For the past two years my Twitter feed has lit up on certain Thursday nights with chatter about wine with the hashtag #WFMwine. Yes, WFM stands for Whole Foods Market, and the upscale grocer has been sponsoring Twitter chats on wine once a quarter for the past two years. Whole Foods invites me to participate, and I’ve put out 119 tweets over 6 sessions. To me it’s a fun way to connect, try some new wines and find out what others think in real time from around the country. The Twitter events are hosted virtually by the Whole Foods Wine Guys, Doug Bell, based in Atlanta, and Master Sommelier Devon Broglie, based in Austin. Full disclosure, Whole Foods provides me the wines as samples for the tastings. Ok so I get something out of this (more than just the wine of course), but I was wondering, what does Whole Foods…
Turning Winemaking Over to Facebook Fans
“They did not pick the yeast that I normally use,” winemaker Tom Johnson says. “It’s a new experience for me.”
The “they” refers to Silversmith’s Facebook fans, 797 of them, who are voting on winemaking decisions for the 2011 vintage. “I thought Matt was crazy when he came up with this idea,” says Tom. “I thought no one would be interested and no one would participate. Boy was I wrong.”
Matt Johnson is Tom’s son and sales and marketing director for Silversmith Vineyards. His idea: crowd source all the decisions in the winemaking process to the winery’s Facebook fans who “like” the winery’s page.
This may be the best use of social media in the wine world. Read more
DRINK – #CaliCabs Tweetup
On Thursday, Feb 11, I took part in the #CaliCabs Community Tasting Tweetup event that was created by St. Supery winery’s resident social media guru, Rick Bakas. The event started at 5 pm PST, with Cabs from Paso Robles south to San Diego tasted from 5-5:30pm. Then Cabs from Monterey to Lodi were up. Finally, at 6-7 pm, northern Calif Cabs. My contributions…Eden Canyon “Jolie” from Paso Robles, and cabs from Livermore Valley, a Retzlaff Vineyards and BoaVentura de Caires. The tweets came fast and furious. At times hard to keep up with the volume. According to Rick, 172 of us on Twitter took part, generating about 2,000 tweets to 1,000,000 followers. Many of the folks were at St. Supery winery, or at Judd’s Hill winery in Napa. I have to say that even though I was in my living room in San Jose, I felt like I was part…