Check your calendar — what are you doing on June 1st?

If you haven’t already heard, the second annual Wine 2.0 summit is scheduled for June 1st of this year, and you’ll definitely want to be there. Why? Not just because it’s an awesome networking event, or because there will be several-dozen wineries (some on WineQ) pouring their delicious wines there. The number one reason you’ll want to be there is to hear WineQ speaking about the disruptive effects of technology on wine clubs!

The Wine 2.0 guys are encouraging their participating companies to guest-blog on their website, and here’s what WineQ had to say:

The world recently witnessed a fundamental shift in how the web is used, and many people called it Web 2.0. It represented a transformation of the world wide web from a basic publishing medium into a social, participatory platform that empowered it’s users more than ever before. Wine 2.0 follows in its footsteps, bringing the world of social networking to the world of wine.

Finally! The social dimension, while highly intrinsic to the experience of enjoying wine, has largely been disregarded by numerous dot-com wine sites. However, they certainly aren’t the only ones, and they definitely weren’t the first.

One example that’s particularly relevant to WineQ is the modern world of wine clubs. Today, because of the retail wine club industry, “wine club” has come to mean a retail operation where some hired “authority,” with no relation to its members, chooses what he or she likes, hoping the members will enjoy them too! Sometimes the authority is someone we trust, and the perfect example is the winery wine club, one of the biggest success stories in the wine industry. However, with retail wine clubs, we often don’t even know the name of the person choosing our wines, let alone what kind of wines they themselves like — so how can we trust them to find us a wine WE will like? Yet this is the rationale behind most retail wine clubs.

This thinking is fundamentally flawed, because what many dot-coms and retail wine clubs have failed to understand is that, like enjoying wine, discovering great wines is also a social experience. “Wine club” used to mean you would meet with a group of your wine-enthusiast friends and enjoy your favorite wines together. Wine clubs were once both a means of discovering new wines, as well as enjoying them, all in a very, very social atmosphere.

At WineQ, it is our mission to revolutionize the wine club by restoring this missing social experience, using state-of-the-art technology. WineQ, in it’s current form, is based on an entirely customizable wine queue that’s prompted many people to label us “the Netflix of Wine.” As many of our members have pointed out (Winecast, Winehiker, Dr. Debs, Wannabe Wino, Twisted Oak Winery, Escafeld Vineyards, Vivi’s Wine Journal), the Q has proven an excellent tool for regularly receiving wines that excite you in a busy world where regularly going shopping for wine has become a rarely-afforded luxury. (And with free shipping, WineQ is even more affordable!)

But that’s definitely just the beginning! The Q is simply the first step in our evolution — call it WineQ 1.0 — and forms the backbone for the reinvigoration of the wine club now going on in the WineQ Secret Lab.

Want to get involved in reshaping the future of the wine club? Join our club, start receiving the wines that *you* want (shipped absolutely free) and inquire about becoming a member of the WineQ Beta Club. We’ll see you all soon — we’re looking forward to what promises to be a very exciting June 1st!

That applies to you, too, loyal WineQ Blog reader — See you at Wine 2.0!