[Cross posted from my New York wine community, theLocalSip blog.]

It’s the end of August.

My technical co-founder Gary LaRock is impatiently waiting for me to say ‘go’ and push theLocalSip site live.

I’m super nervous. We’re not ready. Nothing is vaguely perfect.

I’d been schlepping all over the city on weekends for months, laptop and mifi in hand, selling the dream of a connected New York wine community grounded in neighborhood wine shops.

We had a handful of wonderful early adopters signed on. But only five tastings were live for the coming week! We had a platform that worked really well (thanks Gary!) and immense enthusiasm from the shops…so we just did it and went live.

Five months later

Some 35 New York wine shops across 20 different neighborhoods have joined the community. They’ve hosted 575 tastings as of today, poured 1400 different wines to thousands of New Yorkers in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Over a thousand wines are available for purchase online today with a click for free delivery in your neighborhood or to be shipped nationally. We have inquiries from wine shops waiting for us to go West and South with the community platform should we decide to.

We are still very much a neonatal community. At the very beginning of an evolving social and commercial platform. But there is a dynamic rumbling going on. Something real has touched people and merchants. Something is resonating and taking shape with every interaction.

Thousands of people have discovered new shops, new tastings, new wines, and made new friends by having, for the first time, a way to look across the city: by neighborhood, by wine, by referral, by event.

We believe that wine needs to be sold, person-to-person. We believe that the web is an underused runway of immense power to connect people to their neighborhood shops, connect people’s wine referrals to their networks nationally, to make wine part of our social fabric and insure that every time we share a wine, you can buy it with a click.

We’ve discovered that wine shops produce great content (every word on theLocalSip is shop created), and are the prime influencers of taste. They are the pebble in the pond causing the ripples of awareness for new wines, for new regions and conversations around wine, amongst people everywhere.

With our sponsorship of SherryFest, we crossed a big threshold.

In October, twenty-seven shops across Manhattan and Brooklyn organized themselves through theLocalSip platform and hosted free tastings of Sherry to thousands of wine lovers and shoppers everywhere in New York. This is community education and enjoyment and commerce at its best.  A real world reaffirmation that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when community dynamics catch hold.

We are deep into planning what’s next for theLocalSip. Changes are a-coming in the New Year.

If it is wine and food related in New York’s neighborhoods, theLocalSip will be the place to find it. Dinners, tastings, music and art events…you name it.

We are opening up the platform to bring in not just our core enthusiasts but also a broader swipe of New Yorkers who love wine as part of their lives, but don’t define themselves around it. We’ve also gotten to know our boutique distributors and importers and our local online mags and bloggers, and will be giving them real ways to participate in the community platform.

The toughest nut to crack is to figure out how to take the face-to-face, person-to-person exchanges that happen in a shop to the web, to allow our shops to become a national resource for launching and selling wine online. We are constantly moving the pieces around and will continue to do so until we find the secret human sauce to make this powerful connection work online.

Our dream is to grow theLocalSip into a wine tasting community that changes how people discover, taste, share and buy wine. A marketplace connecting wine lovers with the best wine shops in the country and the most interesting winemakers across the globe.

We are getting there. Community takes time and moves at its own pace. We’ve had a great start, taken with measured strides and care this year.

So thank you all for participating and contributing. Have a great New Year!

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2012 in photos from the tastings on Facebook. We could use some help tagging!