A GUIDE TO (wine) BLOGGING

Posted by Tom Wark on Jul 6, 2006

Well, I read it…and with great anticipation.

Hugh McLeod’s "Stormhoek’s Guide To Wine Blogging"  was something I really was looking forward to reading. In the first place Hugh has proven himself quite the forward thinker when it comes to communicating anew in the world of blogs and on-line for the purpose of business development. He’s also used his popular Gaping Void Blog to help promote Stormhoek Winery, a South African venture that has done quite well in the UK and was recently introduced into the U.S. market. Add to all this, I have an interest in wine blogging.

Having read the illustrated guide I’m impressed that Hugh understood his audience well enough (it will be published in a Drink Magazine–a trade magazine for the corporate types) to make this little guide not so much about wine blogging as about blogging in general. There is nothing in the "Guide to Wine Blogging" that isn’t appropriate to any company producing any product. It might have been named, "The Short and Illustrated Guide to Corporate Blogging".

That said, I guess I’m a little disappointed. I’d really love to see a true guide for wineries that are considering adding a blog to their arsenal of marketing tools. The Stormhoek-financed effort by McLeod suggests there is very little about wine or wine lovers that should lead potential winery bloggers to do things slightly differently than say a blogger writing for a toy company.

Can that really be the case? In the world of blogging is wine like toys, like soap, like software, like widgets?

I’m almost sure this isn’t the case.

For example, I know this about the practice of winery blogging:

1. Your audience is far more interested in wine than the average person: that means you can assume more about their knowledge base as you write

2. Chances are, based on the demographics of the highly motivated wine lover, that their income is higher than average and they have an higher than average education level. This means you can touch on the notion of luxury goods as well as luxury services more often than if you were writing a for, say, a music production company.

3. Wine lovers tend to associate wines with the winemaker. This means they are probably looking for some sort of a dialog directly with the person who is pressing the grapes.

This little list could easily be expanded to more than 20 items that speak directly to winery-connected bloggers and blogs. However, it would be appropriate for a far smaller audience than Hugh’s more generic guide to wine blogging.

A guide to wine blogging, both for wine loving bloggers as well as winery-related bloggers would be a very good thing. And, it would be a very generous project given the small audience it would have. Perhaps we’ll see one in the coming months. Whoever does it should give a hat tip to Stormhoek and Hugh McLeod for the inspiration.