The Impact of Wine Library TV going Mainstream
Blogging was once a phenomenon, but has recently made the transition into mainstream media and the lives of people around the world. According to business week, there are over 15 million active blogs as of March 2007. This number seems a bit low, considering anyone with a MySpace account has a blog.
Regardless of how many blogs there are, it’s more about how many people are reading them and their relative influence. It seems that general readership of wine blogs has been increasing, with a proportional increase in their influence. So it was just a matter of time before a wine blogger went mainstream, and brought his or her palate to the world.
What we didn’t know, was that it wasn’t going to happen through the written word, but rather through a different medium. Enter streaming video. Thanks to advances in technology (mainly flash), video players can be imbedded directly onto a webpage. This opened up the door for the next generation of blogging, vlogs.
There are clear benefits of using video as a communication tool. Certain emotions and feelings as well as non verbal cues can be conveyed, which would be lost in words. More importantly, video allows people to have short attention spans. It’s much easier to watch a five minute video then to read a 5,000 word article.
However, it does take a certain person to star in a video. Anyone who can put together a decent sentence can write a blog post. But to record a fun, entertaining vlog that people will actually watch is a different story. If someone could come along and make an interesting wine vlog, it could be gold…
Solid gold that is. And Gary Vay-Ner-Chuck certainly has “brought the thunder.” And it’s official, Gary’s Wine Library TV has gone mainstream. Last week, TIME magazine featured an article on Gary titled Totally Uncorked.
Although rather coarse in it’s description of the Wine Library TV phenomenon, the article does hit on some very important points. That Gary has what it takes to engage, entertain and relate to his audience about a subject that has been historically elitist. “He’s more hyper than Emeril, more cheerful than Rachael Ray, more street than Bobby Flay and cockier than all of them combined.”
I don’t know about “cockier” than all of them combined, come on, Bobby Flay. Enough said. What’s more important than the actually content of the article was fact that a wine blogger is getting mainstream media attention. This isn’t the first time either, CNBC ran a story on Wine Library TV you can see here.
Gary’s tag line is “changing the wine world,” which is a rather bold statement. However ambitious, it seems to be happening, with over 25,000 daily visitors to his vlog. This kind of influence is nothing to scoff at. His approach to wine is refreshing, and is a step in the right direction.
The wine industry needs someone like Gary to reach out into new markets and capture their attention. We need to scream from the roof tops “Hey! Wine isn’t all snobbery and elitism!” A similar stereotype had a strangle hold on golf, that is until Tiger Woods came along and changed everything.
Golf is more popular than ever, and in large part it was due to Tiger Woods showing that golf was not just an elitist game. Not saying that Gary is Tiger, but something similar is happening. Although many of you may disagree, the more we can bring wine to the masses the better.
Cheers to Gary and the WineLibrary team, keep the great episodes coming. You may think this post is biased because we advertise for WineLibrary, but this post was my honest assessment of the wine bloggosphere and Gary’s influence within it. If you don’t think so, leave me a comment.
Comments & Reviews
July 3, 2007 | drdebs
Are we sure Gary isn't Tiger? He just may be--great analogy! For what it's worth I think WLTV is great too, and have been a little shocked that more bloggers haven't cheered this development because even though it's a video blog, it's still a blog in my opinion.
July 3, 2007 | Ryan Fujiu
Debs, I agree completely. Its weird that other bloggers don't show more love to Gary. He's helping everyone out, a rising tide raises all ships, right? As far as the Tiger reference, maybe that was a bit much, considering Tiger is one of the more famous people in the world. But relatively, its probably not that far off base.
July 4, 2007 | JB
Okay, so I think Gary is talented, charismatic, and good for the wine community, online or off. However, it's hard to not take notice that most of the people writing about how great all this attention is for Gary (Dr. Debs an exception to this) also have big WLTV or Cork'd ads plastered on their sites.
Okay, I'm being slightly cynical. This is a good thing for ALL of us. But I would bet that there is a pretty clear correlation between the lack of love being shown in response this recent PR blitz and bloggers who are not in the "inner circle" so to speak.
Just a thought. There's a lot of envy out there and people tend to forget that in almost any industry (whether sports, wine or otherwise) there is room for more than one star. Also, I don't think that it's bad or wrong for some people to show skepticism. That can be a healthy thing too.
That said, I toast Gary and hope that I can successfully bottom feed off his stardom!
July 5, 2007 | Ryan Fujiu
JB, I understand that you guys are envious of Gary's success. He's doing great. We have been covering Gary for quite a while now, long before he started working with us. This post was about a wine blogger getting mainstream attention, not about promoting winelibrary.com or tv.winelibrary.com. If Domaine547.com gets a write up in TIME or a story on CNBC, we'd be more than happy to do a write up on you guys. We think its a big deal that he's getting this kind of attention, and hope it brings more people to wine blogs. I agree; it's not bad for some people to show skepticism, but only if there's legitimate reasons for it...
July 6, 2007 | JB
Hi Ryan,
I wasn't meaning to say that this isn't a legitimate story worth covering...nor did I mean to sound like we're fishing for you to write about us (though of course feel free!).
Really, I was just posing some questions, and pondering whether the lack of blogger love is a bit of a response to the PR machine that seems to be driving all of this attention around Gary. Maybe some bloggers, who consider themselves outside of the "mainstream" media, are just not enthusiastic about one of their own going mainstream, or being co-opted by the more traditional media.
Perhaps our phrasing of things was a bit off. And for the record I didn't say that we envied Gary's success...I said that "there's a lot of envy out there" referring to the blogger community as a whole. Though we'll be honest. We would include ourselves in the category of being envious -- but in a very self-aware, humble and benign kind of way.
July 7, 2007 | Jessica Diamond
I think its great that Gary has received such attention. He's fun to watch, and takes a unique approach to wine tasting. It's weird, I didn't know about him until recently, but now I watch almost every episode.
You must login to comment.