Formulation of the #Winelover Winery Visits Task Force

Prior to its dissolution, the #Winelover Administrative Committee had created a number of Task Forces aimed at adding value to the community experience. One such body was the Winery Visits Reporting Task Force which had completed a draft document with recommendations targeted at both the institutional and individual winelover levels.

After surveying the landscape, the team felt that the benefits that would accrue to individual winelovers from access to our collective effort dictated that we share the output (despite our loss of mandate). Towards that end, we have scrubbed the document of all institutional end goals and will present the remainder in a series of posts over the course of five consecutive days beginning with today's post on the intent and formulation of the task force. Many of the findings and recommendations of the study effort will be second nature to many of you but if they provide direction and/or reassurance to even one individual, it would have been worth the effort.

A. Problem Statement

Members of the #winelover community are making trips to wineries — either as part of a community event or on their own — but a large subset of these members are neglecting to provide any reporting on these trips. This lack of reporting:

•  Deprives non-attending community members from sharing in the experience and learnings

•  Fails to repay the generosity of the estate by providing some level of exposure of its products and practices to the wider world.

A number of the winelovers who prepare trip reports are not communicating effectively while others are doing a quality job and their practices should be exploited.

B. Vision

The solution to the problem is envisioned to be:

•  Concise, informative, uniform winery reports -- utilizing a variety of media -- that seamlessly document the winery visit in a manner that is:

o   Informative to Community members

o   A statement of gratitude to the estate

o   A contribution to the construct of a long-term community asset.

A Winery Reporting Task Force was established to develop tools and techniques to improve the frequency and quality of member winery reports and, in so doing, address the shortcomings listed in the problem statement.

Summary of the Problem and Expectations of the Task Force

C. Task Force

The process for development of the actual task force is detailed in the diagram below.

Task-Force-Development Flowchart

The Task Force was headed up by the author with other members to include Luiz Alberto, Sharon Parsons, Magnus Reuterdahl, Olga Mosino, Fabien Lane, and Tomislav Ivanovic.

D. Study Approach and Team Member Responsibilities

It was decided that the data needed for analysis and report development would be collected via literature searches. It was further decided that the final document would be organized as follows with the indicated team members responsible for specific components:

1. Introduction (To include Objectives and describe the team and approach taken; Keith Edwards)

2. Winelover Preparation for the Winery Visit (Including all the steps that the Winelover should take ahead of the trip to ensure collection of quality data; Olga Mosina)

3. Winelover Site Visit (To include steps taken onsite to collect information necessary for a high-quality report. To include Conduct, Data Collection, Wine Tasting; Keith Edwards)

4. Follow Up and Reporting (ID of data gaps and mechanisms for getting that data, formatting, content, and timing of reporting; Sharon Parsons)

5 Reporting Mechanisms -- the population of mechanisms that the Winelover could use to report on the site visit. Tomislav Ivanovic

Luiz Alberto provided directional guidance while Fabien Lane provided technical support.

This post will be followed by a guest post on my blog from Olga Mosina. Olga's post will cover Preparation for the winery visit and will be followed by posts on successive days from the author, Sharon Parsons, and Tomislav Ivanovic covering their respective areas of responsibility.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme