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wine in the news

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cruvee's groovy Print
Written by Nikitas Magel   

NM: So, it sounds like there's a lot of intelligent aggregation going on site-wide.  Even back on the Home page I notice that there's a section called What's Happening Now, which seems to be funneling wine information in real time.

EC: What's Happening Now is bringing the whole world of wine online.  A lot of that information is not only user-based, but also comes from the different wine blogs that we're monitoring; there are thousands of blogs we monitor, so when [entries] get published, we actually see that information, read it intelligently, and start putting it in that area.  There, you can find discussions of people opening and tasting their wines, and reviewing them.  Also, if someone's tasted a certain wine and then posted it on Twitter, it'll show up [in that section] as well.  It's all part of our [proprietary] technology: being able to take all the different things that are happening within and outside the site, consuming it intelligently, and then directing it to the individual Cruvee members as well as into that Home page section of What's Happening Now.

NM: It's looking like you and your team are at the epicenter of this burgeoning field of social wine media online.  The way I see it, there's a shift going on with media in general: the center of gravity is moving away from the traditional (print and TV-based) to the online-based.  Can you tell me some of your ideas about all this?

EC: It's an interesting question.  Obviously, the Millennials are taking over; let's put it that way!  And this is how they're going to access information — through sites like ours.  Now, while traditional media is no longer going to be the sole source of information, let's face it: magazines will always exist.  But people are wanting to get their information quickly and accurately, learn a little more about something than just what's actually being focused on (on a page of print media), and have the opportunity to purchase it from there.  [With online media], there's a much more fluid way for them to get immediate gratification, as opposed to doing their research through something more traditional.

NM: It sounds like we're on the same wavelength on that.  There's definitely a shift going on, and it remains to be seen how it's going to affect the consumption of mass media.  The question remains whether these newer internet-based resources and technologies are going to take over entirely, or rather create an entirely new niche in the exchange of wine information that will peacefully coexist alongside the more traditional wine media.

EC:  It's such a young market right now, too; it's only going to grow at this point.  So, that's another reason to get into this game early.  In order to be a leader, you've got to get out there and make it something of value for not only your own members, but — for us — we're also providing that same value for the wineries.  And because the information is going to be so widely used, so widespread, we'll be able to give that information to the wineries, and that's going to make sense for them to understand where their brand is [in the marketplace].

NM: Regarding the younger market that you mentioned, I wonder: by harnessing some of the online technologies that they're already their familiarity with, do you feel you might actually be increasing the interest and involvement in wine among younger people who are really only beginning to get into it and otherwise not know where to start, and who might be a little intimidated, confused, or even put-off by wine information as its been traditionally conveyed?

EC: Absolutely!  Like I said before, the Milennials are taking over.  Look, they're people who are comfortable with the web, comfortable to navigate through it to get the information they want, and this now just gives them an opportunity to [use those skills] to focus on their wine [interests].  Plus, you can see that we made Cruvee very easy, very approachable — if you look at the characters [or avatars] on our site, [you can see that] we wanted to remove any pretentiousness around wine so that people can come to the site and have it feel comfortable for them.  It's something that we want them to be able to go into, start learning about, and increase their knowledge on, so they can feel comfortable going out to eat and knowing a little more about wine, knowing what goes well with what and such, and take it from there.  So, yeah, absolutely, it's only a matter of time before everything [wine related] comes here.  We leverage the technology with our own stuff that we've created, try to give [users] some useful, valuable information, and connect them around [the web] to other people who might have similar tastes and also to the wineries.



 

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wine in the news

Please make the Cache directory writable.

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