The Elegant Sufficiency

The Social Media Sommelier

Don't touch on wine very often here (another story away from the screen), but thought you'd find this video interesting. Apparently, the 32-year-old Gary Vaynerchuk is a "cultural phenomenon" in the States, a wine merchant who attracts up to 80,000 viewers a day to WineLibraryTV.com, his online wine-tasting show. He calls himself the "social media sommelier". Vaynerchuk's schtick wears thin pretty quickly but it's interesting what media commentator Jeff Jarvis on Buzz Machine has to say about him:

"This isn’t as simple as using online video to sell wine, though the family store is now a $60m-a-year enterprise. Vaynerchuk is also transforming retail and making it social. He has realised that a store should be a community and so he uses every tool available online — a social wine rating site called Corkd.com, his videos, his appearances on other popular online shows such as Diggnation, his ubiquitous presence on Facebook, and answering countless emails every day — to make and connect with as many fans as possible."

Vaynerchuk may be a merchant primarily, but he has also well and truly crossed into the world of wine media. And watching him and reading Jarvis's thoughts on him, it's not hard to crystal-ball a few years or so forward to see, as is the case with all other forms of conventional media, how the food and wine media landscape as we know it is going to irrevocably change — both in how information is delivered and who is delivering it. In his Guardian column in February, Jarvis wrote that camera-phones "may well change the job of the journalist in ways more radical than even I could ever have imagined". I'm going shopping.

Two Things

1. On SBS's Dateline tonight, any minute now, George Negus looks at the skinny model debate. (Sorry, I have an tragic addiction to Cold Case and Anthony La Paglia in Without a Trace ... can't possibly tune in to George, tell me what happens ...)
2. At the local wine-shop tonight, buying a bottle of chardonnay (I’m sorry, I’m not a wine snob, and those who sneer at chardonnay irritate me… perhaps they should spend some time in France’s Chablis region), I realised that I put two or three bottles of wine back in their racks because they had corks. In 1999 I went to Portugal to report a story about the cork industry, threats to it, New World winemakers revolt against corks, etc. I thought the cork companies’ fears were unfounded. How could we turn away from cork, I thought in my head as I wrote an article about Australian winemakers’ efforts to find alternatives and the cork industry’s attempts to woo them. Yet earlier tonight, as a wine consumer who doesn’t have a cellar, I wanted a bottle to drink immediately. I wanted a bottle that had no chance of being corked. I put two bottles back on the shop’s shelves, including a French Petit Chablis, because they were under cork, and picked up a Yarra Valley chardonnay with a screw-cap. Who would have thought this was where we’d be in 2007. (I won't tell you what I bought, because I wasn't impressed ... I wasn't skimping ... it cost me nearly $30 ... but given the number of premium winemakers using screw-caps, that's not the point.)