We’ve worked really hard over the past 6 months to establish our first client Tastevine as its own company, and feel very good about our work. We now feel it’s time to take what we’ve learned and become a more well rounded marketing and technology company. Holistic, I guess you could say… servicing the full holistic lifestyle.

Wine is a big part of this, and so is organic food, natural medicine, renewable consumer goods, social apps & games that bring people together. The whole deal.  We feel this represents who we truly are, as it represents the change we want to see in the world. Furthermore, with the clients we’ve been working with outside of the wine industry, it is clear that a holistic marketplace should be the focus of our services. In talking to people about this growth, we’ve received mixed reviews. Some say we should remain a wine company and others see us becoming something more.

Check out these rough mockups for our banner… a picture says a thousand words as they say. Click the images to see an enlarged view. One attempts to show a big evolution outside of wine and the other shows something more subtle.

Which one is in the right direction? What would you suggest?

When I started working in the wine business in the summer of 2007 I knew a few things about wine. First it was exponentially better to drink than the Natural Light my contemporaries were imbibing at the time. It provides a great way to meet women and convince them you’re more sophisticated than you actually are. And finally there was something I desired to learn about wine culturally, historically and socially; anyone can order a martini and look good doing so but in the world of wine you are constantly finding out new and interesting things. Yet for all the knowledge I thought I had gathered nothing was more humbling than going to work in a wine store, where the people above you spent most of their lives buying, selling and learning about wine. From my time with them I’ve learned a lot about spotting good wines.

First of all, labels mean absolutely nothing, so when you go to buy wine don’t even look at the front label ignore it, there is more useful information on the back like a good importer. In this era of opulence and visually stimulated purchasing, Louis Vutton and Cadillac, take a more refined and dare I say classier approach. I am reminded of the movie Tommy Boy with the late great Chris Farley. Tommy is selling Callahan Break Pads; one of his retailers says there isn’t a guarantee on Callahan’s box. Tommy says you can put a guarantee on shit and its still shit, same thing with wine - creative picture means the winery spent all the money on a design and not the juice. Like a guarantee vs. the actual product. There can and often will be a cute picture on the bottle but the juice, more times than not, is still absolute Swill (a colloquialism used to describe wine not worth drinking). Read the rest of this entry »

The first leg of the Commerce Bank triple crown of cycling (Lehigh Valley Classic) was today in Allentown, Pa so I took the afternoon off to go check it out. I had never been to a cycling race before and wasn’t expecting much, but it was surprisingly entertaining. Some of the best cyclists in the world were there, many of which cycle the Tour de France. It is a very social type of event because you only see them come by every 15-20 minutes or so (10 eight mile laps through the city), and then chat it up with your friends and family while waiting for the next pass. It was great to watch the cyclists push it out, their fitness was amazing. Very enjoyable event, and when it came down to the wire, the crowd started going nuts and the commentators were going absolutely bonkers.

 

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So you are ready to start advertising on Facebook?… Great! This simple tutorial should help you to get your ad set-up in less than 15 minutes.

Step 1 - What are you promoting? - Login to Facebook, then go to the Create Ad page and enter the url you want your traffic to go to. (For our clients, we customize a landing page for each ad in an effort to better convert the traffic). Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t forget to tune into the You Tube debate tonight, the partnership has been done between You Tube and CNN and is going to be history in the making. Participants from around the country have filmed 30 second questions and posted them on You Tube. In turn, Anderson Cooper of CNN is mediating the questions, which will be posed to the Democratic candidates.

This is partisanship and politics like we’ve never seen it before since the days of Athenian democracy. The top-down model is falling away, and suddenly the average person can broadcast a message from his webcam straight to Hillary Clinton and receive an answer on CNN before a world audience. Hallelujah, the democratization of mass media is underway.

As mentioned this weekend, this trend is extending to wine, as this year for the first time, the World Cup of Wine will coincide with the World Cup Rugby as the wines of Rugby playing nations are pitted against each other in a taste-off between countries. Gary V. may do his bit to answer e-mail individually and factor in viewer requests to his show, but the beginning of a more two way communication medium is yet to emerge in the wine industry. As I’ve been saying, we perhaps need to see more of this in the food world. Jamie Oliver and the rest have done wonders for celebrity cooking, but has it gotten people at home cooking more, or does it just have people watching.

The Taste Vine envisions hosting online cook-offs much like the CNN You Tube debates, where perhaps viewers could submit videos featuring them planning an evening with friends, self-catering the event and then filming the results. All our viewers could perhaps respond to a menu as laid out by a celebrity guest. The key to the success of any movement is to motivate people into action. We’re already seeing this with Is My Blog Burning, but perhaps its times to step it up a little and provide an arena in which such competitions can be seen in multi-media, with more frequency. I figure that if we can get citizens involved in politics, it’d be ludicrous not to motivate people to become actively involved in something perhaps more socially rewarding and enjoyable, like entertaining and fine dining…