SURVEY RESULTS: We Are Strange People
What do we know about those special people who read wine blogs?
Call it unscientific. Call it a "fairly small sample" if you like. I’m going to call it "The results"
To this point 56 readers of this blog have taken the first-ever FERMENTATIONS SURVEY. The general subject: "How do you consume your wine media?" I wanted to share results from the first question of the survey. It says something interesting.
1. How often do you read about, listen to or view information on wine?
Eighty-four (84) Percent responded "DAILY".
Aren’t we the obsessed ones. I figure this is about the same stat you’d get from the same survey at any wine blog. The message is we aren’t like most other people, but we are typical of Internet-savvy media consumers.
There just aren’t many people in America who read about wine daily. Those that do are either connected to the wine business or semi-connected by virtue of the way wine has captured their interest and piqued their imagination. The vast majority of people don’t even think about wine, let alone read about it. Wine is for most a pleasant part of their meal from time to time or a pleasant part of the daily self-medicating routine. Those of us who seek out information on wine, and on the Internet in particular, on a daily basis account for a percentage of the population so small we’d have to take quite a hike just to get near single digits.
Why we have taken up wine is another question all together and one better suited to a book than a blog post.
But, it strikes me also that we are perfectly typical of that modern breed of media consumer who has incorporated the ability to seek out in a near professional way information on the Internet related to our obsession. There are blogs like ours for every hobby. Poker, mystery writers, civil war history, civil war reenactments, civil war era currency… This ability to find information and lots of it has become one of our skill sets. I’d bet that at least half the peole wh read FERMENTATIONS use this talent on a daily basis in their work life.
That this skill is even masterable tells us something about how the nature of information has changed and how wine information is disseminated today and how it is radically different it is than when I first started in the wine business in 1990. If you look out another 15 years you have to conclude that the wave of change is not nearly ready to retreat or even slow down.
My head starts to hurt when I even try to think how the wine media business and the delivery systems for this information will change in 15 years. I know this much. The way we choose to receive professionally written and legitimate wine information will be completely malleable by the consumers. If our interest is German Riesling then "German Riesling Today" will show up in our email or our FERC (Flexible Electronic Reading Scroll) weekly. And it will be beautiful in appearance. It will be printable and quickly archived. And we will probably do this through voice commands.
So I guess one of my daily conversation in 2020 will sound something like this:
"Open FERC Journal…California Pinot Noir Journal Today…Brighten screen….Volume off….Open article 1…Close article 1….Find Dehlinger Vineyards.com….Email Open…[email protected]….Close browser…Show All Wine Journal ratings…2015 Russain River Valley Pinot Noir…Open article 2….Close article 2…Archive Journal….Quit FERC Journal!
12.5% of those who responded to the survey said they read about wine 2 to 3 times per week.
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