corkd.com

Gary Vaynerchuk retires
Gary Vaynerchuk retires

Gary Vay-Ner-Chuk!

Gary Vaynerchuk is arguably one of the biggest names is the wine business and social media.  He built a $65 Million wine empire out of the Wine Library through passionate daily wine videos.  He pioneered the idea of personal branding through the new media.

Late last year Gary announced that he was pulling out of his daily wine community website, Corkd.com.  Then on his 1,000th Wine Library TV episode he announced that he was retiring from WLTV, to pursue a new venture called The Daily Grape.

Yesterday Gary announced that he is retiring from producing wine related content altogether.  The news came as quite a surprise to much of the social media and wine blogging community.  In explaining why he was doing this Gary explained in episode #89 of The Daily Grape that he just felt ready, he felt that it was time to move on.  He explained that he has always been an entrepreneur first and that he sold lemonade and baseball cards before he got into wine.  He is going to be looking for new opportunities,  unrelated to wine.  Many people have speculated that this has something to do with his Social Media and Branding company, Vayner Media, but Gary also said that he is not retiring so he can do more of Vayner Media.

It will be interesting to see what he comes up with and how long he can manage to abstain from making wine videos for!

Corkd.com Shutting down
Corkd.com logo

where's the content?

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Corkd.com has been a great way to review share and discuss wine.  Over the past year a new “corkd content” section was added. Corkd senior editor Jonathan Troutman worked with bloggers, sommeliers and wine aficionados to produce educational wine content on a daily basis.  I was contacted by Gary, Jon and Corkd CEO Lindsay Ronga early last year to guest write and I jumped at the opportunity.  I managed to pump out (with the help of Jon’s impressive editing skills) 40 arcticles.

But if you’ve visited the Corkd Content recently you will have noticed that there have been no new guest blogger updates since December 13th.  And @Corkd hasn’t tweeted since December 15th.  What’s going on? Are they planning to rebrand/revamp the content portion of corkd.com?  Are they shutting down, selling out? There are definitely some changes coming, but the team has been very hush hush about what the plans are.  I have been in email contact with Jonathan Troutman and asked him if Corkd was going to be revamping, rebranding, and asked him point blank “What is going on over at Corkd?”  He responded by saying he should have an answer to my questions very soon.

…stay tuned…

UPDATE: Corkd Content atCorkd.com is winding down operations.  Lindsay Ronga will be “moving on to other opportunities” according to the final tasting note posted on Cork.com on January 12th.  Senior editor Jonathon Troutman will be working with Gary Vaynerchuk in other capacities. Corkd.com will still be operational, but there will be no new content or maintenance.  Gary said in a video post that the site will be up for a couple more months to give people time to export their reviews elsewhere.  He also mentioned the possibility of selling the site.