Ian Griffith of Beverage Media:

It would certainly make our lives easier if there was a standardized format for bottle shots. Ideally winery websites wouldn’t make the only shot of a wine available on a flash page or pdf file. Are you thinking about all wineries or only wineries of a particular size? And if you can crack this one I’d like to have a go with standardizing UPC codes.

Marshall Sontag of WineQ:

Count me out, my friend! We take our own photos and we (WineQ members included) love them!
It’s probably cheaper to hire a team of people to Photoshop every single wine brand you put on your site, than to try to get every obscure Chilean winery and small farmer with a wine to adopt a photographic standard, not to mention all the myriad Constellation, et al, brands.

I can’t argue with your logic, though.

UPC code standardization would be great as well, but I think thats even harder. The average winery simply copies a Gallo UPC or recycles the same one annually. I’m hoping that with bottle shots, being that they are more visible to the consumer we might get traction faster.

and Marshall, you’re right, the photos you take are fantastic, the benefit is mainly for stores with 2,000 sku’s and up (and sites like snooth of course).

All we need now is a wine bottle photographer to define some sort of standard and then we can slowly begin to put the word out there.

Paul, I have a few contacts I can pester, but if Inertia has someone in house, or that you use drop me a line and I’ll contact them to come up with the tech specs of the ideal bottle shot.

The fact that I stumble on Philip’s post a month late should tell you exactly how many balls I’m juggling. That, and my “Bob’s Bitch” T-shirt is in the laundry.

In essence, I see this as related to every other problem in the online wine industry: lack of uniformity. It abounds, partly because of the scale of the problem (how many 100’s of wineries? 1000’s of brands? 10000’s of labels?) but also the personalities involved. There is still a very deeply held NIH (not invented here) mentality in the wine industry. Everyone thinks they are Moses leading their people to the Promised Land, and few want to play nice with others out of some sense of zero-sum competition. The largest players (Diageo, Constellation, Fosters) all have crews of people that can provide uniformity within their individual realms. But step outside that bubble, and it’s a bit like entering the mosh pit at a Pantera concert. (I hope I’m not dating myself too badly).

So, the issue remains. How to transform an entire industry’s attitude toward data and media. I expect we’ll be at this a while.