I was looking at the Don Sebastiani and Sons Web site (Wine Enthusiast's American Winery of the Year!) the other day and noticed that they have a whole array of short podcasts (which appear to be spoken-word descriptions of the associated wines). As it turns out, Tim Elliott at WineCast had already noted the existence of the Sebastiani podcasts in a recent post, as well as Napa Valley Wine Radio, a regular podcast from Goosecross Cellars.
No less than The Wall St. Journal has now picked up podcasting as a business tool (in a well-written StartupJournal.com article - no subscription required), so I thought I ought to at least mention podcasting here. Of course, if you're reading a blog, you probably have at least heard about podcasts, particularly since Apple now supports it with iTunes.
Podcasts are pretty simple to understand - they're really just digital audio files (e.g. MP3s). As with blogs, the secret sauce is that you can subscribe to a podcast (using the same RSS technology that underlies blogs), which means the audio file is automatically downloaded to your computer and/or MP3 player, such as an iPod (hence the name) without additional effort on your part. An iPod is not required to listen to a podcast.
All this is just by way of encouraging you to go listen to a podcast or two. Like blogs, podcasts are just another potential means of building relationships with people who are interested in the story behind your wine. A good storytelling tool, whether written (blog) or spoken (podcast) is worth knowing about.
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