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August 17, 2008 | Andrew Kamphuis

Vinocamp Recap...

Yesterday, Jason and I spent the day at VinoCamp Vancouver.

What is VinoCamp? Their definition is that "This is definitely not the wine festival". Vinocamp is about bringing wine, people and technology together in one place, making wine accessible, educational and fun.

There was a great line up of speakers (and wine) and the sessions included:

1) BC Wine Regions - Kathy Malone the Wine Maker at Artisan Wine Co. It was interesting learning about all the areas where wine was grown in BC and the breakdown of varietals in each region (The Fraser Valley is only 1% of all the wine in BC). Jason and I were lucky enough to talk to Kathy at a break and she is very knowledgable and passionate about BC wines. (Artisan Wine Co is a client of ours, and we are going to launch their website shortly).

2) Beyond Homemade - Brad Cooper the Winemaker at Township 7. Interestingly Brad really promoted the Crushpad concept as an alternative to homemade wines. At Vin|65 we built the commerce platform for Crushpad and I've been down to Crushpad myself, so it was interesting to here Brad's comments about the Crushpad concept. (Brad has a blog here that is worth subscribing too)

3) Food & Wine Pairing 101 - Michelle Bouffard and Michaela Morris from HouseWine.ca. These two ladies gave a very dynamic talk and explained how the weight of the dish, the intensity of the dish, the acidity, etc all come into play when pairing the wine. (There were a lot of helpful tips and 4 rules of thumb, unfortunately I can now only remember the first couple.) Michelle and Michaela were definately the best dressed at VinoCamp, but I couldn't persuade Jason to get a picture with them.

4) The Glass as a Messenger - David Sanders from Riedel Crystal. This was by far the best talk of the day. I myself and alot of others in the crowd were skeptical as to how much a difference the wine glass made in tasting wine (sure nice stemware goes well with nice wine, but does it matter that much?). We tried 4 different wines in 5 glasses and the taste of the wines were remarkably different from glass to glass. Yes remarkably different, and the right glass definately enhanced the wine, and the wrong glass either dulls or adds negative attributes to the wine. (I think I will find myself buying a couple more cases of glasses in the near future.)

5) Indian food and Wine Pairing - Bal Arneson, Chef. Bal's talk was fairly interesting (but unfortunately I had too much great wine and food by this part of the day, I was dosing off)

6) Organic/Sustainable Winemaking - Anthony Nicalo from Farmstead Wines.

7) Wine Blogging - Kelly Robson, Wine Blogger and Columnist, Chatelaine Magazine.

All in all, it was a great un-conference. I'll definately be attending next year. Lots of the crowd were tech people so a number of people were live blogging, posting pictures to flickr and tweeting throughout the day (read full session reviews by some of the live bloggers - DrinksAfterDark.com, Full-Bodied.Blogspot.com, Matthew Simpson, Stretched.ca, and view a lot of photos on Flickr)

Aug 17, 2008 at 11:15 PM

Read the full article here.

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August 12, 2008 | Andrew Kamphuis

This is your brain on wine!

An interesting article on Israeli Wine Direct blog talking about the intersection of our brains and wine.

On the internet side of things:

Internet marketers have a huge advantage over brick-n-mortar shops in that they can easily test different ways to present the wine, pricing strategies, etc. (Always be testing).
Internet markets can let customers do some of their own categorization.
Free shipping as an incentive outperforms other wine discounts.

And in general interest:

Group dynamics definitely affect wine tasting. If one of the group of friends tasted the wine and declared it to be awful, it's likely that others might find defects too. (We see this in our wine tastings we are doing with our facebook group)
Discounted wines don't taste as well as a wine bought at full retail.
People don’t just think expensive wines taste better, they actually DO taste better (as measured by brain scans) - even when the cheap and expensive wines are the exact same product.

(Article was found via the How to Change the World blog)

Aug 12, 2008 at 10:15 PM

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August 9, 2008 | Andrew Kamphuis

Does your website show your personality?

This past week I've been reading about the personality of people and personalities of websites. The information I've been reading groups people (ie. logical, emotional, spontaneous, competitive, methodical, humanistic) and then determines how to setup your site to target different personalities.

If you have a large audience, I can see how setting your website to target different people could be important, but what about having your company personality show through on your website?

On a recent company holiday, Brent, Peter, Jason and myself visited Rollingdale Winery. We had heard a few things about this winery on our Okanagan Wines facebook group and decided to go check it out.

To get to Rollingdale, you drive down this long dirt driveway and pull up to a quonset. A couple dogs were running around (or maybe it was just one). A younger guy with a tatooed arm came out and greeted us. His name with Kyp. At first glance we weren't too sure about this place. (A picture of Kyp inside the quonset is on the Okanagan Wines facebook group).

We went inside the quonset for a tasting. From here everything changed. Kyp had an amazing passion for their wine. They also had some great tasting wine. Overall it was an amazing atmosphere and you got the impression that these guys really poured their soul into their wine. (We have purchased more wine from Rollingdale than any other winery over the past month).

Fast forward this story and visit Rollingdales website. These guys make some great wine, and have a tasting room with a great personality, but none of it shows in their website. I would like to take Kyp and just inject him into their website.

So in thinking about 'website personalities' for a week, and talking about it Friday in our office, I kind of feel like this Vin | 65 site might need a bit more personality.

So I'm going to start off with a few pictures. When we are on holidays, here's what we look like from the back...

And here's what we look like from the front (standing in the arch at Mission Hill).

Left to right is Brent, Ryan, Jason, and myself (Andrew). Brent is sales. Ryan is a friend of Brent's who came on our company holiday. Jason handles our servers. I do lots of the programming.

A couple of important people are missing from the picture. Peter (or designer) is the person behind the camera in this shot. Christina, our bookkeeper didn't come on the trip.

While all the people in the picture look fairly young, I can tell you that each and everyone of us has a deep passion for the web, and while we might not have the deep knowledge possessed by many wine makers, we do have a passion for wine. If you have a chance to talk to any team member, I'm confident this passion will shine through.

Over the next few months, I'm going to attempt to put more of our company personality in this site. If you have any thoughts on adding personality to your website, or to our website, we would like to hear them.

Aug 9, 2008 at 11:08 PM

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August 1, 2008 | Andrew Kamphuis

If your wine won an award today, how long would it take you to feature that wine on the home page of your Web site?

Mike Duffy from The Winery Website Report poses a couple of thought provoking question on his blog yesterday to see if your winery is web-oriented.

If your wine won an award today, how long would it take you to feature that wine on the home page of your Web site.
How long would it take to get the press release up on your site?

If you want to comment back, please do it on Mike's original post.

I personally feel that if you don't have a person in charge of your website, or you don't have a system in place - it's going to take a lot longer than a day to do either of those tasks.

Aug 1, 2008 at 7:33 AM