Daily Marauder

WINE SIPPING: TASTING ROOMS TO SOCIAL COMMUNITIES

Today, being one year older, I head to my most favorite place on earth to taste some wine and turn off my phone. Five years ago, the movie Sideways released and a furor of wine tourists flourished to Los Olivos, Santa Barbara wine country.

I’ll head to my favorite winery, Rusack Vineyards, and like I always do, stand in their tasting room and gush over their Anacapa using such proverbial phrases as “awesome town” and “I dig it.”

Wine tasting is a tradition trending from the 14^thcentury and onward. There are typically four stages in a wine tasting from appearance, smell, mouth feel, and finish.

But in the age of online media, wine tasting has evolved from the traditional tasting room experience to social communities of online wine-drinkers. Here are a few sites helping to transform the industry and introduce wine to a whole new generation.

Online Video

Gary Vaynerchuk, online entrepreneur, debuted the “Thunder Show” in 2006 attracting some 100,000 viewers per episode. Weekly online episodes attempt to deconstruct wine tasting and the entrenched associated wine lingo. I mean, when’s the last time you described a wine as tasting like “wet clay”?

In this, my favorite episode, Gary attempts to pair his favorite cereals with the proper wine. Riesling and Captain Crunch? Yes please.

Social Community

Cork’d allows wine tasters an online tasting room experience. Rate and review wines that you’ve tasting creating a library of your wine tasting experience. Share your notes with friends to get your wine community on.

Twitter Search

While there are sites that aggregate wine tweets like Wine Twits, a simple Twitter search is usually by far more effective and interesting. As I soon plan to be holding a delightful Pinot in my hand, I figured a little Twitter search was in order. @Wine Bistro I’m on board. Let’s go tasting!

Apart from simple searches, some are taking the onslaught of Twitter communication to the tasting room itself. Instead of walking around the winery, pen in hand, now wine tasters can tweet their tasting notes. City Winery in NYC tried their hand at this concept just last week with their Spit & Twit event. Alex Baldwin, Marketing Director at City Winery tells me, “It was a very successful initial effort in connecting the online and offline worlds. Participation was very high during the event and afterwards. All of these things are experimental in the world of the unproven but overall we were very happy with the turn out.”

Wine Blogs

There are several choices to choose from when looking for a good wine blog. Tyler Colman has a PhD in political science and is a wine educator at New York University and the University of Chicago. He has written about wine in many publications from The New York Times to Food & Wine. So, yes, he’s highly accredited. But simply, I like his blog better than the other highly rated wine blogs because he speaks in a manner in which the non-wine educated masses can understand. He also tends to run a visually driven site, which I firmly believe to be the best way to communicate.

So, I tip my glass to you. It’s time for me to go get my birthday party started. Hopefully, this doesn’t all end with me drinking from the spit bucket…