Winery/Winemaker Monthly Features - MAY WINERIES POSTED

Based on feedback, and the idea presented (actually several times) about doing a BerserkerDay type event each month, featuring one winery (or maybe two) and opening up discussions with the winemakers, encouraging quick buying and shipping to have tasting notes come out during the month, and general interaction with the community throughout.

We’d be essentially combining the ‘Special Guest’ and BerserkerDay features into one, and I think it might be a really unique concept that could revolutionize wine buying in a very small way.

Thoughts??

Sounds good.

The Power of WB never ceases to amaze me! Well done Frenchie!

This could be UGE.

Love the idea, with the cautiously optimistic note that it won’t be used by wineries/winemakers as a dumping opportunity. I guess if they did that though, there might be some adverse commentary from the WB community, I would venture to guess…

Sounds like a great idea for both sides. Hopefully this will include Old World also?

We’re not going to be a dumping ground - we’ll be carefully choosing them, and giving preference to those who already participate in the community. A dumping ground ‘sale’ makes no sense, as the winemakers will have to sit around and talk with us, and it’s probably MUCH better to take some conversation to a new level, talk about winemaking styles, get positive and negative feedback, and really explore more about the winebuying experience, as a community at large.

Ed, yeah, I hope some old world too!!

I like it; though my credit card whimpered.

This would be less, um, ‘impactful’ than BerserkerDay, as it will be spread out over the course of a year. One, two, maybe three featured wineries per month…

Nice idea, Todd

A call-and-response of offers and TNs sounds great.

How about expanding it a little further though? On some level, you should have access to mine data like which wines/wineries generate the most tasting notes AND follow-ups to those tasting notes in the Berserker community. Use that data to drive invitations to winemakers/wineries, have discussions and then produce follow-up offers. I’d love to see the relationships be dynamic in that way. I also think that has a good chance to spreading the net out to people who are not very attenuated to social media and gives them a tangible reason to get involved.

A.

Your latter point is most definitely one I’m wanting to integrate - it will easily showcase the benefit of social media as a vehicle, now in a new way (assuming it works out!)

As to your former point, won’t that data be easily seen? Everybody can see how many threads, how many responses, how many tasting notes are posted, as it is a public forum, and the number are posted next to the threads in the list. Just wondering what you mean about mining the data…

One can eyeball the data, but that is often very misleading. Been down that road a few times with work stuff.

It would be interesting, at a easy first pass level, to collect aggregate numbers like N people views notes on Chat X’s wine and n people responded. (I get that it would not be perfect - TNs buried in bulk tastings, threads derail, etc.) Digging in deeper and requiring a fair amount of work would be to see more accurate numbers and get associated word tags w/ TNs. eg, “Over 75% of tasters say your wine ‘needs time.’ Do you have library releases?” Pretty much all of this kind of analysis would require a direct data interface, not the board interface.

A.

Sounds great…know of any data tools that could collect and parse such data?

A little too technical for me, but is it possible to interface this with CT. Andrew is that what you mean and could that even work logistically? Todd I am sure you thought this out, just my $0.01. Have to save that penny for this will happen I’m sure.

We’ll see if Eric’s interested, but that’s a good idea, for sure - we can compile the notes here via CT, perhaps. I’m sure Eric has a way to parse that data more easily than I.

I like the idea.

I don’t see an easy way to get clean data if you want to restrict it to TNs. CT would help, but a) You can’t force everyone to do notes there, so you’d still have to deal with the people who wrote notes here, b) other people who didn’t participate in the WB offering could also write notes during the relevant time period, c) they might not publish notes here (of course Eric could provide data about notes taken on the wine for the time period we would care about). Also, if the note was done directly here (and some would be) there’s no way to ensure that people always write notes in a format that would allow tracking (i.e TN: WB Offer #4, Chateau M).

Some people might buy the wine and NOT write a note right away as they want to let a wine age a bit. You could do some work and dump all post titles and text into another database and construct queries to mine that in an attempt to deal with those issues but, frankly, I’m not sure that’s worth it.

A better alternative might be to use one of the many social media monitoring tools that monitors mentions of brands. If I’m a winery, that’s really what I care about - not just TNs but do offers like this cause people to talk about my brand more during and immediately after the offer? Tools like Sprout Social, Radian6, etc do this. From the perspective of a winery, you’d really want to see if there’s a bump in brand chatter during the week you’re on offer here… but that requires monitoring before and after the week too. If WB invested in the SMM tool and had wineries scheduled, this would be easy to do since you’d know NOW who you’re featuring 3 months from now.

In general, what Rick said, especially about social media tracking utilities. I used to work in large, wacky databases, but am long out of practice. Anything I work with now has tools built in.

I don’t think it has to be restricted to official TNs. I hardly write those anymore, either on CT or here. I think overall impressions about a wine or producer is more the kind of data you can map or, even better, visualize.

A.

I notified a company that is spot on in this type of scenario - hopefully they join up

As a winery I love the idea.

Adam Lee
Siduri Wines

I like the idea. It may also be a way for people on winery waiting list to order a bottle or two prior to getting their offers. I am on seven waiting lists and it would be beneficial to try a few of these prior to making it to the offer list.

This idea may allow younger collectors to branch out to new wineries.

Jon