André Ribeirinho

I’m incredibly happy to have been awarded as Wine Personality of the Year in Portugal by the DN newspaper and I would like to take this amazing opportunity to say a few things.

As I said previously it makes me very proud to see the work that me and my team (André Cid and Emídio Santos) have been doing during the last 3 years recognized by a national newspaper. So, what have we been doing ?

Adegga
Adegga is the project that started everything. 3 years ago I quit my day job at SAPO and decided to work full-time on this project.

• Adegga (Twitter) is an online wine community where anyone can track the wines that are drinking (to help remember later) and share that experience with other people.
• Adegga now has over 100.000 unique visitors every month and includes over 10.000 tasting notes from its members. Together consumers are changing the wine world by creating a new wine recommendation era where trust and conversation are more important than status.
• Adegga is now a platform with a soon be released API and Mobile application for the IPhone & Android.
• Wine producers can use Adegga to talk about their wines, present their winery or launch a new wine. Cortes de Cima and Quevedo are two of wine producers already doing it.

AVIN, an ISBN for Wine

• The AVIN (Twitter) is a unique identifier for each wine. Think of it as an ISBN for Wine.
• Like with books, every wine should have a unique number. This will help consumers get more information out of each bottle of wine and help them make smarter decisions.
• 2 years ago we created the concept of Dynamic Wine Labels allowing anyone with a camera-enabled mobile phone to read the label and access wine reviews, wine prices and a lot more information from anywhere.
• Cortes de Cima, Quevedo, O’Vineyards were the first to use the AVIN.
• Now, over 1 million wine labels have been printed with a Dynamic Wine Label including an AVIN and a QRCode
  
• Wineries interested in getting an AVIN for their wines should contact us.

What else?
The awarded is largely based on the work done on those 2 projects but I gave another wine related project a lot of time in 2009. Together with the star couple Gabriella and Ryan Opaz and shirt-proud Robert McIntosh I helped bring the European Wine Bloggers conference to Portugal. The conference was a major success, gathering over 160 people including wine producers, wine bloggers and wine writers from around the World. It brought new media education and attention to the Portuguese wine industry.

Portugal *is* changing
Being awarded by a respected national newspaper is the kind of exposure that should happen more often in Portugal. Some awards should exist to promote and create public awareness of great work done by young people who are shaping the future and not to award the same-old-people who are already well know and awarded. Thanks to Aníbal Coutinho for his courage in doing this and helping change this mentality.

Aníbal wrote something powerful to finish the article and I definitely think ever

If you’re a wine producer or professional in the wine area and you’ve haven’t understood why I gave André Ribeirinho the award, make sure you’re not turning your back to the future of your business.

Thank you
I would also like to thank everyone who has been supporting me and my projects on Twitter, Facebook and all around the World. You guys make it possible!

Thanks Henriette from inspiring me for that title!