Bubble brothers’ contribution to wine marketing
April 18th, 2008
How to use the blogoshere as an wine exporter/ wine importer? Is there a way to see blogs as a tool to communicate with potential suppliers or clients? I don’t know the answer to this question. But I thought it would be a nice to try out something different (”different” at least for me). Judge for yourself, did it work?
In 2007 Tintoralba was looking for a wine importer in Ireland and England. As I did some research on the internet, I bumped into the Bubble Brothers blog, one of the first importers with a blog. I asked the owner Julian from Bubble Brothers in a comment on a post in May 2007 to check out our wines of garnacha tintorera. He looked like a passionate wine importer to me, with a weak spot for authentic Spanish wines. To make a long story short, Julian agreed to receive our samples and to taste the wines. So far, so good.
There was only one requirement from my side. Julian had to post publicly his own tasting notes and his comments on his blog. As an exporter the risk of getting bad publicity is always there. And of course bad we prefer to avoid it by all means. But this blogging thing is different. As an exporter I’m interested to see how internet and blogs are contributing to the way of communicating about wine in general. And from a marketing point of view I am interested how it affects the way of looking at the marketing of the Tintoralba wines.
I forced myself to think of this as an experiment and the worst thing that could happen was an unfavourable tasting note. In that case it would be just an opinion more next to a few hundred that can be found on several tasting note sites. Inmediately I though: “what if I would do this with all my clients and all future potential clients all around the world”? Not only would this conversation make it more transparent how a producer tries to get any importer interested in his wines, it would as well take away the fear to have no control over negative public tasting notes. As if any winery can ever have any real control over it!
As with any other sample I send to any serious wine importer in the world, it can take a while to get feedback. In this case Tintoralba sent the samples in June 2007. Julian already mentioned that he wouldn’t have a lot of time during the summer. In September Julian told me he was sorry. “no time”, he told me. But then in February 2008 “out of the blue”: Julian recommended the tintoralba dulce as a Valentine’s gift. A bit later AT LONG LAST was published. A very sportive title for the post, by the way! (Oh Julian, about the photo, how did you do it? It looks kind of arty)
Was it worth waiting? Yes, for me as an exporter it was. I may have taken Julian more time to give his comments on our wines. I don’t know if it always takes that much time to have the tasting notes ready. I suppose not. But having agreed to publish them made it probably more of a burden. Running a blog can be a time consuming hobby. And it will take some time to get the right skills. I’ve been reading copy blogger for a year know, and I’m still doing about everything wrong.
The interesting part of it is that we should do these kind of things more often with more importers: in this way anybody who’s interested in our wines will be able to search for opinions from other importers on Tintoralba. If I was an importer (as I used to be when I worked when I was living in the Netherlands) I would love to read this kind of information. It gives you a pretty good idea of the wines and the producer as well.
I’m asking myself this question: could the post AT LONG LAST by Julian be the reason for any importer out there to contact me? I sure hope so.
What about our relation with Bubble Brothers? We don’t know each other personally, we have never even phoned (Am I a lousy exporter or what?). I do hope to meet Julian during the next London Wine Fair. And not only to tell him that Tintoralba would love the Bubble Brothers to be a future client, but also to thank Julian personally as a fellow blogger.
If you are an importer of wines and you have a blog, do what Julian did or invent something new. We’re always open to new things. Don’t hesitate, contact Tintoralba, the first cooperative blog in the world (I like to believe we are the first cooperative blog, can somebody please confirm we are!)
Un saludo from the Tintoralba team
- Emilio
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April 23rd, 2008 at 9:03 am
Emilio,
Great post! Whether or not yours is the first blog by a cooperative - my guess is yes - this post shows that Tintoralba is truly open to the potential of blogging.
All the best,
Steven
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:24 pm
thank you Steven. With your wine experience on the internet your “yes” guess sounds pretty definite to me.
I hereby declare Tintoralba’s blog as the first Coop blog in the whole world!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks for your post on your blog. I hope to be able to inspire you to write more posts about our future actions as well
Keep up the good writing on “tempranillo”.
Emilio (export manager for Bodegas Tintoralba)