The “Anything But Chardonnay” Days are long gone… time to rediscover this fabulous varietal.

It’s not long to go until the Third Annual Chardonnay day on 24 May, 2012. It’s the perfect excuse to be exploring the range of great Chardonnay styles being made across the world, and particularly across Australia and New Zealand.

According to Winemakers’ Federation of Australia (via Aust and NZ Wine Industry Directory), Chardonnay was the leading grape varietal crushed in 2011 – accounting for over 48% of total white wines crushed in Australia. There’s endless quotes and commentary on the quality and stylistic changes that have taken place by Chardonnay producers on a global scale (no longer about big oaked Chardonnays), and days like #chardDay are a perfect opportunity to discover the vast amount of styles being made. It’s no longer the days of “Anything But Chardonnay”, but as Sally Scarborough quoted to me last week, more along the lines of “Always Buy Chardonnay.”

Peter Bourne (The Wine Man), David Bicknell (Oakridge Wines) and Andrew Spinaze (Tyrrells Wines) give you  an insight into the evolution of Australian Charonnay at last years #chardDay event at Coast Restaurant in Sydney (yes it was a huge event and there’s some background noise).

So what exactly is Chardonnay Day?

This is a global day to talk about Chardonnay via social media platforms. There’s no concurrent tasting, conversations will take place in the time zone of country participating. Anyone can get involved. Simply post up comments on twitter, facebook, youtube , foursquare or other social media platforms. You simply need to use the #chardDay in your posts/ tweets and follow the conversations taking place on the day.

In 2011, Chardonnay day tweets reached millions of people across the world, with Australians getting involved at venues across the country as you’ll see from some of these photos https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150619858750512.692663.196942140511&type=3

If you’re new to Virtual Wine Tastings, here’s an older blog post on how to participate

Love Chardonnay and want to get involved?

• Check out the official Spotlight Mobile app to see where there’s a venue near you hosting a tasting
• Michael Ellis also has a list of venues around Australia that are hosting tastings on the Wine Punter Blog
• Open a bottle of Chardonnay at home and use #ChardDay to get involved remotely.

Here’s a few tips for Wineries to maximize your participation

• Engage with consumers – sell trial packs of your chardonnay in advance – whether this is a special Chardonnay trial pack on your website, special offers on your Chardonnay through cellar door, features in your eNewsletters or deals to the trade it’s an opportunity to get trial of your products and get consumers tasting. Help the understand how the day works and get them talking about your products

• Make it easy to join in the conversation – many consumers are intimidated to talk about the wines, particularly on twitter. Help them get involved in the conversations – print out a sheet of your tasting notes to put in with packs sold and create a letter to include on what is chardonnay day and how they can get involved.

• Create content in advance – Don’t leave it to the last minute to start planning. Those who have had success with similar days in the past have thought about their participation in advance and created relevant content. Videos, blog posts, having tasting notes accessible will allow you to tell your messages. You can pre-load some content via platforms like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck so think about the messages you’re trying to convey.

• Organise a meet up – Creating an opportunity for people to get involved and meet up is a great way of sharing the wines. This can be as simple as a tasting in your cellar door on the day, approaching local venues about hosting a tasting or just getting together with friends. Whilst not mandatory it makes it easy to follow along with the conversations by having a big screen and watching the flow of conversations on a program like www.twitterfall.com or tweetdeck.com makes it easy to see the conversations taking place all over the world.

• Collaborate with others – In many cases there’s a regional/ stylistic story to be told as well as a brand message. Talk to your regional wine association about how you can create some regional content and work together to get the message out. A great way to create some videos in advance. If your own cellar door is not participating, why not see if you can get some other producers from your region together and sample your wines up against other international examples?

Retailers/ Restaurants/ Sommeliers- generate some incremental sales… 

This is also a great opportunity for you to generate some incremental sales and generate some further understanding of different styles of chardonnay being produced. Why not consider:

• Tastings on the day – in store tastings on chardonnays. Talk to consumers about the different styles and regions and get your producers involved.
• Chardonnay by the glass specials for the week of Chardonnay Day or specific food matches with Chardonnay on the menu
• Mixed cases of regional Chardonnays sold in advance in tasting packs so people can get involved

If you need more information, send me a tweet to @mastermindTB or email me on Trish@mastermindconsulting.com.au – happy to help you spread the word and get more involved.

What’s all the buzz about Instagram about?

There’s been lots of hype this week over Facebook’s $1billion acquisition of the 2-year-old photo sharing application Instagram. Whether the price tag is justified, this is one app to look further into. It’s been the #1 downloaded app on the apple istore this week and been an instant hit on Google play.

Over 30 Million people have used Instagram and download on their Iphone since the application launched in January 2011. It’s my favourite Iphone app by a long shot, but I know that for many of you reading this post, Instagram may not be an app that you’ve used as part of your social media tool kit. The good news is that Instagram is also now available for Android users too, so there’s a much greater audience who can use and share.

What is Instagram?

Instagram allows you to share your photos in a simple stream with friends to see. You can also play with the filters of the images to create better image effects and share instantly to facebook/ twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, Posterous etc.

You can follow other users’ photo stream and once followed their stream will appear on your news feed. You can also browse through the “popular” section to find users with similar interests to look at.

It’s also a great tool for creating content for those who are not avid tweeters or facebook users. You can download instagram on the phone of your winemaker, chef or staff who have access to content that can be shared in a visual format. Connect up your social networks, given them some brief training on the messages you’re trying to convey and you have a rich stream of photo content to access.

It’s as simple as taking the photo, applying the relevant filters, putting a description and hash tags and then you can send to your social media networks. The integration of Instagram photos within a facebook feed is also a huge benefit – the photos display in a large format and much more of a feature than using twitpic on your facebook page.

Ways to get the most out of using the app

• Play with the filters – test out what different filters look like on your photos and work out which ones you prefer and which give the best visual effects.
• Add Hashtags to your posts – it’s a way of finding other like-minded people on Instagram, but be specific in your hash tags to make it easier to find.
• Follow people with similar interests
• Geotag your photos – Like using hashtags, geotagging provides another data point that can be used to categorize and display content.
• Pay attention to what works -occasionally looking at the popular photos gives you an idea about what people want to see and what is most popular.

Some other Instagram related tools/ sites you might not have known about.

There’s literally hundreds of Instagram related sites to help you manage and monitor your Instagram photos stream. Here’s just a few you may like to look into further.

• Searching for users or Hashtags – http://searchinstagram.com – Allows you to search for users, hash tags and display these images
• Viewing Instagram via the web and searching from your desktop (remember this was designed as a mobile platform) -http://extragr.am/ or http://web.stagram.com/
• Backing up Instagram Photos – Instatport helps you download to your desktop http://instaport.me/
• Photo Gallery – http://listagr.am – browse the life of your friends through a series of pictures on Instagram. It searches the Instagram user’s public photo archive from the URL of one photo and shows like Flickr’s photo stream.
• The analytics behind your Instagram Account – http://statigr.am/ – Allows you to look at some of the analytics of your account – who has commented, who follows you etc. There’s also a cool tool to allow you to create a facebook cover of your 50 last instagram photos.

 Why not follow me on Instagram?  Instagram.com/Trishbarry

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