Steve Heimoff ended his recent blog essay Are you Living Social with the question: “Can any social media relationship be as good as an old-fashioned relationship in which the participants actually meet in the real world, hang out together, eat and drink and laugh and talk with and see each other?” As good as? No, of course not. But since winery principals can’t do this personal meet and greet with the reach of social media, SM is a kind of hamburger helper, allowing the winery to use a new technology to extend the sort of connections that heretofore could only be conducted in the flesh. Which is pretty much what Steve wrote in the body of his post.

Yes, in the good old days, there were newsletters and other forms of communication, some very clever (Bonny Doon's comes to mind), which humanized and personalized the principal. But there was no real interaction.

If a winery is truly "living social" I suspect the vintner has to take the lead and not delegate, like Steve Mirassou and Jason Haas. Larger companies will have trouble, therefore, engaging at this level. SM can really only be effective at a smaller scale.

Take one example of Web 2.0 in operation: wine.woot.com. Two long time winemakers, Peter Wellington (”Sonoma Bouliste” in the comment exchanges) and Scott Harvey (”ScottHarveyWines”), have created significant communities of wine consumers who have formed bonds with them and with each other. By placing their blogs in this 3rd party channel they have immeasurably expanded their contact (and no doubt customer) base. They are contributing to consumer education and appreciation that they couldn’t do any other way, in large part because they take the time to have an online conversation.  Alas, they seemed to have stopped blogging on this third party site.

Very few blogs have this capacity.  One notable exception is PinotBlogger which has a broad readership, in part because Josh Hermsmeyer writes so well, and because it's interesting for the reader to be looking over his shoulder while he tries to get his winery off the ground.  But four years later, still no vino.