winesearch.at - Wine Marketing with New Media

Since its inception in 1995 Austrian wine on the net has done very well. As one of the first professional wine organizations the ÖWM used the fact that it was ahead of the competition to provide a user-friendly information platform for its wines. The positive response to this initiative is evident not only in the steadily increasing number of users (currently some 23400 sessions per month), but also in the friendly reception it received in the specialized press. Only this month the international wine magazine VINUM rated 250 top wine sites and enthused about “the masterful performance of Austrian wines”. “There is nothing left to be desired here,” it concludes, awarding the site top marks.

The ÖWM interpreted this positive reception as a challenge. At an internet brunch at Vienna’s Bignet Café the Wine Marketing Service presented its newest service, www.winesearch.at. The new search engine is not only an online wine guide with addresses and descriptions of wineries as well as links to the homepages of producers, it also provides information about international representation of wineries, making it easy to search for importers of Austrian wines around the globe. Those interested in award-winning wines can also use the award search engine in order to locate the most important national and international prizes given to Austrian wines, from Parker points to gold medals and special trophies.

“Say you are sitting in New York and you are interested in buying Austrian wine,” muses Michael Thurner, responsible for the search engine project and designated successor of the departing ÖWM director Bertold Salomon. “You want to find out which producers export into the USA and who are the importers. Within seconds you have the result and you can contact them via email or on their home page. This gives Austrian wines a platform that is absolutely unique, and our home page has already become symbolic for the renewal of the Austrian wine industry.”