As a tech geek, I love this story behind the world’s first crowd-sourced wine.
Our team member, Lori Kilmartin, does a fabulous job of sharing it from our tasting of Washington wines recently.
Lori Kilmartin
Sommelier & Blogger
I really enjoyed hearing about the “Crowd-Sourced Cabernet” program that Juan launched in 2014.
As the location of the winery in Paterson, Washington is a bit off the beaten path, visitors were not as plentiful as at other wineries.
Juan wanted a way to share the winery and the experience of making wine with others, so he came up with this unique idea.
The “Crowd-Sourced Cabernet” is an online website where people from all over the world can sign in and help make the decisions on how to make a specific lot of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Approximately 5 acres with 100 vines is involved.
Each week a question is posed to the online community on certain aspects involved in making the wine, and eventually every part of the winemaking process: vineyard management, fermentation, aging, and blending.
Some 8,000 people participated and voted on 18 different winemaking steps. They could also watch a live video feed of the vineyard, winery, barrel cellar room and current weather conditions. Only 1000 bottles of wine were produced.
For example, this year on week 3 they were asked: “Should we irrigate or stress the vines?”
The answer was 60% for stress, 40% for irrigate.
Whatever the majority voted – that was what Juan and his team did.
As Juan said – sometimes they came up with “some really crazy out there ideas – but we did them anyway”.
The community even helped design the label on the bottle.
For the 2014 vintage, the majority voted to “harvest at night, create a wine with complexity yet soft tannins, age 16 months in 30% new oak”.
According to Juan, the wine is a beautifully integrated and layered Cabernet. Once released, members of the voting community get first dibs on purchasing the wine.
Participants would get mini-winemaking lessons from the Columbia Crest team, and so education was also part of the goal. “The process invited wine lovers to gain a deeper understanding and connection to the craft and skill of winemaking,” Juan commented.
The 2015 vintage is well on its way into Week 22. I’ve jumped on the bandwagon and will be following along for the balance of this year – and am looking forward to getting in at the start of 2017!
Apparently the idea worked, as Juan says “more and more people are showing up at the winery – and wanting to get a picture of themselves with ‘their vines’”!
“It was a wonderful thing for us to be able to say to wine lovers, ‘Come with us.’ That beats the selfish feeling of ‘I want to do this my way”’ Juan observed smiling.
For more information and to vote on this year’s wine, visit CrowdsourcedCabernet.com.
