Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

You would not believe how long Gary V. took
to talk with each of the dozens of people in line for his book signing.

Wine impresario and social-media maven Gary Vaynerchuk came to Austin today — only today, in-between his chores as “wine wizard” for Houston Wine & Food Week — and bonded with a group of fans (”Vayniacs”) at Austin’s top wine store, Grape Vine Market.*

Afterward, he stayed to sign copies of his new book, Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World, and to sample three wines in a blind tasting. Even though the event wasn’t heavily publicized, and even though it was held at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday to accommodate Gary’s madcap schedule, more than 40 people turned out to hear Gary’s thoughts on wine, the wine business, and his own history as an entrepreneur and social-media pioneer.

Be a RAT.

His deepest message, though, was about the necessity of being “RAT” — Real, Authentic, and Transparent — which he sees as an absolute necessity in the era of pervasive social media, when secrets are much harder to hide. (”Everything is the media. Nothing is going to be hidden.”) This message of deep honestly comes as no surprise to his fans, who expect deep wine expertise, oddball analogies, and from-the-gut humor every time Gary videos his “Thunder Show” for WineLibrary.tv. (In the latest episode, for example, he said that one wine smelled “like a G.I. Joe melting in the sun.”)

Vaynerchuk comes on strong, but if you can stand his energy and over-the-top enthusiasm for even half a minute, you’re likely to be hooked by his passion for wine and for sharing good experiences with friends and family. He also talks fast, so he packed a lot into today’s two-hour event, which featured a long, free-ranging Q&A session.

Here are some highlights from his talk:

• Gary sees himself as bridging the worlds of wine and technology, each of which typically has not known much about the other. In the talk he touched on a theme that he repeats constantly on his WineLibrary.tv shows — that wine “brings people together,” and that the most important things in life are the experiences we have with those we love. Part of his goal is to democratize the enjoyment of wine as something that everyone can enjoy; he thinks that wine has been “mispositioned” on a pedestal in the U.S. market.
• Although he has railed endlessly against the big-name marketing campaigns and sky-high prices of champagne makers like Moet, Vaynerchuk had to eat humble pie when he wrote 101 Wines, because the 1999 vintage of Dom Perignon blew him away. In the book he wrote that he’d be “a hypocrite of the worst sort” if he left the wine off his list “just because it has a great story and is marketed really well.”

Trust your own judgment.

• He stressed a lesson that his mother taught him: every wine is its own thing. Just because a particular label has been good or bad for the past few years guarantees nothing about this year. For that matter, just because a particular vintage is considered good or bad doesn’t mean that every wine in it will match that judgment. (He gave the example of a great Italian wine from the 2002 vintage, which was widely considered the worst in 70 years.)
• This ties in with another theme common to the book and the Thunder Show, which is that each person’s palate for wine will be different. Because of this, Vaynerchuk believes it’s critical that you form your own tastes, rather than following his (or Robert Parker’s, or whoever’s) slavishly. As he put it today, “I just want to be a vehicle to a thought process.”

Reading the Journal in science class.

• He has an entrepreneurial streak a mile wide: he got laughs first when he told the crowd that, as a kid, “I had a lemonade-stand chain,” and again later when said that he was the kid reading the Wall Street Journal in 8th-grade science class. He got into the wine business because his father, who brought Gary and the rest of the family to the States from Russia in 1978, owned a wine shop — which Gary subsequently expanded hugely.

Embrace who you are.

• Again and again, he came down hard on the importance of embracing who you are. Vaynerchuk sees this as important in human terms (”I’m just really big on people being themselves”), but also for building your personal brand in the business world (”We are in a fundamental gold rush in personal branding”). Social media, he thinks, opens doors to both financial and emotional success for those who are willing to be authentic. Vaynerchuk is an extrovert deluxe (”I want to be around people, at all costs”); he says that he doesn’t worry about alienating people with his let-’er-rip humor and energy, because he believes that his love for people will show through his zaniness.

The days of wine and . . . e-mail.

• When he opened the floor for questions, I asked him what his typical day is like when he’s not traveling. He said he wakes up in his Manhattan apartment, goes to the gym, then drives 45 minutes — past multiple ego-gratifying Wine Library billboards with his face on them — to his store. He meets briefly with staff, then launches into answering his e-mail. Vaynerchuk famously answers all his own e-mail, and the flow is heavy. (He said that yesterday he received 2,900 e-mails.) He spends a couple of hours answering e-mail, calls downstairs to the retail floor for wines to sample on the air, and then records an installment for WineLibrary.tv. The shows, which he says he does “99% from the hip,” are always shot in a single take and never edited. After a few more hours of e-mail, he heads home, kisses his wife, and . . . answers more e-mail. After giving this summary, he cracked up the crowd by saying, “That’s it. That is my life.” Later, he got another laugh when he said, “I am the human un-scalable product.”

Gratitude for the community.

• When he opened his remarks, and again later on, Vaynerchuk said he was “humbled” that so many people would take time out of the middle of a weekday to spend with him. In his view, when you have even one person tuning in to your blog or podcast, you have a community. He has no interest in the competition for numbers that infects some parts of the blogosphere: “Who cares if you don’t have 800,000 [subscribers]?” Before the event, someone on the Grape Vine Market staff had asked him if he would be disappointed with a thin turnout; he answered that he would have been grateful to have one person show up to talk to him. He calls his approach “Expectation Zero,” and said, “This Expectation Zero game is amazing — you’ll love it” because it removes the likelihood you’ll be disappointed.
• He often comes up with giveaways and contests on his show — literally, while he’s recording a show. When he does, his Web developers then have to scramble to fulfill them. But that’s fine by Vaynerchuk, who gladly spent $39,000 last year shipping free WineLibrary.tv wristbands to anyone who asked for them. His philosophy is that if you’ll just give without worrying about recompense, you’ll reap plenty of rewards — financial or emotional or whatever — in the long run. Gary was clearly touched during the Q&A period, when a woman in the audience talked about how her 11-year-old daughter has bonded with her father over their mutual fascination with WineLibrary.tv.

Future projects.

• As much as he loves wine, Gary also has a passion for tea, which he traces to his family’s Russian roots. Last week he went to the World Tea Expo in Las Vegas. It was, as he described it, “so wine-twenty-years-ago.” Though he’s not sure if he’s the one to take advantage of it, he thinks that the American tea industry is grossly underdeveloped and offers plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs.
• He has turned down offers to do his own television show. As to why, he said, “I want to build as much leverage as possible” before signing a deal, because he knows there’s no way to retain total control over a t.v. show as he does with WineLibrary.tv. He also wonders whether he won’t be better served, in the long run, to keep doing what he’s doing and wait for Apple TV and similar products to catch on with a wider audience. In two or three years, you might be watching podcasts from Gary that look much like the ones he’s making today — but doing it on your living room television instead of on your laptop.

“I don’t want to be famous — I just want to buy the Jets.”

• In the long run, Gary’s goal is to own the New York Jets. Seriously. He joked about how this goal has taken on a life of its own with him, so that he’s actually getting to the point that he believes he’ll do it someday. Vaynerchuk is such a serious sports fan that he attends both days of the NFL draft every year, and that he initially debated doing a podcast on sports rather than wine. Someone asked him what his first move would be as owner, and rather than getting into issues of players and coaches, he said, “To make the Jets America’s team.”

Here are a few more choice Gary V. quotes that I was able to jot down during the talk:

• “I’m a very in-the-moment person. Big-time. To a fault.”
• “I feel like I’m on this weird quest to meet every single person on earth.”
• Describing the outlook that feeds his bottomless enthusiasm: “I woke up, nobody died overnight, I’m pumped.” (He said he’s been that way since he was a teenager.)
• “The way we count points in our current American society is broken.”

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UPDATE, Wednesday morning: Dane Hurtubise has posted his video clip of Gary V.’s wine tasting at the end of the talk. Check it out here.

UPDATE 2, Thursday afternoon: Cesar Torres did a nifty writeup about Gary’s visit. He made a good point that I meant to say but forgot about Gary’s audience:

Looking around the room at one point, I couldn’t help but notice the seemingly random mix of people absolutely riveted by this guy. If I had to venture a guess, I would say the age range in the room was between early 20s to early 70s. It amazed me that one guy with a wine video blog can bring those people together. During the discussion, Gary mentioned one of his favorite things about wine is the way that it brings people together. From my branding perspective, I would go so far as to say that the Gary Vaynerchuk brand brings people together.

Also, Damon Clinkscales has posted extensive video clips of the session.

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More about Gary Vaynerchuk:

• Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine: Guardian column: Gary Vaynerchuk
• Brian Solis at PR 2.0: Gary Vaynerchuk Puts the Social in Social Media
• Yours truly: SXSW recap: Kathy Sierra. — During her keynote at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference, Sierra brought Gary up on stage because she thinks he’s a model for using social media to give wine drinkers a “higher-resolution wine experience.” When I talked to Gary after the session today, he told me that he had never met Sierra before that day, but was grateful that someone so beloved in the blogosphere would have heaped that kind of praise on him.

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* I don’t think anyone would debate my assertion that Grape Vine Market is Austin’s top wine store, considering that it has won Food & Wine Magazine’s national “Retailer of the Year” award in the past. But I can also admit that I’m biased because (a) I live practically around the corner from the store and am a regular customer, and (b) owner Chuck Huffaker is a friend whose kids have played sports in the same leagues as mine.