Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV

New Media Expo has seen its share of notable podcasters take the keynote stage, and this year is no different as Gary Vaynerchuk of the popular video podcast Wine Library TV is set to deliver the Thursday morning keynote address. Intent on bringing wine to the masses, Gary has had massive success in using New Media tools to promote his show, and he’s been tapped to appear on mainstream outlets ranging from Conan O’Brien to Ellen Degeneres. I recently caught up with Gary to get some background on how he’s made this far, as well as a preview of what attendees can expect from his upcoming keynote address.

A lot of people start a podcast about some random topic, maybe something they just want to explore a little more, but in your case you grew up around wine, right?


Yes. You know, I come from a place of, I’d like to hope and think, a little bit of knowledge. It’s something I did my whole, basically my whole career, before I started a video blog, was, you know, the wine retail business. And I lived and breathed wine 24-7-365. So it’s definitely something I’m comfortable and obviously, you know, hopefully a little bit knowledgeable about.

This is a family business. What did your family think when you first said, I’m gonna do a wine-tasting video podcast, video blog, and it’s supposed to help business? Were they skeptical?

You know, I think at that point I’d gained so much street cred within, you know, the world. I mean really it’s my dad and I, so really he was the only that I had to kind of really talk about it with. But I’ve been running operations for a decade, and you know, when you take your family business from three million a year to fifty million a year, you’ve got some credibility, you know? You’re allowed to play a little bit. And so I think that, you know, just like my parents have been, I think they were very confident that there was something behind it and that I wasn’t doing this for kicks and giggles. But regardless, I’ll be honest with you, this was something I just knew I had to do. And you know, it really wasn’t even so much for day to day Wine Library business. It was really more about changing the culture of wine and doing something that made me happy. So that’s really what was most important to me.

Usually when you think wine you’re thinking connoisseurs, upper class two hundred dollar bottles of wine. But you’re going in a whole different direction, right? You’re aiming more toward the masses with Wine Library TV.

Yeah, you know I felt that I can leverage New Media to show people a cooler, more exciting wine culture, something that people could wrap their head around. I just feel that wine is on a pedestal that it has no interest in being on. It’s way to foofy-foofy in society. I think of it as a product that brings people together and is pretty awesome, and I wanted to shed a different light on Pinot. And I felt I could do that leveraging social media, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, you know, things of that nature, and that’s what I’ve been very passionate about. And luckily, somewhat successful.

You’ve been promoting the show using the social networks you mentioned. You do the show every day, and of course you’re still running your business. Why is it important to carve out time to do things like, you know, posting little random stuff on Twitter all day?

It’s actually become my full-time job. My day to day operations at Wine Library I’ve been handing off more and more every day. It’s important because you want to be part of the conversation and you want to engage your community. You know, it’s very important to me for me to put myself out there and spend time with people and, you know, answer wine questions or questions about other things whether it’s marketing or branding or business. I just want to be part of the conversation. I want to be with the people. And so it’s my lifeline. It’s my oxygen. I need it. So it’s not only important, it’s really everything.

So are you one of these folks who kind of goes nuts when Twitter goes down or the “replies” tab gets broken?

No, because I get about a thousand emails a day. So actually I think I’m relieved, so I can actually go do the emails, cause I don’t want to keep those people waiting too long. You know, I’ve always got something to do. So obviously Twitter’s fun and when it goes down there’s another place to go, you know, whether it’s Facebook or Pownce or my inbox or somewhere else.

The show is about wine tasting, so why are you on there licking rocks and eating dirt and stuff like that?

You know, episode 148 is a real historic episode of Wine Library TV. It’s when I did that. It was to show people what I did to build my palette, and how I built my palette when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, to get into wine but my parents wouldn’t let me drink. I would read the tasting notes of wine and I would then go out and basically taste those things. So a Blackberry, Black Current, Cassis, you know, rocks. Whatever, you know, oyster shells, grass, black pepper. Whatever it took, I wanted to taste those things so that I could then pick them up, the subtleties of them in wine. Obviously if I’ve never had Cassis, how the heck was I gonna know what it tasted like when I tasted it in wine? And so that was a very important process of my career, even though it seems extreme, it was a big foundations of my palette.

When you’re on Conan or Ellen it seems like the thing that they want to focus the most on is eating the weird stuff. Do you feel like they’re trying to make it into a gimmick, whereas you have a more legitimate reason for doing it?

Yeah I think at some point maybe, but don’t forget I don’t care because I get the trade-off of getting millions of people to find out who I am and maybe come to the show and see what we’re doing, you know? And it is funny, and it is fun, and you know, I’m more than comfortable in making fun of myself. You know, I’m a New York Jets fan, I can handle a lot. So I just think it’s a part of the process, it’s one dimension. You know, I feel comfortable that I have a lot of dimensions, and so I hope that people start out by seeing it and being curious. And I’m sure some people will see that and be turned off by it and I respect that. But you know, I’m gonna work my face off and work real hard to show up on their radar again, and then hopefully when they see it the second or third or fourth time, they realize there’s a lot going on here.

I know there are lot of people who watch your show who are not necessarily a wine drinker, they just find the show entertaining. But for someone who’s never really gotten into wine, maybe they’ve taken a sip here and there but it’s just never caught on, what would be the first steps that they should take to become a wine drinker?

We should realize that wine is probably one of the only luxury items out there that doctors allow us, we can’t even eat anymore, right? I mean wine is like the one thing everybody agrees is healthy. So it’s a healthy beverage too. It’s phenomenal, it tastes great, and everybody hates it at first, and I think people need to wrap their head around that. Ninety percent of the people that taste wine for the first time dislike it. But then there’s a flip of a switch. And so the big thing to understand is you need to try as many different things and you need to trust your own palette. I don’t want to hear people rolling up on me anymore saying I’m sorry, I have an unsophisticated palette, you know? Nobody needs to be sorry for what their taste buds are. So go out, try different wines, don’t take it too serious, and I think what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna have an epiphany wine. You’re gonna be out with friends or doing something, watching games, drinking something. And you’re gonna taste something and be like wait a minute, this is pretty serious, I like this. And then the journey begins.

So if someone out there, it turns out that their favorite wine is some sort of wine that is cheap and everyone else makes fun of them for it, you’re saying that’s okay?

I think that’s great. I mean if you want to drink White Zinfandel or if you want to drink, you know, Yellowtail, that’s fine. But don’t drink it like it’s got the cure inside. I mean try different things. And way too many people find a wine they like and they drink it until, you know, they’re peeing out that flavor. And so I really would like to see people expand their palette, try as many different things, and that’s where I get really excited.

You’ve introduced some different terminology on your show, for instance there’s one that’s in the title of your book, you use it on your show all the time, “Bring Thunder.” What does that mean?

In high school when we used to play hoops and play NHL ‘94 on Sega Genesis, if you did anything good, you brought thunder. You know, no matter what. If you picked up a girl, you brought thunder. It was just a term that me and my friends used, and you know, I just subtly brought it back somehow when I was doing Wine Library TV. People caught onto it and really enjoyed it, and it just kind of became a life of its own. And you know, it’s just a slang term that I’ve used from back in the old school that has just kind of been resurrected on WLTV.

So these are things, you say things like “sniffy-sniff” and “link that up,” these aren’t things that you’re sitting around trying to think up, this is the way you naturally speak?

I think those kind of things that you try to naturally think up become very non-authentic, which is going to kill you. Not that I haven’t said oh man, this is fun, let’s come up with more stuff. But I just can’t force it because the thing is, I black out when I do Wine Library TV anyway. So even if I had a really solid gameplan going in, it would be thrown out the window. So I kind of just go natural.

You say you black out, I’ve also read that this is unscripted, you don’t have cue cards or anything. So this is just from the top of your head once the camera’s rolling?

Straight from the hip, my man. Straight from the hip. Five hundred episodes almost, never an edit on WLTV, just we rip it. And that’s how it rolls. And so it’s how I feel comfortable. When I do national television, things of that nature, I actually get upset because they want to, except when I do Conan and when it’s live, you know? I mean, people just try to over-produce. And I think when it’s real and transparent and authentic, it dominates. And you know, that’s why I love improv comedy.

Did you know all along that you wanted your show to be video and not just audio?

No, I guess I didn’t, you know? The audio podcasting thing kind of slipped through my radar, I was just in the middle of building a forty thousand square foot store. I kind of very much paid attention to blogging, but you know, that whole thing kind of went and passed me by cause I’m just not an unbelievable writer, even though I wrote a book. And then audio had, you know let’s be honest, audio had like that one year window before video was kind of available as well. And in that window I kind of just was too busy. And then by the time I kind of got back onto paying attention to what was going on, video was available as well and it just felt like a more common, more obvious platform for me cause wine is pretty visual and I thought I could do a lot more things with being a little bit more visual and so that’s how that kind of happened.

How did you end up making the decision to this every weekday, as opposed to just once or twice a week, or something that would be easier on you?

Because I’m hungry and I’m raw like that. I don’t understand anything unless it’s at a hundred thousand miles an hour. And so if I was gonna do this, I was gonna do it for my community and my fanbase until I was gonna bleed out of my eyeballs. And so that’s just the work ethic that I come with. And so it just made sense. I felt listen, I could put out a lot more content, you know? I kind of make fun of myself that I don’t do it seven days a week.

You’re going to be giving a keynote address at New Media Expo on August 14th. Obviously we don’t want you to give away the whole thing here, because we want people to actually go and see it in person. But just in general, what can people expect from you when they go to see you give a speech like that?

Pure passion. Looking to give value. Not looking to go up there and brag about what I’ve done. Maybe try to give a blueprint to people being able to see or achieve the same kind of success as I’ve had in a genre or niche that is meaningful and passionate to their soul. Talk about different scenarios, and a crapload of Q&A so I can answer questions of what people really want to know about. And so, you know, that’s really where I’m gonna come from because that’s what’s most important to me. You know, when I speak, I’m there to help, I’m there to give, and I’m not up there to promote. And so that is going to be a massive, massive part of what I’m doing. And really trying to talk about this gold rush of personal branding and building community and giving back. I’ve got a lot of things I’m passionate about, and really we’ll see where the crowd is vibing, and I like to really adjust or mold into where I think the sense of direction is of the audience.