Courtesy of AlaWine.com the latest ranking of global wine blogs:

1. Vinography
2. Winelibrary TV
3. Fermentation
4. Stormhoek
5. The Wine Collector
6. El Bloggo Torcido
7. The Pour
8. Winzerblog
9. Winecast
10. My Wine Education

View the complete list.

Mike Duffy brings to our attention this terrific post from Jason Haas on the Tablas Creek Vineyard blog, summing up lessons learned from two years of winery blogging.

Although I started this blog about two years ago, it’s really only in the past year that I’ve felt I’ve found my voice.  … I’m sure that blogging came more naturally to some other people than it did to me.  I’m not a writer by trade, so I’m learning as I go along.  …Now that the Tablas Creek blog is two years old, I find myself starting to get asked, more and more, how to do it.  There isn’t any one answer.  But, it occurs to me that it might be helpful for others considering a similar undertaking to put down some of my conclusions about what makes a blog work.

Jason goes on to list 7 things to do if you want your blog to work:

• Have a voice
• Write in the first person
• Write about what you’re worried about
• Answer the questions you get asked all the time
• Write for other writers
• Read and comment on other wine blogs
• Lead with a hook

Mike Duffy also has a great list of wine blogs at the The Winery Website Report.

Sub-Zero markets the Sub-Zero line of wine refrigerators.  The site itself, far from it being purely brochure-ware in nature, contains rich content on the enemies of wine (e.g. humidity, temperature), friends of wine including facts and tips from a wide variety of wine experts, and a blog with wine expert tips that appears to include almost daily updates.

http://www.subzerowine.com/

Source: http://www.nygrapes.com

For wine marketers “Online Marketing” could be the best return for your money. Read on…

‘Online Marketing’ as it is quaintly called, is probably the least expensive communication on a ‘one to many basis’ available.

So, does your business really need more of a shopfront, or perhaps a press marketing campaign with a freephone number and a new callcentre, or maybe ’Online Marketing’ is a better place to put your budget.

Matt Ambrose tells it best, as usual, around a classic tale of a global micro-brand

It seems that if you tell your company story well enough, people could literally buy into it, and help make the story even better, joining the club.

What’s a better conversation over the evening meal?

a. I popped into town to buy a shirt today from Marks and Spencers – or,

b. I bought my shirt from a chap in England. He flys all over the world once a quarter to measure us up and the delivery is within a week or two. It’s great service, and now he keeps my measurements, it saves so much time when I need a new one. Yes of course, you can find him on.. http://englishcut.com/ There’s loads of pictures of the tailoring process and what he’s up to, quite interesting really.

You could never get that word of mouth from a telesales campaign could you, especially as they always seem to interrupt your dinner.

Source: www.conversationware.co.uk

With as many as 1,200 wines on shelf, how do you get consumer to buy yours? Stormhoek Winery does no advertising. Sales will top $5 million this year. It got there on the Cluetrain.

Normally, a winemaker with $5 million in sales would spend at least 10 percent on advertising and deeply discount its wine to retailers. Stormhoek charges twice as much as other wines in its category, and does no advertising whatsoever and no discounting. Yet this morning, it became the little winery that could by launching Blue Monster Reserve label, created for Microsoft and its employees and friends.

The Blue Monster is the brainchild of my friend and colleague, cartoonist/blogger and marketer Hugh Macleod. About a year ago, he gave the Blue Monster cartoon to Steve Clayton, chief technology officer at one of Microsoft’s UK affiliates and a nine-year veteran of the company. The backstory is here

Dear Big Companies: Social Media Marketing Works
It’s a brilliant marketing move for Stormhoek, and a conversation starter for Microsoft. I’m a big fan of both Macleod and Stormhoek, and have no use for Microsoft. Having switched to Mac a year ago in sheer frustration over Dell Hell and Microsoft’s unpleasant software, I don’t believe the wine will ultimately change anything about Microsoft. They, undoubtedly, will still suck.

But I do believe that Blue Monster Reserve will encourage people who work there to try harder to be innovative, and perhaps even to leave and form a new company that is not too big to change.

What’s important is that a lone blogger with a good idea was able to get a huge company to listen to him and to adopt one of his fairly radical ideas. It shows that social media is a viable force for change, for marketing, and for the new media than a lot of big companies may now finally begin to take seriously.

The Coolness Factor
Stormhoek spends “practically nothing on marketing,” the winery’s founder Jason Korman told me in an interview. Instead, the winery relies solely on social media marketing, bloggers, and word of mouth “to make the wine so cool that Stormhoek doesn’t have to do what everyone else in its industry does.” And, he said, sales will top 140,000 cases in 2007.

Korman and cartoonist/blogger and marketer Macleod got together in 2005. “I didn’t have a vision per se to begin with,” Macleod told me. “The vision came ONLY after we messed around with a lot of marketing experiments. After a while, we realized that it was the experiments that informed the brand. In other words, the way to have a cool brand is to do cool stuff. Having a great product qualifies as the latter, but it’s not the only criteria.”

Bonus link: Here’s an interview I did with Hugh in 2005.

By B.L. Ochman.