Few months ago, DiWineTaste has released a new polls service in its WEB site. We did that because we think that listening to our reader's opinion is very important to us. We introduced some polls about communication and wine, and in January, we discovered interesting results. In first rank, at least up to now, you readers have voted “events and tasting”, at the second place “internet”, at the third “enological guides” and then “visits to wine-cellars”. These results are important and show how the preferences about media, involved in wine, have changed. The so called consumer awareness is more and more discussed and it is not by chance if wine lovers want to know more about it, to directly taste the product in occasion of enogastronomical or tasting events about a specific subject. Media talk a lot about wine and producers frequently debate about the numbers of events having the wine as a protagonist. Anyway, more and more people, younger and older, travel many kilometers in order to go to events, which give them the chance to taste their favorite wines as well as discovering new ones.

 The same consideration is true for the visits to wineries, which are getting more and more popular in Italy. There are, for example, wine lovers from abroad, which run across Italy by bus, in order to get to Sicily, with the specific intent of visit just one winery. Are they wine fundamentalists? No, as it simply is in our country as well as and abroad, the interest for the beverage of Bacchus and the will to understand it better are increasing more and more. Wineries are getting more and more organized, even by creating a real receptive service, made by experienced people capable of speaking different languages. Sometimes, the wineries give the chance, by paying an amount, to arrange a lunch, inside the winery itself, with typical local dishes. Wine lovers, among smell of wine and barrique, can experiment the synthesis between wine and terroir, to say it the French way. Many guides suggest which wineries are opened to visitors. And in Italy, there are many! Movies like “Sideways”, which tells the story of two friends visiting wineries in California, has created “the fashion of going around wineries”. Or events, such as the “Wine Day”, organized by Movimento del Turismo del Vino (Organization for Wine Tourism), have opened wineries to wine lovers while contributing to develop the culture of wine.

 We would however like to share a consideration with you: the second place of the polls is occupied by internet in the ranking of the preferred media for learning about wine. And we admit that, we are happy about this result, as we do our very best every month in order to give you our best, to share information about wine and other subjects about enogastronomy with you. Italy is among the countries in which newspapers are read by few people and this also applies to wine magazines, too. There surely are many reasons for this. The economical condition we are passing through, forces people to save the money for the subscription to a magazine or to buy it in the kiosk, because of its high cost. Or more simply, we have no time to go to the kiosk and to buy the preferred magazine, because we all are always in a hurry. Internet gives the chance, most of the times, to read free magazines about wine. Internet is easy to use, most of the time providing interactivity, such as our polls, guides and EnoGames, all being appreciated by our readers. Our web site, in Italian and English, is read not only in Italy, but also abroad, especially in the United States of America, Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea.

 Wine is a very special product and communication about it is something of its own. Communicating wine is not the same of communicating a toothpaste. And this is not something clear to understand. According to some points of view, communication about wine is very traditional even nowadays, and most of the times it is simply too much! There are some communication media which are scarcely considered for the communication of wine, and sometimes they are not even considered at all. This is the case of cinema or television, for example. Only few wines for daily consumption are advertised on TV, while we rarely see a wine commercial at the cinema. Producers prefer to invest in communication on other media, especially on specialized magazines and on the ones destined to professionals (restaurants, wine-bars, pizza houses, hotels). Wine is communicated by public relations activities, by means of events organization, tasting, enogastronomical and cultural events. Moreover, producers usually meet wine professionals in occasion of exhibitions. An example is Vinitaly - which is organized in Verona, in April - the most important wine event in Italy, which attracts people from all the country and wineries from all over the world.

 A recent survey, made by the Italian press agency Ansa, put the attention on the diminishing interest for daily newspapers, while internet is getting more and more used for reading news. Although we are very sorry for the press, this seems to be a realistic scene. The investments on communication by producers do not take in consideration the trends about the fruition of communication media by consumers. This happens because most of Italian producers do not have access to data and researches or the chance to finance surveys, because they are too expensive. Communication is one of the point of marketing, which, at least in the wine field, is mainly done by intuition and not according to numbers and trends, which are in the hands of big companies. In the wine field, it is very difficult to see “real marketing”, because most of wine companies are not structured with a specialized sector.

 Today, many wine companies have a WEB site, but few take advantage of this dynamic mean. Many WEB sites are “static”, without even considering the characteristics this medium could offer, they are never updated or this rarely happens. Few companies, on the contrary, use internet to continuously communicate to their public (consumers, suppliers, buyers of great supermarkets chains, prospects) and we are not talking about wine e-commerce only, which in Italy does not take off, because buyers are afraid of using their credit cards on the internet or simply because they are not accustomed to that. In Italy, there are company web sites, very famous all over the world, which are not being updated for many years. Even companies having financial and human resources to do that, most of the times neglect this aspect. For small wine companies this is more difficult, but sometimes, their web sites are up to date. Internet is a medium offering huge potentialities and attract people of different ages, even older ones, but it is necessary to use it with a precise communication strategy, which is, most of the times, nonexistent. This is the real problem in the wine business: most of the cases, the lack of a marketing strategy, which includes the strategy of product, as well communication, distribution and price. There is still too much instinct in this field and wineries are too traditional.

 In this column are published our reader's mail. If you have any comment or any question or just want to express your opinion about wine, send your letters to our editorial or fill in the form available at our site.