One of Stormhoek’s customers, Harper Wells, is now running The Week Wine Club, the wine club of the popular British news magazine, The Week. It launches today.

If you join you will automatically be entered into a competition to win a wine connoisseur package of fine wine, glassware, storage etc, worth £6000. Offer open to any UK resident aged 18 or over.

A lot of major “upscale” publications have wine clubs in this country, including the national daily papers. I believe The Sunday Times wine club has about 250,000 members alone.

Anyway, good luck to them. Hope they sell some Stormhoek.

Technorati Tags:
gaping void wine, smarter wine, stormhoek, stormhoek wine, stormhoke wine, wine 2.0, Week Wine Club

[DOWNLOAD COUPON HERE.]

So here it is: The Stormhoek-Thresher Coupon 2.0.

40% Off any wine in any Thresher store for the next week [N.B. Thresher’s is the the largest specialist wine retailer in the UK].

We did Version 1.0 last Christmas, for Thresher, one of our big clients. Not to mention, it made the national news. So now that Easter has come along…

Unlike last time time, however we put a little Stormhoek branding on the top. That’s the shameless advertising hack in me etc.

Anyway, feel free to download coupon and blog it and/or e-mail it to as many people as you like. Thanks.

[This is the cartoon in question etc.]

For Wine Relief [a subset of Comic Relief] I’ve donated one of my cartoons for a charity auction. Details here.

Cartoonist and blogger Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com and Stormhoek.com fame has drawn a special Wine Relief cartoon, and wine expert and journalist Tim Atkin has specially selected 12 bottles of wine from his cellar in aid of Wine Relief.

And we’re bringing them together in what may be a web first – a “Cross-Blog-Auction”, where the highest bidder will win the fantastic prize of Hugh’s cartoon (above) plus Tim’s wine (listed below)!

It’s all in aid of a good cause, so I hope you’ll check it out. Thanks.

Our first day of shooting last week, in Inverness. We were just warming up…

Greetings from sunny York etc.

Colin just posted our first film efforts from yesterday. Edinburgh and Newcastle. Rock on.

[He’s still tweaking Day One- Inverness and Edinbugh etc. Expect to see that up shortly etc.]

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]

My dates for my Stormhoek Valentine’s Roadtrip have been confirmed:

February 2nd: Inverness, Corstorphine [Edinburgh].

3rd: Newcastle, Durham, Tadcaster.

4th: Blackpool, Bidston Moss [Merseyside], Horwich, Warrington.

5th: Stockport [Manchester], Altrichham [Manchester], Redditch [Worcestershire], Cardiff [Wales].

6th: Yeovil [Somerset], Bournemouth.

7th: Purley, Gatwick, Chichester.

8th: Sandhurst, Bursledon, Cirencester.

9th: Reading, Newbury, Abingdon.

10th: Barr Hill, Royston, Watford.

11th: Aylesbury, Ipswitch.

12th: Cheshunt [Herts.], Colchester.

13th: Pitsea [Essex], Twickenham.

14th: Brooklands [Surrey], New Malden [Surrey].

[UPDATE: Tour Map is here.]

You can download a more detailed itinerary here: [Word Document].

Cut and paste the postcode in the Word doc into Google Maps or Mapquest to get super-precise directions. If any bloggers want to meet me in Tesco’s while I’m there, or maybe a drink in the evening, just phone me on my mobile on the day +44 (0) 770 309 9462.

We knocked down the final number of stores I’ll be visiting by about a third, sadly. In the end we decided we wanted to spend more than ten minutes in each store, so there was really nothing else to do.

If this goes well, there’s already talk of doing something similar in both Germany and the USA. The virus spreads.

[This was originally posted on my personal blog, gapingvoid.]

As I’ve been mentioning for a while now, Stormhoek is launching a new series of cartoon wine labels, designed by myself.

We’re launching our first label at the end of this month, with a Valentine-related theme [the image above is not it, I’ll let y’all see it closer to the date etc]. It’ll be going into Tesco’s, the UK’s largest supermarket chain.

All very exciting. Two points:

1. Roadtrip

There will be a noteworthy promotion. Not being the type of folk to sit on our bottoms all day and wait for the results to magically happen elsewhere, we’re going on the road. Namely, I’m going on the road.

Think of it as a bit like a book tour. Except instead of visiting bookstores, I shall be visiting Tesco stores. And instead of signing books, I shall be signing this new commemorative edition of Stormhoek lithographs that I’m currently working on, to any shopper who wants one.

I am hoping to recruit Colin Kennedy of Get Your People fame to accompany me, as traveling companion, assistant, and the guy who holds the camera & mike during podcasts. We’re meeting next week or so to discuss.

We kick off the tour circa February 1st, and hope to visit 50 Tesco’s stores by Valentine’s Day. It’ll be busy, that’s for sure.

2. Love

We’re not just launching the new cartoon series around Valentine’s Day just for the usual holiday-promo reasons. Like I said earlier, in this brave new world of ours, LOVE is, or should be, at the center of marketing. My buddy, Tara Hunt once famously said that “Trust is the new currency”. A nice thought, but I disagree. Love is where it’s at. Love reaches into far deeper places than Trust ever could.

Of course, I don’t just mean romantic, sexual love. I mean human connection. If you don’t have that, like Saint Paul once said, you have nothing.

And why do people drink wine together? The same reason people write and read blogs. Connection. Human connection. That means “Love” on some level, whether you care to admit it or not.

Music may be food of love, but wine is the drink. Welcome to the heart of Stormhoek marketing.

We live in interesting times.

[This was originally cross-posted on my personal blog, gapingvoid.]

Heather Hopkins over at Hitwise has some great stats on the Thresher virus:

The weblog for South African wine-producer, Stormhoek, which posted the voucher on 24th November, saw its website visits surge ahead of those to Threshers, capturing a 110 times larger share of visits than Threshers. On 28th November, the voucher was also posted in the forum of MoneySavingExpert.com and 45% of visits to Threshers.co.uk came from forums.moneysavingexpert.com last week.

Wine retailers are trying to benefit from the frenzy. A search for “threshers” on Google yesterday returned a sponsored result for Sainsbury’s promoting 25% off wine and today, Virgin Wines was the top sponsored result, offering 50% off wine.

Microsoft’s Steve Clayton interviewed me a week or so ago. Not my worst interview ever, by any means. About 7 minutes long. Enjoy.

[NB. I interviewed Steve about a week prior to this. All good fun etc]