Blog

Even though Italian Wine
Week has finally come to an end, there’s still lots to learn and discover. Two
of our events are available in full though livestream: the opening press
conference (in parts one and two), and the standing
room-only What Emily Post Can Teach You About Social Media, Millenial App-titude and Geo-Marketing. Even if you couldn’t be
in New York City
last week, there’s still plenty to learn about modern Italian wine and digital
branding. And if you want to hear more insight from some wine world heavy
hitters, you can still watch the interviews from the conference. I spoke with a
wide range personalities involved in Italian wine, including ambassador Umberto Vattani about the Virtual Vino
program, Mark Vaughn of Sante Magazine about small Italian
winemakers, Jonathan Newman of Newman Wine and Spirits about Italian wines
finding new distribution in the U.S., and Dan Dunn of Playboy and theimbiber.net about Italian value
wine. You can also tune into conversations with Ed Deitch of vint-ed.com about his blogging his
experiences and Alessandra Rotondi  journalist and sommelier about Italian spirits.

Virtual Vino is already
growing, and there’s going to be more to explore in the future. This year we
experienced an incredible response to our social media initiative; in 2010 we
saw 399 tweets mentioning VINO or Virtual Vino, while this time we saw
thousands. Our What Emily Post... seminar had people tweeting in from all over
the world asking questions and offering their opinions as our panel discussed
digital authenticity and communication with customers. YouTube, Twitter,
Facebook, and blogs as tools for meaningful interactions were at the core, but
looking to next year, the vibrant social media landscape offers many new
concepts to dig into. For example, how can location-based systems like
FourSquare and Gowalla be used for outreach? Can social gaming be applied to
wine? Should you pay attention to smaller (but wildly dedicated) communities
like Tumblr? What could augmented reality technologies--mobile apps that
overlay information onto the real world--offer for educating customers? Should
review communities like Yelp have a place in your strategy? And how can a brand
harness user-generated content? As new technologies are released and fresh
communities emerge and evolve, wine fans, brands, distributors, and retailers
will be offered an incredible variety of new and thrilling opportunities. In
the next Virtual Vino, we hope to hear even more of your ideas and find new
ways to merge winemaking with social media.

Still to come: Make sure
to check the www.italianmade.com/Vino2011 for event images and to be
sure to download from GoogleBooks the newest edition of The Wines of Italy.

We hope that this is just
the start of the conversation, and that you’ll continue to Tweet away, tagging
your comments on Italian wine with #virtualvino. We plan on keeping this blog
active, sharing news on Italian wines in America, and we look forward to
continuing our dialogue with you here, on Twitter and on Facebook.

This was an incredible
week for Italian wine, and we hope you’ll join us again in 2012!