Geekiness has become a mainstream meme.
Across connected cultures everywhere.
In general, people are more random in their interests, more richly versed in the details and backstories around what they believe in and consume.
This is true for life; true for work.
Truly front and center around what we eat and drink.
We live at a time where we are inspired by categories of affinity—be they local or organic, raw or gluten free, artisanal, natural, indigenous or simply obscure.
We live at an exceptional time where we don’t eat things because they are organic, but we often refuse to eat them if they aren’t.
Equally, we live in a world that is backlashing after two decades of pushing everything up on the web and away from human touch. We are harnessing the web today not as a place but as a connector to people on the streets.
This has transfixed the behaviors of the consumer and redefined how we look at context and communications. This is very much evident in the wine world.
I’m not thinking about the top of the wine market that buys on brand and scarcity or the very bottom that buys solely on price. Neither the very fat middle where everyone from down-brand big names, the Club Ws, the flash sale sites, and even the US version of Naked Wines battle it out.
I’m thinking about the artisanal enthusiast segment. Loosely the top ten percent and growing chunk of a $41B US wine market.
The dynamics of this segment are a bit crazy.
Hundreds, maybe a few thousand producers, delivering wine and spirits through mostly small boutique distributors to vast number of shops, restaurants and bars. Alongside a growing direct to consumer, club and winery channel.
How all of these small producers find a channel for their products is a puzzle. How shops aggregate these dispersed communities of consumers into coherent businesses belies standard logic.
It’s happening though in the most counterintuitive and interesting way.
Not online at scale for the most part. But in small, real-world events with extended communities online and a network of micro brands that bubble up considerably larger than the sum of the parts.
There are two pieces meeting at the market middle:
A common language as consumer currency
This is the unbundling of information access. Geekish curiosity gobbling up details and domain expertise, creating a common vernacular for communications.
Of the hundreds of wine posts in my Instagram community, there are damn few (thankfully) sharing tasting notes. But there’s an infinite number of descriptors, check marks on how the fruit is grown, talks about sulfur, rambles about indigenous yeasts, pictures of rocks and soils, maps, the names of the winds from the South that impact fermentation in Marsala.
A layering in of terms about how, where and why wines are being made as the texture behind the story of winemaker and the place. As the means to express something beyond that we like it or we don’t.
It is the normalization of the obscure as a common language.
This is the natural context for communications and fodder for storytelling. Forging a language that is smart and interesting, dynamic and shared. It’s entertainment that teaches and fun that informs.
A decentralized marketplace without a common platform
This is the community and market side of the equation. A decentralized world with no one place, community or really a dominant network.
A loose confederation of bloggers, winemakers, exceptional shops, boutique importers. With a growing number of influential somms and in-shop experts, teaching and pouring the previously obscure and wonderful to an insatiably thirsty public.
It’s happening from the ground up.
Where I live in NY, at the best wine shops with deep communities of customers and strong neighborhood roots.
With winemaker dinners every week, partnering the producer, importer, retailer, restaurant with influencers, and through them, the broader market. A dinner with Frank Cornelissen for 40 driving a community of thousands on just how good his current vintage is.
There are endless informal, often impromptu tastings driven by street side signs and tweets. And a redefinition of educational events from restaurant/bar/schools like CorkBuzz, consumer festivals like SherryFest and the Natural Wine Week.
In Europe as well, where people like my buddy Andre Ribeirinho has created a family of Adegga Wine Markets. Celebrations that blend the curious, the enthusiast and the expert, food and wine, face-to-face human touch with seamless digital followup. And the rambling and quite wonderful, #winelovers community, created by my friend Luiz Alberto that spiderwebs across every wine region with enormous good will.
This is the golden age of wine for both the small producer and the enthusiast consumer. A time when geekiness is not nerdiness but simply the new normal to the interested and inspired. A time when on the ground connections are the very best way to create extended and online communities.
This is also a marketers and brand builders dream. Be they organizations, the merchants or in many cases the producer themselves.
It is not about hype or social buzz. Not about manufactured context.
This world is community driven, connected, common grounded with enormous potential to bring value to every piece of the commercial chain. To inspire, share knowledge and drive business in really simple and effective ways.
Few markets come together as perfectly and as palatably as this.
Lucky for us, this one is about wine.
