Thank you from the bottom of my heart
I want to thank everybody who is coming to Santa Rosa or writing about the WBC from wherever you call home.
The fires that started on October 8th profoundly impacted Santa Rosa and wine country in all the surrounding counties. For the individuals who live here and the many businesses that remain, the best thing that we can all do is visit the region and help the locals find a new normal. So thank you for coming and writing about the region.
We’re looking forward to thanking you in person! The big awards dinner toward the end of the conference is sponsored by nakedwines.com (and a few other companies that are typically Californian) and you’re going to get the royal treatment! And we’ll be hanging out at all the panels, keynotes, afterparties and after-after-parties so please say hi and give us a chance to thank you in person. We’d love to tell you our stories.
Why you matter
Wine Bloggers and other digital communicators mean the world to us because you are the perfect ambassadors for folks with a lot of stories to tell. And we sure have a lot of stories.
We fund over 150 winemakers around the world and more than 40 winemakers just in the USA. Our customers called Angels crowd-fund those winemakers and their wines, and helped us become one of the biggest wineries in the country according to Wine Business Monthly’s annual report.
But unlike most of the behemoths in that top 30 list, we are made up of lots of small winemakers (the average case production for one of our wines is less than 3k cases – typical grocery store brands are 10-100 times bigger!) That means we’re very different than the rest of the wine world, and a little hard to pigeon hole.
That’s why we LOVE connecting with writers and storytellers like you. How else are we going to get hundreds of stories out there?
Just this month, we had dozens of winemakers wrapping up our largest ever harvest in the northern hemisphere, dozens of winemakers going through bud break in the southern hemisphere, we collected over 15,000 ratings and reviews, our customers raised over half a MILLION dollars to help communities recover from the fires in California, over 40 winemakers posted personal updates from their corner of the world.
YOU are our only hope to get those stories out to the world. Because the big media outlets often don’t know where to start talking about us.
About nakedwines.com
We’ve got a cool business model that I can ramble about for hours, but there is no substitute for actually tasting our wines.
Several of our winemakers will be pouring at the conference dinner, with a special focus on our locals. But we know the conference is really jam-packed with content and wine so…
We’ve got a special invitation for all WBC participants and alumni with an address in one of the 42 states we ship to. Email your shipping address to nicole.stawski@nakedwines.com and tell us what kinds of wines you like to taste and the stories you want to hear most. Nicole will match you up with a special surprise after the conference.
Cheers and see you soon!!!
–Ryan O’Connell, winemaker and naked narrator