Every wine tells a story, every winemaker has a story to tell, and the Internet provides new ways of telling those stories.
This phenomenon is beginning to be called Wine 2.0 – or Vin 2.0 as we like to call it.
Vin 2.0 means using “social media” or “Web 2.0″ tools or whatever they’re called – in other words, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and so on – to get your story out there and make new connections with, well, with people who like wine.
Vin 2.0 means things like:
- Using the Internet to break down the barriers between producers (winemakers) and the rest of us
- Creating direct connections between “citizen wine bloggers” and their audiences
Hardly a decade ago, this way of creating connections basically didn’t exist. But now a growing number of Languedoc winemakers are using Vin 2.0 to tell the story of their wine – their terroir, their families, the weather last week, the vendange next September.
Take some of the winemakers featured in our blog’s wine links. Iris Rutz-Rudel is based in Lisson in the Hérault, about 50km north of Béziers. I can follow her daily work and her dreams on her vineyard.
Things went quiet on her blog since November, but now after the snows she has been showing us her traditional wine press and explaining in great detail how she is pruning the vines.
We’ve never met Iris – we get all this information from her wonderful little Lisson Blog, and she’s a member of Les vignerons blogueurs.
ViniSud 2010Or take a young winemaker based just north of Carcassonne in the Aude, called Ryan O’Connell. On Thursday Ryan posted another new video to one of his sites (yes, he has several), Love That Languedoc.
It was about a presentation he gave at ViniSud 2010, about the first steps winemakers can take to get into Vin 2.0.
J’ai fait cette présentation sur le sujet du marketing sur le net dans l’espace Agora du stand Sud de France a ViniSud 2010.
J’espère que cette video de vingt minutes pourra circuler parmi les vignerons de ma région. J’essaie de recadrer l’histoire et l’importance de l’Internet dans des termes simples et efficaces pour notre filière viticole. Je donne quelques conseils que n’importe quel vigneron peut suivre (tant qu’il comprend comment recevoir et envoyer des mails).
- Ryan O’Connell on the video of his talk at ViniSud
Ryan’s talk came at the end of the annual show in Montpellier, and while he didn’t get much of a crowd on the day, his presentation lives on through this video (isn’t the Internet great!), and it is now doing the rounds of wine blogs and finding a much wider audience.
He also sent a message out on his Twitter feed yesterday.
Ryan O'Connell on Twitter yesterday: "We can OWN the Internet"
It’s a great little call to arms. As he puts it, we can OWN the Internet (or “this interweb thing” as us old-timers still call it).
As Vinternet.net puts it, “Ryan est un pragmatique, il sait communiquer son enthousiasme et ça lui réussit.”
Ryan is very young - less than half our age. The two of us are old enough to be his parents. He’s American, and moved over to the Languedoc in 2005 with his mum and dad when he was only 19.
Yet he has a fantastic command of French that has us green with envy. He is enthusiastic and prolific and has the adventurousness, courage and sheer neck of youth to question the old ways and get out there and do things rather differently in the Vin 2.0 era.
It will be an uphill struggle, step by step, and there’s no point in getting seduced by apparently instant results, but this is where it’s all going.
Vin 2.0 is the new rock ‘n’ roll, with wonderful new tales being told by people like Ryan and Iris.
Related posts:- In praise of terroir
- Wine 2.0 and wine bloggers
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