Blogging boosts business for wine firm

The Sunday Telegraph carries an article on South African winery, Stormhoek, which started blogging to help it sell more wine, and its worked.

Courtesy of The Sunday Telegraph: Last May, six months after Stormhoek launched, [they] despatched a bottle of mid-price Sauvignon Blanc to 150 of the UK's most frantic-fingered "bloggers", the burgeoning community of internet diarists.

It was a plan that didn't lack bottle. After all, since their emergence at the end of the 1990s, bloggers have become a nightmare for businesses the world over. Microsoft, Tesco and McDonald's have all fallen victim to vicious blogs written by irate customers or seething employees.

Since last summer, monthly sales of Stormhoek's bottles have doubled. It has won contracts with J Sainsbury and Majestic Wine. The internet dialogue has also led to greater demand from retailers such as Asda and Threshers with which Dymoke-Marr already had contracts.

Stormhoek now accounts for 20 per cent of all South African wine sold at above £5 a bottle in the UK. Blogging has been really, really fundamental to what's happened over the past year. 

via Antony Mayfield