Check out the pilot for a project that will be appreciated by consumers, an online directory of all Swiss wineries. It was presented to journalists during the Vinea Swiss Wines Fair in Sierre 10 days ago; the pilot version is now available on line.
The project goes live officially in January 2015, the time it will take to incorporate all the wineries and add features, but you can already get a good sense of it.
Swiss Wine Selection, a private marketing business and online shop of quality Swiss wines run by Hervé Badan, is behind the project. It has backing from the Vinea Association and Swiss Wine Promotion, the national marketing board.
SWP is the official partner and is providing the basic listings for the country’s 1,500 cellars, free of charge. Wineries will then have the option, for a reasonable price, of adding marketing material, photos, logos, their special offers and more.
About 70 percent of Swiss wineries have web sites, but even for those who do, it can be difficult to keep the site up to date, says Badan. These are often small family businesses and working in the vineyards and the cellar takes all their time; budgets don’t always stretch to hiring someone else to take care of a web site.
User friendly, user appeal
Badan represents a number of high quality, artisanal wineries and his web site for them is both beautiful and coherent – a promising sign for the new directory. Badan is active on social media; not surprisingly, sharing options are well integrated and Google Maps is incorporated for geolocalization. The new site is clean and easy to use. It functions in four languages: French, German, Italian and English.
Vinea has a free app for smart phones that offers a guide to 500 of the country’s best winemakers, selected on the basis of award winners and general reputation, and several sites (including Badan’s Swiss Wine Selection) offer information on smaller groups but until now there has been no online directory for all of the country’s wineries, with basic information and maps.
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