Grape Thinking’s 1 year anniversary is coming up and we’re excited about taking this to another level. We started as a blog because we had the intuition that blogging is the new business plan. Make sure that you know your stuff, then put your ideas out there, and most importantly, connect with great people that will give you constructive feedback. We had the idea for awhile that we’d try to turn Grape Thinking into a publication and make advertising dollars to help sustain us, but that didn’t feel right with the explosion of wine blogs out there. So we thought about what our focus has been so far and found our ideas separated into 2 distinct topics: the first was mostly from my influence, which was to figure out how to innovate and change the wine industry from a business/efficiency standpoint, whereas Ruarri’s was to evangelize the product of wine and show its true unifying power around the world. We realized, ultimately, that both were very important… evangelizing and working to bring the world together is what is righteous and was always our core purpose, but yet in order to sustain and grow you must have a business component that can be profitable. Thus, we’ve created a plan to help take us to the next level.
First, we’ve developed World Cup of Wine as a place to truly evangelize wine by allowing people from around the world to submit reviews of the top wines from their country and have the people vote on what’s best. This competitive spirit will hopefully reveal where the best wine in the world is every year, while also working to bring people together around the world. Furthermore, we’re going to have forums and virtual tastings that allow people to interact live and evangelize wine together while talking about politics, humanitarian issues, and anything else — time differences will be somewhat of an issue here so we plan on having an annual or bi-annual event in a new place around the world where we all get together in person.
As far as Grape Thinking, we’ve decided to turn it into a full on marketing and promotional company. In the wake of Stormhoek, Pinot Blogger, Sacre Bleu, Twisted Oak, and Gary V., we’ve decided that the best course of action is to still do what we said in our Wine 2.0 write-up and serve the industry at large, but to also put our money where our mouth is and create our own label and brands. Our importer and distributor connections are what gave us the initial ideas in the first place, so why wouldn’t it make sense for us to create and market our own label the right way and use our connections to source great juice, bring it to market, and sell virtually and traditionally. This is the real definition of Wine 2.0… don’t just tell people what they should drink… involve them in the process of creating the brand, let them see the videos of the wineries where the juice is coming from, throw events where you can have a good time and taste the juice so we know what’s the best stuff. We plan on blogging still, but from now on it will be about our actions rather than our ideas. The most important topic that we’ll be writing about aside from creating brands is the process of setting up a virtual system so that we can sell our products to consumers and trade direct and for lower prices. We can thank our friends at Inertia and Good Grape for guiding us along this path, and we look forward to working with them and the 3-tier system to help create the healthy model of the future.
We’re extremely excited about this new phase and look forward to meeting many more great people.
