WINENEWS.TV DEBUTS: AN EXPERIMENTAL WEB-TV DEDICATED TO WINE THAT ALLOWS ENO-NAVIGATORS TO BECOME REPORTERS BY SENDING THEIR OWN FILMS FROM VIDEO CAMERAS AND MOBILE PHONES

The debut of an online video site dedicated to wine. It’s called www.winenews.tv and it is a unique web site in Italy that will present interviews, events, personalities, surveys and curiosities regarding the wine world, all in video format. The site, managed by Paolo De Cristofaro and Antonio Boco, is the “little brother” of WineNews, one of the most popular sites of Italian wine enthusiasts.
www.winenews.tv, which began to take form at Vinitaly (Verona, 6-10 April 2006), one of the most important events in international winemaking, is set to officially begin within the next few months and will offer eno-navigators - wine enthusiasts who surf the web - a selection of films and audio files on wine and all of the protagonists involved.
Winenews.tv, will offer brief and informative videos. It absolutely does not want to compete with big wine & food network programs (which have enormous technological and financial resources and can afford to give the utmost attention to image quality), but intends to focus primarily on content in order to give relevant video news in real-time, with whatever tools are available.
”Our goal”, explained Paolo De Cristofaro, “is to give something extra to our visitors, when an image or a video can give more value to a news piece than just the written word”.
Some videos may be of lower quality than what we are used to seeing on tv, but the non professional effect creates a more living and immediate impression, giving the viewer a sense of participation”.
Winenews.it is an experimental and innovative project that will exploit all of the opportunities made available by new technologies ranging from amatorial video cameras to mobile phones.
Antonio Boco noted that “There won’t be any defined formats, on the contrary, we emphasize the maximum freedom of expression, in order to allow different styles and space for both more institutional videos covering fairs, events, interviews, as well as more amatorial videos that may have just been filmed with a mobile phone”.
One of the biggest novelties of WineNews is that even eno-navigators will have the possibility to become reporters, sending videos they may have made on vacation, or during a visit to a wine cellar, or an encounter with a wine producer.
Paolo De Cristofaro concluded, “We are particularly interested in the theme of travel, and we want to push attention to the wine territories, both the more and less famous areas. In order to finally associate an image of a vineyard, a terroir, a winemaker, caught in the naturalness of a spontaneous or occasional encounter”.