Guest Article by Alan Goldfarb, wine journalist and media consultant
I’ve always, since I was a kid, loved radio. To this day, when I can, I fall asleep listening to radio; and uncannily, manage to shut it off as I’m dozing off. That’s why I’m thrilled to be able to tap into an emerging tentacle in a wine publicist’s media outreach database – streaming, online, wine radio.
Interestingly, as traditional and print media shrinks seemingly every day, the recent proliferation of web-based wine-related radio shows have come on the scene, seemingly emanating from every market. A flack would be remiss if he or she didn’t tap into this resource that I think will prove to be invaluable to winery clients.
I myself, used to have wine radio shows that were broadcast in the San Francisco/Sacramento region. Notice, I used the word “broadcast.” These were disseminated through the AM and FM dials. Some wine radio still lives on broadcast radio frequencies, but like their print counterparts, those too are quickly drying up. Thus, wine radio lives, breathes, and proliferates on the Internet in the form of streaming.
We’ve recently had several of our clients appear on a variety of these shows – whether in the form of one-on-one interviews with the host, or a chat room tasting with a panel of wine experts and consumers. They prove to be fun for the client, and invaluable toward reaching a wider audience, which in turn, helps build a brand.
I used to love to pull the cork under the mic so the listeners could hear a bottle being opened, and then pouring it – up to the mic – into the glass. Swishing the wine in mouth, also close to the microphone, lent a sense of action. I also enjoyed having the likes of Andre Tchelistchefff and Georg Riedel in my studios. Before Riedel glasses hit big, I conducted a comparison tasting with my own glass (which I thought was perfectly serviceable) and one of Riedel’s Pinot Noir vessels. Guess which one blew the other away?
I received lots of comments on that show – broadcast on a dinky little 1,000-watt station. Imagine the listeners you’ll garner now on Internet radio.