One of the books that changed the way I see the world and helped nudged me along into founding Israeli Wine Direct is Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail (recently issued in an updated paperback edition).

The gist: after you get beyond the popular well-known “hits” in any space (music, movies, books, wine) there still exists this “long tail” of nichey stuff that some people would love if they only knew about it, if they could get to it, if they had help sorting through all the crappy stuff that also admittedly exists in the long tail of anything.

For instance, probably 80% of Israeli wine available in the US comes from a very small handful of commercial wineries. I wanted to get to the juice that wasn’t here, and I’d done enough homework to know there was some REALLY worthy juice in that long tail I wanted to shine a light on for others, too. So that’s what we did. We reached across the ocean into the long tail of Israeli wine, sorted through the nasty swill and brought you what we believe to be the best AND then built portals for you with easy access to these tail-wines(websites, wine parties, direct marketing etc).

There are businesses to be made from AGGREGATING and BUILDING EASY ACCESS TO a selection of high-quality long-tailers (Amazon.com and eBay and NetFlix are great world-class examples of such businesses). There’s an audience out there for really off-the-path stuff (there are some kooky people trolling for kooky stuff on eBay but good for them!). As Tom Wark said about us some time ago, the Internet has enabled us to create a “store”  entirely focused on Israeli wines – a hyper-narrow niche that would be impossible to do as a bricks-and-mortar store.

It was and is a lot messier and more complicated than it (hopefully) looks behind the scenes, trust me, but that’s the idea of Israeli Wine Direct.

Today, Chris Anderson penned a post about the Long Tail of CUSTOMERS (forget about product long tails for a moment). And here’s what he says about the customer long-tail and a bottoms-up marketing approach:

if you’re selling things, you don’t necessarily need to massively expand your product range to tap Long Tail markets. You can instead just reach the “long tail of customers”, which is to say all the potential pockets of demand that don’t necessarily lie within your normal marketing channels. This is the smaller potential customers, the ones you don’t know about, the ones you never considered and the ones who didn’t even think they were potential customers until they heard about your products from someone they know.

Chris has managed to get in my head again – and it’s now after 2:00am Central. Uh oh.

He’s talking about the OTHER Long Tail, the one that you and I are likely in and may not even know that we’re in it, the one for those of us with niche interests we may have not yet connected to available products or services we may not even know exist with our names on them.

And I am loving discovering those people through this adventure we’re on. For me so far, it’s a dentist in Manhattan I now enjoy talking regularly with, an executive from Florida who summers in New York, an Israeli high-tech adult movie distributor in Silicon Valley, the evangelical Christian family in Ohio who fell in love with an Israeli winemaker’s family when they visited the Holy Land, an IT director at a major university in Ohio who will be hosting a major house party with me in August. I just think the world of these good people!

Israeli Wine Direct has connected me not only to a Long Tail of great wine from Israel but a growing long tail of great people never before on anyone’s radar for traditional wine marketing (but who pays attention to boring stuffy snooty wine advertising anyway?). And in the process my world is thankfully bigger than it ever was before at a very personal level.

You know what I think the secret sauce is (in addition to the fact that the wine tastes good thank God)?

I think the secret sauce is that when someone discovers something they never knew existed, they somehow feel discovered and uncovered themselves in the process.

And I think that when you have a product with MEANING THAT PEOPLE WANT TO CONNECT WITH that’s a secret sauce also. And wine from the ancient land where wine was born, where people like Abraham and Jesus and King David themselves walked around drinking wine, a land re-born only 60 years ago yet having accomplished so much… is meaningful in a way that Napa Valley just isn’t.

As I write this evening (morning?), I am listening to a CD from a contemprary Israeli singer/songwriter/pianist named Karen Peles sing in gorgeous Hebrew (the language God used to create the Universe, a ”dead” language for hundreds of years only refreshed and reborn 60 years ago! Anybody speaking Latin anymore? I don’t think so.)

The story of the rebirth of the Israeli wine phenomenon parallels the story of the rebirth of the country of Israel herself, as she celebrates her 60th anniversary as a modern state.

That’s the secret sauce people all over this country in the Long Tail of actual and potential customers of ours are responding to in part (in addition, as I said earlier, to the fact that the wine tastes GOOD). That’s the kind of meaning that is scalable that Hugh McLeod has written about, that can start fires inside of people and networks of people. You should have seen people connecting with Israeli winemaker Golan Flam in a home in Highland Park, IL. It went beyond wine, I can promise you. They all have plans to visit him in Israel now!

Email me richard@israeliwinedirect.com if you want to have a wine party with me in your house. I’ll bring the wine. You bring the people. Together we’ll connect the long tail of wine with the long tail of people eager for good juice that also means something for a change.