How a South African winery is stealing mindshare from Napa competitors

We’ve written before about Web 2.0 and the wine industry and how very few local wineries seem to truly ‘get it’.

Today, Business 2.0 has a write-up on Stormhoek Winery, a small South African outfit that has taken to the blogosphere (with assistance from Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid) in a big way and is seeing an impressive business impact as a result.

The article talks about how Stormhoek executed a strategy that enabled it to engage with A-List tech industry bloggers such as Robert Scoble and Dave Winer at first, which is not a bad strategy. Afterall, it’s these guys who are the online trendsetters. And how have things progressed from there?

The buzz has spread beyond the tech community. Supermarkets and wine stores, including U.K. supermarket giant Tesco, are giving valuable shelf space to Stormhoek wines. That’s no small feat, with thousands of competing wineries hawking pretty good products for about $10.

Check out the full article, it makes for a decent case study (particularly for any of you smaller Napa Valley wineries looking to break through the noise!)…

Cheers guys, keep up the excellent work!

TechTags Plugin [ Napa | Napa Valley | Stormhoek | Stormhoek Winery | winery blogs | Hugh MacLeod | gapingvoid | Robert Scoble | Dave Winer | Web 2.0 ]

About the Author

TrevR has written 706 posts on The Cork Board. He was born and aged in the Napa Valley and has a passion for wine, writing and social media, which led him to co-found this blog in early 2007. Follow him on Twitter @TrevR.