Selling Wine the Web 2.0 Way

Forget about essence of black currants -- this wine tastes like a dead deer with cherries sprinkled on top. This is the kind of candid review uncorked by Vaynerchuk as host of Wine Library TV, an offshoot of his family's New Jersey retail business. His daily webcast is quirky, opinionated (he described one wine as tasting like "a gremlin who hasn't taken a shower in a while"), popular (80,000 viewers and growing) and inevitably digresses into the fortunes of his beloved New York Jets. Vaynerchuk will be a keynote speaker at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in New York. His advice: hustle, connect with your community, be honest and be yourself.

What have you learned about building a successful web show?

You have to feed your community. That's your differentiators from somebody that's on television. One of my key successes at first was answering every e-mail. I'm way behind, but I still do. You've got to spend so much time on the community part and less time on the content. So many people are so focused on the product or the content -- for example, with video bloggers it's the lighting, the graphics and editing. I have taped all 600 shows of Wine Library TV without ever, ever taking another take.

No second takes?

It's been one take every time. If the phone rings, so be it. No special graphics, nothing. I want to spend every minute of time working the community. Way too many people spend nine hours a day finishing an episode. That's absurd to me. As a small business trying to build viewership, you can't do that, no matter how great a show is. The big differentiator, and the big weapon, that people in new media have, is that they can be touchable and connected to their fan base. I want people to focus on that more.

Did you get into web TV because you wanted to have fun or because you thought it was a strategic business move?

Both. Something triggered in my mind that said I'm probably better off being Oprah than Target. I would say it was 90 percent business, and 10 percent fun. But it's so fun. What gets me excited in the morning is building businesses.

Did your shows help sales?

At first, sales decreased substantially. I was the CEO and it was culture shock for this company to lose me. I wasn't spending 15 hours a day trying to build Wine Library retail. My day used to be calling on CEOs and six figure clients and selling them tens of thousands of dollars of wine every day. That just stopped on a dime. But it's climbed back up. That's the kind of business you love, right? It doesn't rely on you at all and is still growing.

Almost 70 percent of the wines that have been on Wine Library I've panned. At first, I knew people would think I was just shilling wine. But what they didn't realize I had a much bigger global thought: I was trying to build personal brand equity. There are people driving four, five or six hours just to see where I tape the show and coming to Wine Library.

How big is your business?

We stopped reporting sales in 2005, but we were a $50 million company in 2005 and we've grown since.

You say you want to change the wine industry. What's wrong with it?

The global brand of wine is positioned as something people are intimidated by. Wine has been put on pedestal. That's what I want to change. I want people to really get excited by wine and know they have a good palate. I want to build wine self-esteem.

You described one wine as tasting like a pile of stinky clothes in college dorm room infested by loose hamsters. Not the kind of tasting notes we see in The Wine Spectator!

It's authenticity. If a wine tastes like a Rubik's cube to me -- because I've gnawed on one or two in my life -- then that's what I'm going to call it. Or Grape Big League Chew. I just want to be real, because when people taste it they're like, "Oh my god, this does taste like a Tootsie Roll!" The lesson there is authenticity trumps tradition.

What wine would you serve to the New York Jets?

I've been on record thousands of times -- including my fourth grade yearbook -- that I want to own the New York Jets. That's actually what I'm working towards. I'd love to host them. Obviously every player is different. Brett Favre, he's a good old country boy so he may need a rustic Barolo. Other players like Kerry Rhodes, he's very into Hollywood and nightlife, may want a good bottle of Cristal. Different people have different palates so every Jet player would have to be individually dissected.

Why would you rather have a million friends than a million bucks?