Gary Vaynerchuk, Wine Library TV
Hurricane Vay-ner-chuk
America’s Gary Vaynerchuk could well be shaping the future of wine commentary with his daily video blog Wine Library TV. Nick Ryan meets the man behind the mouth.
While this may look like just another article, in reality, it’s a sophisticated kind of demographic research. If you recognise the face to the left we can pretty safely mark you down in the tech-savvy, social-media-connected, amped and app’d column. If this fresh-faced, but slightly crazed visage is drawing a blank, then we’ll assume you think Twitter is a noise birds make and an iPad protects your corneas. We’ll also assume you have no idea that this man is turning the wine world on its head.
“I’m so cutting-edge I make people bleed,” says Gary Vaynerchuk, the 34-year-old Belarus-born, New Jersey-raised ball of atomic energy. Coming from anyone else, such a statement might seem arrogant, but the man who has been called “the first wine guru of the YouTube era” has the runs on the board to back such a claim.
Vaynerchuk’s harnessing of the internet as a tool to showcase his unique brand of wine commentary – and his masterful deployment of social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to build a fervent fan base for it – has become a leading case study for successful, profitable communication in a new age.
Even Decanter magazine, the clubby refuge of Broadbents and Spurriers and bastion of an archly British style of wine writing, could not ignore the barbarian at the gate, and named Vaynerchuk on its list of the most powerful people in wine.
To some his rise to prominence may seem to have the rapidity and subtlety of a cyclone, but dig deeper and it’s obvious this is a storm that’s been a long time brewing.
He first discovered an entrepreneurial streak as a teenager, turning his obsession with sport into a baseball-card-trading business that turned over US$1000 (A$1130) a week. Reading copies of Wine Spectator out the back of his father’s liquor store, he realised that wine wasn’t all that different to baseball cards – very collectible, expensive if rare and able to inspire a high level of geeky enthusiasm.
He was too young to start educating himself about wine in the usual way, so he set about training his palate based on what he could read in the tasting notes in magazines. If a wine supposedly had grassy notes he went and ate grass. A note on pinot gris sent him off on a mission licking salty stones. He may have been too young to smoke tobacco but that didn’t stop him chomping on a stogie to understand the character he saw often mentioned in writings on Bordeaux.
Once he was let loose on the family store he rapidly and radically transformed it, taking it from a modest local liquor outlet to one with an annual turnover of US$60 million (A$66 million). As he moved much of the business online, he developed the vehicle that made him the voice of wine on the web.
Wine Library TV, a video blog launched in 2006, is little more than one man, one camera and three open bottles, but these daily episodes, in which Vaynerchuk tastes and rates wines with the hyperactive energy of a frog in a blender, now attract 90,000 viewers per show, and he reckons he knows all of them.
He understands social media better than almost anyone and has used platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to build a loyal following and an enviably strong personal brand. “I love people,” he says without a skerrick of insincerity. “Social media is just a way to connect with a whole lot more of ’em.”
It was his mastery of this brave new world – he’s written a bestseller on how to use the internet to capitalise on a passion – that recently brought him to Australia.
Ostensibly here to speak at a social-media conference, Wine Australia nabbed him and put him in front of a bunch of tech-savvy winemakers. Tourism Australia also understood the importance of his visit, and laid on a helicopter to squeeze a visit to the Hunter Valley into an insanely tight schedule. Somehow I got caught up in the backwash of Hurricane Vaynerchuk, too.
The first thing you realise when you spend time with the man is that the shtick is genuine – perhaps knocked back a notch or two from the explosive energy of Wine Library TV, but still more lively than I’d be even after you drained every drop of my blood and replaced it with espresso and tequila.
The second thing you notice is a genuine love of wine and a palate that can walk the walk while the rest of the mouth talks the talk. But perhaps most impressive of all is the gymnastic nimbleness of the man’s mind and the way ideas pop out like loose change falls from a hole in your pocket.
He even had ideas on how to tackle one of the great mysteries of Australian wine – why won’t more people drink Hunter semillon? After landing in the Hunter, it was straight into a tasting of unbottled 2010 semillons divided into the valley’s main sub-districts. It didn’t take long for the excitement to build.
“This stuff has my entrepreneurial radar going nuts,” exclaimed Vaynerchuk, just a few glasses in. “Why isn’t this the wine that the top US sommeliers go nuts for like they have with grüner veltliner?” he asked himself as much as the rest of us. The parallels then got a little more flattering.
“You just need to look at the rise of riesling in the States to see where this could go,” he said, thinking aloud. “Go to any gathering of serious wine folk, sommeliers and high-end trade types in the States and they’re all drinking riesling. Why? Because its pure and unadulterated, it clearly expresses terroir, it has the ability to age and, perhaps most important of all, it’s a bit of a wine head’s niche. Now that sounds a hell of a lot like this stuff to me so why aren’t they all drinking Hunter semillon?”
It’s one thing to pose questions. It’s another thing entirely to provide answers.
“You know what I’d be doing? I’d be getting this stuff to the States as quickly as possible, getting it into the distribution pipeline by the beginning of June and making a big deal of this being the first wine of the global vintage,” he enthused. “Get wines like these on pour in a hot New York oyster bar, just as the weather warms up and people come out to play, make a virtue of its freshness, and it will go off. Then put an older one alongside it and you’ll blow minds.”
Vaynerchuk is acutely aware of the difficulties facing those trying to sell Australian wine in the US and has strong ideas on what’s causing the problem. “There are three things that all came together at once that have turned the US market away from you guys,” he told a group of Hunter Valley winemakers gathered at lunch. “One is the huge success of Yellowtail and the fact that for many people that is the strongest impression of Australian wine.
“You also get those big fruit-bomb wines that [Robert] Parker loved but that haven’t held together, and the people who went out a bought them feel they’ve been duped. They don’t blame Parker for that, they blame Australia.
“And then when Parker handed the reviewing of Australian wine to Jay Miller, you lost a lot of people who don’t respect Miller the way they respect Parker.”
But Vaynerchuk also sheets blame for the current predicament back on the Australian industry itself. “You have allowed others to tell your story for you and for their own ends. You’ve put your fate in the hands of others and you need to take back control.”
Wine Australia’s Paul Henry, who shepherded Vaynerchuk through his whirlwind trip of several days and is more aware than most of the difficulties Vaynerchuk describes, firmly agrees.
While he sees the irony in spending the time and energy persuading a key influencer to rethink Australian wine only for him to say you need to do the legwork yourself, he understands that’s what’s required in this brave new world where the internet has fragmented and democratised the flow of information.
“One of the things that Gary is really strong on is the huge value that lies in the story behind the wine,” says Henry.
New media presents a whole range of opportunities to tell those stories and Henry believes that’s the single strongest message from Vaynerchuk’s visit. “If you believe in your story, then you’ve got to own it,” says Henry. “We’ve invested more time and energy into our customers – the distributors – than the consumers, placed too many eggs into too few baskets and that has backfired. I think Gary has been able to show people that nobody can tell your story like you can.”
Acutely aware of the perils of placing too much faith in a single oracle, Henry is pleased and satisfied that all those who spent time with Vaynerchuk during his visit have picked up on his grassroots message. “I would hang my head in shame if the only thing that came from this trip was a bunch of people saying ‘Oh well, we’ve converted Gary now. Let’s sit back and he’ll do all the work for us,’ but thankfully that isn’t the case.
“The most pleasing thing is seeing winemakers come away with the determination to get out there and spread the word. They’ve got their game faces on and it’s great to see.”
While it appears many have been inspired to get out there, burn some shoe leather and press some flesh, those winemakers wanting to sell their stories might also want to investigate Vaynerchuk’s newest project. It’s a web venture called Cork’d, and he is typically ambitious when it comes to its intentions.
“I want this to be the greatest repository of wine content, for trade and consumers, anywhere on the internet,” says Vaynerchuk, without the slightest suggestion that it could be anything less. “I want 25 new articles from around the world going up on this thing every day. I want in-depth vintage reports from Tasmania alongside articles on the glories of great Chinon. I want the latest news from the Loire alongside a bunch of tasting notes on new pinots from Central Otago. I’m going to have someone solely dedicated to doing Skype interviews with winemakers from around the world to post every day. This is the kind of thing that traditional media could never do but the internet can.”
If these plans eventuate, Vaynerchuk’s already-considerable influence will become even greater. Perhaps, as has been written before, he might be the new Robert Parker.
“I have a great deal of respect for the man but the last thing I want to be is the next Robert Parker,” he insists. “I want to be the man who makes it possible for 10,000 Robert Parkers to emerge.”
Yet even in a world where such a thing is possible, and a phalanx of Parkers roam the regions, there can still only be one Gary Vaynerchuk.
PHOTOGRAPHY JULIE CRESPEL
This article is from the June/July 2010 issue of Gourmet Traveller WINE.