Wine Brands and Social Media

Yesterday, the Cork Board wrote an interesting piece on defining brands in the wine world. Using a social media monitoring tool, they were able to track mentions of "Napa Valley" in online media (such as blogs, microblogs like Twitter, and rich media sites) to find which words were most associated with the Napa Valley "brand." Words such as "cabernet" and "vineyards" came up often in results, indicating these are hot topics in conversations about Napa Valley.

Over the past several weeks, we've also been monitoring the "winosphere." We found this first attempt at aggregating data on brand ownership so intriguing that we did some additional research of our own. Staying on the Napa theme, we wanted to compare the online buzz generated by several Napa Valley wineries over the past month. We chose five major Napa wineries: Robert Mondavi, Beringer, Sterling, Beaulieu, and Rubicon and discovered the following:

These results provide a glimpse into the relative prominence of these wineries or their relative share of the ownership of the larger Napa Valley brand in online conversations. Mondavi was at the front of the pack, meaning the Mondavi brand was mentioned the most in social media posts, followed by Beringer and Sterling.


Approaching this from another angle, we determined the relative prominence of these five wineries within discussions about Cabernet wines. Who is generating the most buzz when it comes to Napa Valley cabs? We found similar results to the graph above:















Is this just a coincidence, or can we use this data to come to general conclusions about brand power in social media? We're interested to hear your thoughts, and we'll be checking back with the Cork Board to see what else they are cooking up.

All of these Napa Valley brands and many more are available on our website.

Or get a taste of the most talked about Napa Valley wine brand, Robert Mondavi.