If you don’t yet know what a “twasting” is, don’t worry, you soon will. The wine industry’s newest trend—online or “virtual” wine tasting—not only requires a shift in how we perceive wine tasting, but requires us to learn a few new terms, such as “twasting,” “tweeting” and “Skyping.”

This whimsical terminology reflects the new, tech-savvy face of wine tasting that is turning wine communications on its head. As wineries come to understand the benefits of going virtual, primarily saving money and time, a growing number of them are quickly overcoming their reticence about technology and social networking and are organizing online tastings.

A virtual wine tasting is just like a traditional wine tasting, but instead of being face-to-face, the presenter (i.e., winery staff, wine marketer) and the viewer (i.e., consumer, distributor, sales rep, retailer) are in separate places—usually a winery tasting room or hospitality center on the presenter’s end and in the home or sales room on the viewer’s end.

“We have to think twice before we travel anymore; it all has to result in real sales,” said Burke Owens, marketing and communications manager for Bonny Doon Vineyard (30,000 cases) in Santa Cruz, California. “We can’t visit every market regularly as we did in years past.”

Lisa Mattson, director of communications and public relations for Wilson Daniels Ltd., a wine consulting firm in St. Helena, California, encourages her winery clients to explore the advantages of online tastings to maintain close customer connections. “Many people really want to visit the winery, but they are overly busy right now and their travel budgets are small.”

Through the use of social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, wine marketers are able to communicate directly with consumers instead of going through more traditional channels. “It has fundamentally changed the model of communication from one-way marketing to two-way conversation,” said Mike Wangbickler, account executive for Balzac Communications, a Napa-based wine marketing company. “Wineries no longer have to rely on a network of distributor salespeople, retailers and restaurants to promote their wines or get feedback from consumers—they now have a direct channel.”

Creating a virtual space where winery staff and tasters can easily meet seems an ideal solution to overcoming wineries’ current lack of resources; but online tastings will likely continue beyond the recession as technology grows and available time shrinks. There are many different ways to organize a tasting. Here are just a couple of the more popular set-ups that wineries are using to make their splash onto the virtual wine tasting scene.

Taste and Twitter

One way to communicate during an online tasting is through Twitter, a free social networking service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates. These ongoing conversation updates, known as “tweets,” are similar to text messages sent between cell phones; but for each tweet you are limited to just 140 characters (the length of this paragraph’s first sentence).

In 2008 Craig Drollett, a 15-year wine industry veteran, started using Twitter’s online feed to promote his Boston retail wine shop, Bin Ends, and soon began to wonder how he could use the social networking service to bring wine lovers from all over together. This resulted in the creation of TasteLive.com, a website that offers a platform for wine tasting where “hosts” and “followers” from all over the world can easily communicate. In this set-up, both parties do not see or hear one another, but instead share their thoughts and opinions about the wines they are tasting through their tweets, which show up in real time on a webpage designated for that event. The service is free to followers while wineries or hosts pay a minimal fee.

Tweets can be viewed on the Twitter website or can be forwarded to a cell phone or other social networking site; but for Taste Live wine events the tweets are forwarded to the Taste Live website, where it is much easier to track the conversations between the sender and followers for that particular event. This frees up participants from having to sift through any unrelated tweets from other feeds they may be following (some people sign up to follow hundreds of different sender feeds).

Compared to virtual tastings where both parties can see and hear one another on their computers—like a video conference—Drollett feels that there is a benefit to a text-only platform. “I think the text format leads to better conversations and takes away any nervousness that some tasters might otherwise feel in a face-to-face tasting,” he said.

Wineries that have held tasting events on Taste Live benefit from the buzz that gets created by all the tweets, which ultimately creates more brand awareness. The distinction is that the buzz is follower-created as opposed to coming from the winery. And while the tweets are not always positive, as with any tasting, they are real; and tasters appreciate this. “The followers respect and trust the messages—which can number in the hundreds—because they’re not coming from a winery marketing department, the media or the critics,” said Drollett.

Clos LaChance (60,000 cases), a winery in San Martin, California, held their first virtual tasting on Taste Live in June. “We saw measurable sales,” said Cheryl Murphy Durzy, vice president of sales and marketing. “We highlighted three wines during the tasting, and people were buying the wine before and after the event.” People can buy their wine anywhere they like, but the Taste Live website also offers a wine marketplace where tasters can easily purchase featured wine.

Durzy said that they decided to expand the tasting beyond just the Web interface to include a gathering at the winery to provide more of a party atmosphere. They set up a webcam and many laptop computers in their hospitality area so followers could see winery staff members as well as follow along on the TasteLive.com webpage. The event drew more than 100 wine fans from all over the U.S. (and even one from China), including a handful of the winery’s club members.

But despite the available video and audio set-up at the winery, most of the followers preferred to tweet than speak, said Durzy. “Most of the viewers were already fans of Taste Live who do this regularly, so they are used to tweeting,” she said, adding that most of the promotion for the event was through Facebook and Twitter. “We didn’t do any regular advertising; I think these social networking channels are taking the place of traditional advertising.”

Retailers can also benefit from the events by hosting tasting parties at their stores or following the tastings to learn of new wines they don’t currently carry. “One retailer in Massachusetts really liked our Cab and wanted to bring it in the following week,” said Durzy. “So I connected him with our distributor.” Some of the tweets posted during the Clos LaChance tasting included:

Can you Email me about your distributor in Florida?

I am in Prescott, AZ and participating online...am a member of the wine club.

I’m impressed by the acidity on the ’08 Unoaked Chard. W/all the pear & pineapple, I need a tiny umbrella for this.

Broadcasting your brand via Taste Live is most beneficial for wineries that have a quality product, a good reputation and a sense of place, noted Drollett. Wineries can quickly spread the word about their wines if followers of the tasting event like what they’re reading and tasting and will be more likely to ask their friends (who may not be a part of the event but who are on Twitter) to follow your brand/winery. Such activity can lead to even more exposure via wine blogs, which can serve to spread your winery’s message and brand virally (without the winery having to drive it).

Mattson of Wilson Daniels has also used Taste Live and advises wineries to be well prepared to make the most of their tweets, not only sharing basic information about the wine but also information that followers may not already know, such as the background of the grapes, and links to related websites and videos. However, the short tweets don’t leave much room for fluff, so tightly focused messages are most effective. “If you want the taste to be memorable, you need to be prepared with your information because people are talking a lot and things are moving fast,” she said.

While most wineries still face a big learning curve when it comes to social networking and virtual tastings, many have accepted the shift and are ready to evolve. “Wineries are waking up to social media,” said Drollett. “I’ve have conversations with lots of wineries and suppliers, and they say they know they have to get into this although they might not know what ‘this’ is.”

Swirl and Skype

Another type of virtual tasting uses Skype, a free online software application that allows users to make telephone calls and conduct video conferencing over the Internet. As long as both parties are set up similarly—each has Skype software, a video camera, microphone and speakers on their computer—they can proceed with the tasting and are able to see and hear one another (no typing, tweeting or texting is necessary). The winemaker, for example, would talk about the wine (that the viewer already has in front of him or her) just as he would in a face-to-face tasting, and the viewer would respond and ask questions as usual.

Bonny Doon Vineyard has come to realize the value of holding virtual sales meetings and tastings of new releases with some of its farther-flung distributors. “The cost of traveling to secondary markets, both in terms of dollars (food, lodging, travel expense) and physical wear and tear on the body—especially these days where you have to work four times as hard to derive any discernible result—makes it somewhat compelling to make contact with distributors via Skype,” said winery founder Randall Grahm.

Since choosing to downsize in 2005-2006 in order to focus on their estate-grown, ultra-premium wines, Bonny Doon has fewer available resources, marketing and sales dollars and less wine at a higher average price-point than in the past. This presents more of a challenge to reach out and touch all of their trade accounts and distributors like they used to; yet maintaining these relationships and reinforcing their message is more important than ever.

The winery’s marketing and communications manager, Burke Owens, says that interacting virtually with the distributor’s sales force, talking about their market and getting feedback is very effective. “It does make a real difference when you can conference in real time (even through the computer) as opposed to relying on traditional sales materials and frequent market visits,” he said.

Skype’s popularity has taken off in large part because it has a fan in Oprah Winfrey. In one of her shows last May, “Skype Around the World,” she participated in a four-way virtual wine tasting led by Grahm, which was also attended by Skype president Josh Silverman and some first-class passengers aboard a Virgin America flight.

As the Oprah show illustrated, Skype is being used for a variety of applications. In the wine industry, it is used by journalists, critics, authors and retail shops to gather information or do promotions of their own. Mattson noted that one winery’s Pinot tasting was co-hosted by a retail wine shop and an author who had just released a new book about Pinot Noir. Holding creative, synergistic events online such as this can attract a wider audience and benefit everyone involved.

Taking the Virtual Step

There are, as with anything, pros and cons to going the virtual wine tasting route. One of the biggest pros is the environmental benefit of not having to travel as often. As more people begin to “sip without the trip,” winery travel schedules will ease up and transportation fuel usage will be decreased. One winery also noted that it saves paper since they can cut back on sending out so many flyers to their lists (except in wine club mailers).

Some see the technology itself as a drawback to going virtual as jumping in to learn how to use it, set it up and fix any bugs that may come up can be intimidating. Most who have experienced virtual tastings agree that there really needs to be someone at the winery who will be the go-to person for these tastings, especially if a variety of software and services are used (see sidebar).

And while having an employee devoted to IT (information technology) can offer a great relief to any business, more wineries are also realizing the importance of having at least one staff member manage the social networks. Durzy said they have a designated staff person who is in charge of this at the winery. “She spends more than half of her time on our social networking,” she said. “You’ve got to assign someone to do it if you’re a little bigger; time needs to be dedicated.”

Another aspect to be aware of is that the audio and video quality will vary depending on the platform and service you use. Free services will typically not be as high quality as paid services, such as WebEx (see sidebar above). With lower-grade audio, you may hear an echo, for example, which can be intrusive, especially if you have multiple people involved.

Some wineries may find one of the drawbacks of using online technologies to be getting the people they usually work with onboard, such as distributors, whom one marketer generalized are often older and not as comfortable learning new technologies as younger people. This may lead them to avoid seeking winery information through easily accessible social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

And let’s face it, most would agree that a virtual tasting lacks the same face-to-face romance as a typical tasting. But one Taste Live follower seemed more than happy to forego the in-person aspect as he tweeted during the website’s recent “Pinot Days” tasting event: “Pinot Days is not like ZAP [Zinfandel Advocates and Producers]. Crowd more into appreciating wine than getting drunk.”

While the media divide may persist for some time, there will likely always be room for both types of wine tasting. And even though virtual wine tasting supplants some of wine’s romance, wineries who have tried it are breathing a little sigh of relief at this new opportunity to save time and pennies. “Being there in person is ideal,” said Grahm, “but in the age of scarce resources, making one’s presence known via Skype is a reasonable, second-best alternative.” wbm

Twasting and other important terms

As you embark on the virtual world, knowing the lingo is a good first step. Below are some of the key terms related to online wine tasting and social networking technology.

Facebook: A free social networking website where users can join different networks according to their interests (i.e., work, school, region) and connect with other people (“friends”) they already know (such as family or friends) or wish to get to know (people who share hobbies or business interests). Facebook has more than 200 million active users worldwide and tends to draw older users compared to MySpace. (www.Facebook.com)

MySpace: A predecessor to Facebook, MySpace is also an interactive social networking website with a user-submitted network of friends, profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. The most popular social networking site in 2006, MySpace, which attracts a younger user, was overtaken in popularity by its competitor Facebook in 2008. (www.MySpace.com)

Skype: A software application that allows users to make calls and conduct video conferences via the Internet. Calls to other users of the service are free while calls to other landlines and cell phones can be made for a fee. (www.Skype.com)

Snooth.com: An interactive wine database and social network that assists visitors in finding wine by price or region, searching wine-related data and offering focused recommendations. The site, which also helps to connect wine lovers from all around the world, currently boasts more than a half-million users.

Social networking: Web-based social network services (i.e., Twitter, Facebook) that focus on building communities of people who share interests and/or activities and provide various avenues of interaction, such as email, texting, instant messaging and tweeting.

TasteLive.com: A website that offers a platform for wine tasting where hosts and followers from all over the world can easily communicate about the featured wines. Thoughts and opinions are shared via Twitter and typed comments (tweets), which show up in real time on a TasteLive.com webpage reserved for that event. (www.TasteLive.com)

Texting: Or text messaging, refers to the exchange of brief messages (as well as videos, images and audio content) between cell phones.

Tokbox: Provides free video calling, conferencing and instant messaging through an online application similar to Skype, and allows users to create video posts (similar to text-based Twitter) that can be embedded on other websites. (www.Tokbox.com)

Twasting: Derived from the words “Twitter” and “tasting,” twasting refers to a wine tasting that takes place online with the help of the social network, Twitter.

Tweets: Text-based posts of up to 140 characters delivered to other Twitter users (“followers”). Tweets can be sent and received through the Twitter website, via cell phones and other external applications, such as Facebook.

Twitter: A free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates, which are known as “tweets.” (www.Twitter.com)

UstreamTV: A live video broadcast platform that allows anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size. Operate your own channel on the Ustream site or through your own website. The video is one-way, but comment boxes allow anyone watching to make comments or ask questions. (www.Ustream.tv)

Viral marketing: Refers to the use of online social networks (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) to very quickly increase brand awareness and achieve other marketing objectives via self-replicating viral content in the form of emails, text messages, video clips, tweets and images.

Virtual: When applied to computing and information technology, “virtual” indicates a computer-generated simulation of reality.

Vodcast or vidcast: From “video” and “podcast,” vodcasts refer to the delivery of video clips via the Internet as a stream or a downloaded file (which can be played offline). The term distinguishes between podcasts, which normally contain audio-only files.

VoIP: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a transmission technology for delivering voice communications over the Internet rather than the public switched telephone network. Skype, for example, uses VoIP technology, which comes at a lower price than traditional phone calls.

Web 2.0: Refers to the World Wide Web’s second generation of design and development, a large part of which includes the cumulative changes in how we communicate, collaborate and share information online. Social networking sites (i.e., Twitter, Facebook and MySpace), video sharing sites and blogs are all under the Web 2.0 umbrella.

WebEx: Owned by Cisco, WebEx provides on-demand collaboration, online meeting, and Web and video conferencing applications designed for use by businesses in the areas of sales, support, training, consulting and marketing. (www.WebEx.com)