100 wine videos on BKWine TV

We have published our 100th wine video on BKWine TV. We celebrated that with a press release that explains what it is and a bit about the background. Here it is:

“BKWine recently published its one hundredth wine vide on BKWine TV. BKWine TV is a YouTube video channel with interviews with winemakers and reportage from wineries and vineyards across the world. The latest video is an interview with South Africa’s first black woman winemaker. All videos are available here: http://www.youtube.com/bkwine

BKWine TV is the video channel of BKWine, the Paris based wine journalism, wine travel and wine photography organisation run by the originally Swedish couple Britt and Per Karlsson.

All videos are recorded and produced by Per Karlsson, BKWine co-founder, who explains the background: “It all started as a fun experiment 2 years ago. We travel around quite a lot for our wine tour business and for our journalism – we visit more than 200 wineries every year – and a friend said to us: ‘Why don’t you do some videos with the winemakers and from the vineyards?’ So I borrowed a video camera and started to do some videos. It has proved to be tremendously popular with more than a hundred thousand online views.” The technology is very simple: just one person with a camera and a microphone talking to the interviewees.

Most videos are winemaker interviews, explaining their way of making wine, or reportage from vineyards and wine regions. The latest video is an interview with South Africa’s first black woman winemaker, Ntsiki Biyela of the Stellekaya winery in Stellenbosch made recently on a BKWine tour of South Africa. Other recent videos include an interview with Jon Bowen, an English winemaker in the south of France, Charles Metcalfe, a well known British wine writer who talks about modern trends in Portugal, the marketing director for Amorim, Carlos de Jesus, who explains why natural cork is the best bottle closure, and a mini-series with winemakers from the Douro valley. Other notable videos include the chief winemaker at Château d’Yquem, the president and vice-president of CIVB (the Bordeaux producers’ organisation), and a presentation of the new champagne closure “Maestro” that has since been forbidden. But the most popular video is on how to make a wine barrel! Most videos are in English (marked [E]) but some are in French or Swedish (marked [F] or [S]).

Per explains about the purpose with the videos: “It’s a way of sharing our experiences and our travel with wine enthusiasts across the world. We really want to let the winemakers talk, to explain what they try to do and why – it’s not us talking about what we drink. We want to give people an insight into what the real wine people do and think and share with the online social networking community for wine. We’re not really trying to make a slick professional style programming; we don’t have the resources for that. Rather, we try to tell an interesting story. It seems to work quite well. BKWine TV has more than 150,000 video views. We’re also proud that we have more ‘channel views’ than the Wine Spectator, but they have of course more ‘upload views’. But we’re not competing in any way; the more people who do wine videos the better it is for the wine lovers of the world.”

BKWine TV is regularly updated with new contents. There is for example a series of more South African video interviews coming, following BKWine’s recent wine tour of the country. All videos are available on YouTube on http://www.youtube.com/bkwine, and are also published on the BKWine blog: http://bkwineblog.blogspot.com/.