Gary Vaynerchuk (Vay-ner-chuk) has captured attention with his pioneering, multifaceted approach to personal branding and business. A self-trained wine expert, Vaynerchuk revolutionized the wine industry with his video blog, Wine Library TV (affectionately known as The Thunder Show). His enthusiastic, unconventional, and often irreverent wine commentary attracts more than 80,000 viewers per day worldwide and has earned him national television appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Ellen Degeneres Show, the Today show, Mad Money with Jim Cramer, and The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. Vaynerchuk's roots in wine-tasting come honestly—his Russian immigrant parents owned a liquor store when he was growing up. Bored at the cash register, he began reading Wine Spectator and The Wine Advocate and realized collecting wine offered an allure similar to his previous hobby of collecting baseball cards. As a teenager, tasting wine was legally impossible, so Vaynerchuk set out to train his palate "backwards." To study various flavors associated with wine, he tasted obscure fruits and vegetables, along with earthly influences, including grass, dirt, rocks, tobacco, and wood. "I probably consumed more New Jersey grass in my teens than any lawn mower," says Vaynerchuk. By familiarizing himself with the numerous tastes that contributed to a specific wine, he was able to detect subtleties that an ordinary palate wouldn't recognize.
With a wealth of knowledge and an entrepreneurial spirit, Vaynerchuk spent every weekend of his college years at his parents' store, re-branding the family business as Wine Library and establishing himself as a respected expert. As the store's only wine buyer, he sampled every wine that entered the store. Customers depended on Vaynerchuk for his advice and within five years, Wine Library grew from a $4 million dollar business to a $45 million business.
But Vaynerchuk's career took a new turn with the advent of Wine Library TV. It always troubled him to observe the stuffiness of the industry—conceited sommeliers, snobby shopkeepers unwilling (or unable) to educate their consumers, and seemingly mystical conventions, all combining to make wine seem intimidating to the uninitiated. Wine Library TV breaks down those barriers, making wine accessible to all, while emphasizing the importance of trying new things to expand one's palate.
What raised Vaynerchuk's notoriety even more than his business acumen was his foresight. After primarily utilizing traditional media to build his family's local wine business into a national industry leader, he leveraged tools such as Facebook and Twitter to promote the Wine Library TV brand, capturing the attention of a demographic new to wine and eager to learn. While his youthful following broke down barriers in the wine industry, the business world (and Web 2.0) admired Vaynerchuk for creating a new generation of branding, focusing on the Internet.
Vaynerchuk's remarks on personal branding, social media, and marketing at conferences such as FOWA, Strategic Profits, and South By Southwest have occasioned praise from established web denizens and earned him the admiration of countless bloggers and aspiring entrepreneurs. He has secured speaking engagements around the world and consults for a wide variety of companies. Vaynerchuk's dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him the Social Media Sommelier.
As the youngest winner of MarketWatch's Business Award at 27, Vaynerchuk is an icon in his industry. His first book, 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World, brought his unpret
