Adon: My focus is almost entirely on wineries since they are who I mostly work with. But your point about wine shops is a good one. I would think it is somewhat of a two-edged sword for them, using social marketing to improve traffic to their stores but services like yours tend to drive prices down for their online sales. Not that I'm complaining, as a consumer I use Wine-Searcher quite a bit to find the best values.
Hope to see you again at a conference this year. Cheers!
@raghav: Good point. I'll have to learn more about your service; looks interesting.
Thanks, Paul. I would also hope to see New Zealand Pinot and Cab blends get some additional traction in the American market. After all, man can not live by SB alone ;-)
Josh: Sure, remix the quote as you would like and let me know when you post. Cheers!
@Bev: If you are looking for wine and food pairing, check out Hello Vino. I haven't seen an app doing exactly what you are looking for but I'm sure someone will do something similar if it's not out there already.
Thanks, Marco. The next podcast is already well on the way to release... glad (and humbled) that you and many others are still subscribed.
Hi Wendy: This wine is very sweet but does have enough acidity to stand up to a dessert as long as you don't go too sweet. I would pair it with a fruit dessert or pie. Peach or apricot would probably be best. Or you would just have the wine by itself for dessert.
@Sondora Thanks! Yep, I'm back and have a few surprises for the New Year, too.
It's partly due to Goosecross using a CMS and Neal not updating their site very much since 2003. If you use Wordpress as your sites back-end, you will see better SEO and the platform will encourage more frequent updating of content which search engines love. But you already knew that ;-)
You could just hire one of us to take care of such details, too.
I was suggesting that wineries should own the first page of search results for their specific wines and not generic terms like varietal or even region. For example when you search on 'Goosecross Chardonnay 2007' you get the information the winery has provided as the first result. Do the same for 'Neal Family Cabernet 2003' and you get CellarTracker, Snooth and other retailers before the winery. They might end up selling the wine via those retailers but consumers like to buy directly from the winery particularly if they are limited production or hard to find at retail. The bottom line is to try to control the user experience and maybe capture the sale. Being the first or second result will be important as consumers start to use their mobile devices to make purchases.
I recommend producing compelling content regularly and use a CMS like Wordpress to power your website as the best way to SEO your web presence. If you want to do the fancy keyword stuff, fine, but I wouldn't start there.
What do you think Mr. Winery Website Report? ;-)