll answer five days later with lame faux-politeness, “sorry I missed your timeline, I was really busy ...”

4) Not empowered – many PR people are not empowered to talk substantively on behalf of their clients.  Many clients are hard to track down and don’t respect their PR people

5) Rudeness – I had one winery marketing person respond to me with a dismissive, “what can I do for you” and then she proceeded to do absolutely nothing, including not responding to several follow-ups. 

Remind me – this is wine, right?  Based on some people’s reaction, you might think I was a narc infiltrating the Cosa Nostra.

Just a Thought

I’m nervous that people are going to think that because the recession is “officially” over that this bad dream is going to immediately fade to black.  Just as it will take a couple of years for our 401K’s to recover, so too will it take our economy a period of time to climb out of the hole.  This is a particularly important point for luxury wines.  Just because economic indicators are adjusting out of the abyss doesn’t mean that the hard work is over.

Back roads

Last weekend, as I drove home from a weekend at our family lake house, after having attended my 3rd Notre Dame game this season, I reflected on how blessed I am.  I am frequently guilty of looking at what I don’t have instead of what I do have … it’s a mistake.  Just the same, as I drove down state road 13 in the heart of rural Indiana, passing blurs of towns with names like, “Windfall,” “Leisure” and “Aroma,” I was brought back to the fact that if I had a “windfall,” I would surely seek a life of “leisure” filled with “aroma’s” – wine aroma’s.

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