This made my day. From the MSNBC blog:

Though it seems mostly as the result of marketing strategy, Stormhoek appears to have established itself as the geek wine.

I like it when the Stormhoek meme gets picked up by mainstream media, even in a small way. As a marketer, it tells me the virus is working. Even more importantly, it also tells the same thing to the people who pay my wages.

What’s interesting to me about being “the established geek wine” or, as I’m fond of shamelessly calling it, “The Unofficial Cult Wine of Silicon Valley”, is the fact that [A] Stormhoek is THOUSANDS of miles away from Silicon Valley and [B] Napa Valley is just up the road from Silicon Valley.

In other words, logic would dictate that the Valley folk would’ve picked a wine a bit closer to home, indirectly or otherwise. But then the blogosphere came along and changed the rules.

Of course, on another level, it should come as no surprise that a South African wine became “the established geek wine”. This is what the internet is all about. Eliminating distances etc.

I’m not sure if I concur with the thought that “it seems mostly as the result of marketing strategy”. Two reasons. First, this implies that marketing was some kind of peripheral thing, an appendage to the main event. This to me undermines just how important marketing is, to everybody alive, not just us marketing nerds.

Secondly, it wasn’t as if me and the Stormhoek boys just sat down one day and said “Hey, let’s just market to the geeks”, for inherent brand reasons. The geeks just happen to be friends of mine, people I know, and people who reads blogs. If our readers had instead been sweet old ladies from Wisconsin, perhaps Stormhoek would now be selling to them.

We live in interesting times.