Note: This is a cross-post from my weekly entry at Good Grape. Since I’m behind again, I’ll post another article on Sunday.

As a wine marketer, I’m always on the lookout for new and innovative strategies to sell more wine. As the first wine podcaster, I feel a certain responsibility to keep current on the genre by subscribing to every new wine podcast (for a while anyway). When these two things meet, I take notice.

So it was with great interest that I discovered today that Trinchero Family Estates has started to podcast. This is the conglomerate that white Zinfandel has built with the best known brand being Sutter Home. Their podcasts are focused not on consumers like first entrant Goosecross Cellars (disclosure: I work with Goosecross) but on the trade. Kudos to whomever at Trinchero came up with this idea as I’ve always thought that business-to-business podcasting is as compelling as business-to-consumer. It’s somewhat perplexing why this is not the first thing large wineries would think about in this medium as distributors, retailers and restaurants are naturals for regular communication in forms that can be consumed on the go. But that’s where this effort falls a bit short in my opinion. Instead of providing RSS feeds for listeners to subscribe to, they make the user download each podcast individually. This can be easily fixed and I’ll bet someone will take care of this shortly. My impressions of the first few shows I listened to are, well, sort of dry and basic but it’s a start.

I’m hoping other large wineries (and I’m talking to you, Gallo!) will follow Trinchero’s lead here and address their podcasts to the trade and maybe even the consumer, too. It’s inexpensive and very effective.