Over the holiday weekend I was thinking about which blogs to recommend clients read daily from the long list of wine (84 feeds) and social media (75 feeds) blogs that I read. It was pretty tough to get these down to a selection most winery owners would actually read on a daily basis, which I somewhat arbitrarily picked as 10 blogs. To make it even easier to read, I also put together an aggregated feed here that you can bookmark for easy scanning each day.
So here are my picks for the 10 blogs every winery owner (and really anyone else in the industry) should read daily:
FERMENTATION – Tom Wark’s provocative wine business blog is the best in the genre. Required reading for everyone in the wine industry.
Vinography – Alder Yarrow’s wine blog is the first sustained effort in wine blogging but also the best.
Pinotblogger – Josh Hermsmeyer started documenting his winery start-up two years ago and has developed a large following for his innovative marketing ideas presented on his blog.
Good Grape – Jeff Lefevere’s view of the wine business, news and reviews.
Tablas Creek Blog – Voted the best winery blog this year, it is a great example of how any winery can tell their story and engage their customers online.
Gary Vaynerchuk – No, this is not Gary’s Wine Library TV video podcast but his personal blog with short videos on various topics mostly social media related.
ShipCompliant Blog – Compliance is a hot topic and this blog provides an up-to-the-minute view on the subject.
Chris Brogan – One of the top social media bloggers, I’ve aggregated just his articles on the subject including his excellent Social Media 100 series here.
Web Strategy by Jeremiah – Jeremiah Owyang is another leading voice in social media and I’ve aggregated his thoughts on the subject here.
How to Change the World – Author, venture capitalist and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki’s thoughts on business are insightful, often humorous and inspiring.
There are many more great blogs I could recommend but these should get most winery owners started. If you want to read these in an RSS reader, just download and import this OPML file to subscribe to them all at once.
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Let me guess… I was #11.
Dang…
Nope , 17th, but still respectable
No, I would be #11.
Actually, you ARE #11, Jeff… I almost put you in when I cut Seth Goden… but that Vaynerchuk guy somehow took #10; go figure
“Tim! Hey Tim! I think you dropped something.”
“Yes! This little word was left dangling all on its own. Don’t worry, I know where it was meant to go.”
10 Blogs Every AMERICAN Winery Owner Should Read
Sorry!
Thanks for the list.
Of course, there is a serious point to this as well. Although I agree any winery, particularly if they are targeting the US market, would get something from reading these sites, they are almost entirely US focused.
I see there being three overall categories here:
A. Wine information sites
B. ‘Best Practice’ Winery sites
C. Generic ‘Web 2.0′ thinking
The vast majority of the content of sites in category A, like ShipCompliant and even Fermentation would be alien and not relevant to wineries from anywhere else in the world.
I do agree that any winery would learn a lot from Pinotblogger, El Bloggo Torcido etc. but it would be hard to justify to a time-poor winery owner that they ought to read them every day.
I’d be really interested to hear what your suggestions would be if you were talking to an audience made up exclusively of the other 98% of wineries in the world? Do you think it would be different?
Good point Robert… and you are absolutely correct that my focus is on U.S. wineries.
If I were to recommend a reading list to European wineries, for example, I would switch some on the list to blogs in Europe such as your blog, Spittoon and Catavino. I would also point out that there are great wine blogs written in French, Spanish and Italian that would probably also be worth following if you understood the language. But my winery and social media picks would be the same as I don’t know of any better picks in those areas.
Thanks for keeping it global, Robert!
You can count on me (and the Opai) – it is our crusade!
And thanks for the vote of confidence. I wonder whether the polyglots amongst us could put together a version of your list to bring together those international blogs. I’ll see what I can find
Sounds like a good idea for a post at The Wine Conversation, to me.
Cheers
Tough to get together such a list, no doubt! The difficulty in doing so is demonstrated by your questionable judgment concerning the first one on your list.
That said, you definitely forgot Inertia Beverage Group’s blog on all things Direct Sales.
You are right, Tom. IBG’s blog is another good resource and would have made my “15 Blogs Every American Winery Owner Should Read” list. Your blog would still lead off the list, however.
I might recommend this blog, except that Mike doesn’t post as much as he used to:
http://blog.winerywebsitereport.com/
Still, the archives are worth poking around in, and are quite relevant. A whole bunch of good info, and one of the places where I learned about blogging!
Another blog in the same state:
http://www.pajamamarket.com/pajama_market_small_busin/
Brian is also pretty sporadic with his blogging these days, but go back and you’ll find a wealth of good guidance on getting started.
I was number one in the “Other” category. Yeah. That’s it.
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