I’ve had an unbelievable two weeks with much good food, hundreds of 1 ounce wine pours, great restaurants, changing cities, cool people and a lot of business. We’ve just touched down in Atlanta and are reflecting on an amazing two weeks and the culmination of it all undoubtedly being Wine 2.0 at Club Sportiva last night.

Left to Right: Ben (CalWineries.com); Gary V., G-Man (*www.thetastevine.com) and me

Stepping out of the virtual world and into the reality of Wine 2.0 was pretty neat, especially to be in the same room with Gary V., Inertia’s Andrea, Tom Wark, Wine Hiker Russ, Alder Yarrow and everyone else playing in this circle.

G-man and myself were the youngest guys by 5 and 3 years respectively - and that’s not to say that it was an older crowd. If anything, having come from the traditional route of working in on-premise and off-premise sales, everyone in the room was a baby compared to the aging 3-tier crowd. It is inspirational to be in a game that is dominated by young players.

To listen to the panel last night, it is a relief to hear people who not only understand how to, but have begun to take wine from a prohibitionist era mindset into the 21st Century (where everyone else is.) Gary is leading the charge, Inertia is laying the tracks and Tom Wark has spread the message. The stadium is built and the people will come.

Grape Thinking, TasteVine and people like the dudes at CalWineries are fortunate to be able to start down the path that has been cleared for us. Whilst Bottlenotes, RadCru, Wine Q and Cork’d are doing a good job giving an online platform to the established wine appreciation crew - Grape Thinking and Taste Vine are working to bring our love for food and wine into the same mix as our understanding of the digital era.

It was great to share the same vision with those who have begun to make it happen. There’s space for all of us to be successful - and with so much opposition at every step, we’re going to need all the force we can muster. Having had a great 2 weeks I’d like to take the chance to propose a digital toast to all the young self-starters in the room last night: the future is ours.

So after a year or so of being quiet, Cork’d and its overarching concept have been given much recognition in the past 2 weeks. Gary Vaynerchuck has gone from strength to strength over the past two years, and we can only wait in anticipation to see what he does with Cork’d. Already Cork’d has been tipped as one of the top 10 best designed sites in the world, and as Gary V. is undoubtedly heading toward being one of the most successful players in the industry, the two will surely make a happy union.

This year we’ve seen Wine X magazine fall by the wayside, and perhaps Cork’d'll now rise to fill the niche which Wine X was never quite able to: the community of young, experimental and down to earth wine consumers.

Grapethinking waits in anticipation for Wine 2.0 where much of the future will be delineated and many partnerships will be forged as a group of young world beaters step up to discuss how things are going to be once direct-shipping laws are loosened and distributors lose their stronghold.

Gary V. has begun to check the boxes needed to ensure his place in history by:

1. Establishing a reputable, nationwide, tech-driven, with-the-times medium to promote and sell high-class hand-selected wines to the American public at large.
2. Winning the hearts and minds of the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Eric Asimov, bloggers, Grape Radio and a wide spread of enthusiasts around the country who take his word as gospel.
3. Purchasing the first community for wine, with cutting edge Web 2.0 design and strong community features.

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To the Wine Community at Large:

I write to you as a firmly established member of what is typically called “Generation Y” and I have a bone to pick. Mainly it is a result of a recent phenomenon in the community, one I like to refer to as the “dumbing down of wine.” It seems to be an increasingly popular opinion that in order to bring wine to younger and newer audiences, wine needs to be brought down to “our level”. Unfortunately for the marketers it is almost instinctive by now that we will reject most things that people attempt to target to us. We like to adopt things ourselves. Look at the successes and failures in mainstream viral marketing. Most things that succeed do so because young people want to have them, not because they were told they need to have them.

Wine doesn’t need to change the way it is, but it does need to change the way young people are told about it. Some believe that wine has to be trendy or cool or fun or marketed like beer and hard alcohol to become popular with young people. They point to trends in marketing in music and magazines and tech gadgets and tailor their wine approach to these same tactics. The problem is that they are missing the ways in which wine has a competitive advantage.When it comes to young people, wine will never win a competition with beer or hard alcohol on trendiness or shock value or sex appeal. It’s like marketing a horse by telling people its a cow because you think cows are what people want.

I’d like to let you in on a little secret about young people. Just around the time we reach legal drinking age we also start to have a desire for sophistication or a desire to be seen as an adult. We’ve done a lot of moving on from our teenage years and, contrary to popular belief, the majority of us are not a bunch of binge drinking, hard partying, pierced, and tattooed hooligans as we are portrayed in the press. The majority of young people today are smart, ambitious, inquisitive, and above all we’re sophisticated and discerning consumers (even if we’re not yet, we like to think so). This is where wine can compete. Make us feel sophisticated, after all this is one of the ways it is marketed to adults. Wine is a complex and beautiful drink with a great history and a great culture. This is something a lot of the Millennial Generation would love to learn about but the marketers don’t think we want to learn the story. Sure we have our idiosyncrasies and like cool stores, but most of all we want to be treated like the adults that we are. We don’t like to be talked down to, we are willing to ask if we don’t know something, and we certainly don’t like it when older people feel they have to dumb stuff down for us.

Truthfully, members of Generation Y shun wine because:

1. the price point of good wine is a bit high
2. no one has really attempted to market wine to us in the middle ground (Meaning someone needs to meet the Millennials with a good wine at a decent price and speak to us at a level somewhere between wine kindergarten and hoity-toity wine college).

I feel I may be getting a bit drawn out, but for now I’ll leave you with this:

• We hate when marketers treat us like we have no attention span or sophistication. Speak to us like the adults that we are and please please stop the race to the bottom when it comes to marketing wine to Millennials.
• Stop dumbing it down to broad-reaching food pairing suggestions and one flavor wine descriptions. We are interested and we want to learn. If you want to sell us wine then be willing to teach us and to take time with us. Part of wine’s appeal is it’s complexity, let’s not lose that for the sake of selling out.
• Finally, if you want to integrate some of the things we enjoy like social networking and other technological concepts, why not get a member of our generation to help you. Please don’t have a member of an older generation try to create products for us without our input. Remember how cool you thought some of the things your parents created were?

I would like to say that I do appreciate the strides that are being made in the wine world. Hopefully with a little input from young people the incredible culture that is wine can spread even further.

-Vino Bandito

Paul from Inertia tagged us last week in the link game going on in the blogosphere so I’m keeping it going. We blog because we’re big fans of the unity between wine and cuisine and how it brings us together. Here are a few of the blogs and sites that keep our interest.

Fork & Bottle - Jack and Joanne bring wines and tasty foods together like no other

Good Grape - He just gets it… nothing more to say

The Pour - Not a big fan of critics, but Asimov knows how to keep things fun

FriendsEat - If you’re a foodie, check this community out

VinoBandito - Brad is a young millenial like us and we’re hoping to bring him on board
A few others unrelated to the world of cuisine that we find really useful:

TechCrunch - Arrington has revolutionized blog monetization, but he deserves it

WebWorkerDaily - Bringing a whole new meaning to virtual enterprise

The two most common shipping methods used by fullfillment companies are, obviously, UPS and FedEx. An important thing to note, and we’re not sure if UPS offers anything like this, but FedEx offers great discounts (up to 65% off) on shipping if the winery is a member of the Wine Institute. This can amount to incredible savings to the consumer, or make the winery look great if they complement their price point with “shipping included”. If you are a winery, you have to enroll in the program.

Some of these shippers work to make it easy to deliver wines. For example, UPS offers a free service where they call the intended recipient before they deliver to make sure that someone over 21 is available to pick up the wine. Unfortunately, I don’t think all the wineries are aware of this, as we recently received some wine, and it was somewhat of a hassle… apparently the only way that UPS will do this is if the winery gives them the phone number and requests the service when they place the order into shipping.

So… if you are purchasing wines, don’t forget to mention it. This will help eliminate the need for the driver to make multiple trips, and make it easier to get the wine into your hands.

If you are a winery, and are interested in the Wine Institute, you better be from California, because they apparently only represent California wineries. Maybe they have plans for expansion, or maybe Wine America’s helping hands are working on, something similar.