About two years ago, wine impresario Gary Vaynerchuk bought the wine-review site Corkd, but then he let it languish. He was busy with Wine Library TV, and branching out with speaking gigs, his own site, a book deal (Crush It!), another online TV show, and spending way too much time on Twitter. Corkd was pretty much ignored, and was even badly hacked last January. But Vaynerchuk promised that he would relaunch it better than ever.
And now he has. First, Vaynerchuk hired a CEO for Corkd, Lindsay Ronga. And on Tuesday night the site relaunched quietly with a much more social design. You can now sign in with your Facebook ID through Facebook Connect. And any review or rating can be sent out to your Facebook stream or to Twitter, with a link back to Corkd.
The home page itself is now an activity stream filled with reviews and comments of other Corkd members you follow. Just like before, you can rate and review wines, but now you can also become a fan of a wine, winery, or grape varietal. And those messages from wineries that you are a fan of also appear in your activity stream. “It becomes like a Facebook for wineries,” says Ronga.
In fact, that is Corkd’s new business model. It charges wineries $999 a year for verified accounts that let them link easily to all their wines and private message their fans on Corkd. Right now, if you go to a winery page that has not yet been verified, its wines are not linked to that page. Corkd is launching with 15 wineries, including Rutherford Hill Winery and Sojourn Cellars. Verified wineries also get featured on the home page.
There are about 350,000 wineries worldwide, so this could turn out to be a decent business if Corkd can convince even just a small fraction of them that it is worth signing up for a verified account. And that all depends on whether Corkd can recapture the attention of wine lovers online.
Trying to become the social site for wine lovers is a good strategy. The idea behind Corkd is that you get a Yelp-like consensus review score for any given wine. If you like someone’s reviews, you can follow them. And if you agree or disagree with a review, now you can comment on the reviews themselves as well.
Wine stores can take the ratings and reviews for any given wine and print them out in customizable “shelf-talkers.” Corkd is also working on an iPhone app that will let members research and rate wines while they are at a restaurant or a wine tasting.
To the degree that Corkd can become the place that people review, rate, and discuss wines, it could become a good marketing vehicle for wineries. But Corkd has a lot of catching up to do. Competitors like Snooth and CellarTracker are far ahead and already have loyal wine-rating followers. Snooth, in particular, is n a tear since raising money last January, right about the time Corkd was hitting bottom. Snooth also has integration with Facebook, user ratings, and other social elements such as the ability to become friends with other members. Which site would you give the higher rating?
Excellent, please send some nice wine to Europe or at least nice recommendations!
If you are a wine enthusiast you might also like http://seriouslywine.com. It is a prototype of the kind of sites http://s.erious.ly is planning to build.
Give the Vayniacs a few tools to share this thing and they will bring the wine geeks to Cork’d.
I wouldn’t want to bet against rabid @Garyvee fans.
In http://yousticker.com more recommendations in stickers!
It’s funny!
Well Lindsay from Corkd is much nicer to look at than Eric from Cellartracker if that helps.
fantastic news for wineries like us in Chile, check out http://www.demartino.cl for further info
Great work – glad to see the Corkd relaunch, looking forward to Gary’s own brand of “Crush it”.
Lindsay Ronga = on Twitter “@Ronga” = great CEO
Met the whole HBS (Harvard Business School) crew at SXSW last March. She was a dual admit GSB / HBS…
http://www.amaz...NK2QNCJF22BRKQW
… that sheds her Ivy academic qualifications and can cold call like a high school drop out (this is good good thing by the way). She is talented.
@garyVee, Best of luck and keep Crushing It
BTW, I’ve a sharpie this time, so you owe me a John Hancock
Love that there’s a business model on relaunch…I’d expect nothing else from Gary – a true entrepreneur.
The competitors are ahead, and the entrenchment problems of network effect-dependent social sites are real, but Gary brings his insanely powerful brand to the table, and that should terrify Corkd competition.
He’s no Oprah, but the narrow focus of media attention he can lavish on any given winery has already been make-or-break according to testimonials. I wouldn’t be surprised if the wineries were clamoring for his attention, rather than the reverse.
And on the consumer side of it, he has the Vayniac Nation, an evil cadre of ninja wine zombies who do his bidding. Again, he’s no Colbert, but his ability to drive actual behavior of wine drinkers is massive.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a future iteration of Corkd – which seems to be suffering a bit of the Techcrunch effect at the moment – that Gary himself more prominently in a cross-promotional play with Wine Library TV.
This should be the model of other product-focused social networks like steepster.com
GV is boring, unless you like to sit around talking about wine all day. Which means, totally boring. Did I mention, boring.
I was happy to be a part of the relaunch of corkd. I got to meet the whole staff at their wine tasting event at their office. They are a great group of people and they have developed a great community for any type of wine drinkers.
Gary is on a mission to redefine how companies should be run!
You have Sojourn listed twice:
“…including Sojourn Cellars, Rutherford Hill Winery and Sojourn Cellars”
Just a heads up.
Beer Advocate and Rate Beer should take note of this. They have great sites and some aspects that align with cork’d, but improving the social media side of a site like that never hurts.
Cheers,
Hi Harrison! So glad you enjoyed the tasting the other night, and thank you for the kind words. Hope you enjoy the new Cork’d, and let us know if we can help you use the site at all.
“Corkd is back” announcement is all it takes to bring corkd.com site down. TC-effect-fail
Greetings! Cork’d offers a different approach, one which I am very interested in exploring. There are many wine sites out there in cyber-space-but only ONE cork’d! Just as there is only one GARY V!
Lindsay (aka Elro Price) is going to be a great CEO for Cork’d. She’s really smart and I hear she can dance well also.
Love this site!
The main page is a bit too busy for me, hoping they simplify it in the future.
AGREEEEEEEEEEED!
All the best luck to the Corkd team (especially Gary, Lindsay and Kyle).
The Mont Tauch winery is super excited to have been onboard for the relaunch. Corkd is gonna help us engage with our fans and consumers, to understand them and talk directly with them: http://corkd.com/monttauch
Lindsay is clearly the best person for this role… She is very knowledgable, passionate, and intelligent when it comes to wine and wine tasting. Her warm, welcoming personality takes any of the pretentiousness out of wine appreciation (not a simple task) and makes you excited to explore your palette. Gary is undoubtedly the best mentor for her as he is extremely knowledgable and just as passionate and welcoming as she is – especially when it comes to his love for wine.
Thanks for feedback everyone. Wine is not perfect, neither are we! That’s the beauty…I want the community to have input, so please bring it.
Use the feedback button on the Cork’d site, guess what, I’ll listen and we hope to exceed your expectations as we continue to roll out features. Thanks for the writeup and the comment love
Lindsay Ronga
Cork’d
Pretty excited about cork’d starting to take off. I could do with a few good recommendations! Nice to see the wineries model, pretty clever.
Is it really worth being a fan of an (semi) entrepreneur?
Interesting niche site, seems like.
Good review – Cork’d is relaunching with a very solid business model. It really seems to be the best platform for a winery to engage with its community in a way that’s likely to add value to both parties. Given the Gary Vee effect, I expect to see a lot of positive momentum behind the business. Congratulations to the Cork’d team.
Congrats on the relaunch! I’ve been a member for quite some time and am so happy to see all the new functionality, including the mobile application. Also, love how great the user interface is…simple and intuitive. So excited to see what else you all have in the works.
Europe already has some of the best.
nice to see corkd revived and with new blood. they should buy or partner with an existing app. i’d recommend drync wine, as cor.kz has already aligned with cellartracker…
Lindsay and Gary are both really awesome people! It is such an honor and pleasure to be able to work with them and be part of Cork’d. I am so PUMPED to be involved in such an epic event!
Thanks to everyone!!
P.S. Check out Delgadillo Cellars
I’m so excited to see Cork’d relaunching with new leadership. I’m a new wine enthusiast who could really benefit from having a site as intuitive and all-encompassing as Cork’d. I LOVE new the look! Thank you Gary and Lindsay for bringing this to us!!
Wine lovers should also have a look at http://www.vinivino.com.
Hi,
at Adegga we have had winery fan pages and a social stream based on your friends recommendations for over 2 years now.
We were even recommended as one the most innovative wine social networks by Vintank.
For each wine you can write your reviews, check wine prices and even blog posts from wine blogs across the web (automatically aggregated).
We even developed an ISBN for wines that makes it simple to track wines online. It’s the AVIN. Anyone with a blog can link up their posts automatically on Adegga.
Do check it.
André
Hello,
wine social networks are not about hate. They are about passion.
http://www.snooth.com
http://www.corkd.com
http://www.vinogusto.com
sont mon favourites.
So to sum up, Corkd does what Adegga has done long time ago and gets on the news, while Adegga is not even mentioned as a competitor. A bit more research wouldn’t do any harm.
P.S.: No, I’m not an Adegga developer, investor or employee.
I miss Vinogusto.com in the list of competitors. And I’m sure many others are missing too.
I personally know the Adegga crew and I can say they’re quite passionate in wine before than in social networks. We’re trying a very different approach with http://www.vinix.it maybe the most known wine social network in Italy and hopely one of the relevant player in Europe.
So exciting to play the game, anyway.
Fil.
http://www.vinic.it is awsome. An of course, Italy, my lovely Italy. You ARE the Nr. 1 in Europe !!
Hi Karen, Vinix, not Vinix
Thank you !
Cheers, Fil.
haha, you got it wrong too: “vinix not vinic”.
http://www.vinix.it
adegga has it all a long time ago. http://www.adegga.com/
Why did I never heard talk about adegga in Techcrunch?