Street Teams 2.0 for wine - Promote your favorites and get paid?

Apart from the fact that a high score from a major wine publication can drive sales for a winery, the best kind of brand promotion and representation is that of your loyal and enthusiastic customers, right? Although the term originated from small record labels finding new ways to advocate their bands/events, "street teams" promote through personal interactions, word of mouth marketing - their enthusiasm and personal connections being the driving factors of a successful promotion. Hitting the streets can be very effective form of promoting a local concert or the release of a new album, but the idea in its 90's form is difficult to apply to wine. Fast forward a decade or two into the web 2.0 world of social networking - a world where grand ideas and banal minutia alike are shared daily by the millions via avenues such as twitter, facebook, google chat, email - you name it. If you could harness the nature of what made street teams so successful, yet let loose your street team into the digital streets of the social media world, would such a viral promotion produce similarly successful results?

In a very basic sense, that is what we are aiming for with our winecliQ project. In a nutshell, a winecliQ is a way to share your favorite wine recommendations and get some money for providing the winery with a direct sale. This can come from a person loyal to a particular set of wineries, or just someone who wants to share their thoughts about the wines they are currently enjoying. Say this person is me: I pick some wines from the AmericanWinery.com inventory (wineries market their wines here, and ship directly to the consumer). My picks are presented in a customized store/checkout cart. I promote my picks to my friends, blog readers, twitter followers, etc. using custom-generated widgets which only present my particular picks and link directly back to the store/checkout page. The wines that I choose are wines that I have personally tasted, wines that I brand with my stamp of approval - an approval which my friends can trust enough to try a new wine.

The main driving force in this interaction is the personal connection and the credibility of the individual. And with every sale that comes through my referral, the order information is sent directly to the winery, who in turn ships the wine straight to the consumer. But the best part is that because the order resulted from my promotional efforts, the winery gives me an affiliate fee. AmericanWinery.com provides the inventory, customer service, and the engine behind the store's transactions, while I promote the wines that I like to people who can either trust my opinion or my tastes. A direct sale for the winery and some money to try some new wines for me. The winery acquires a new customer and if the buyer likes the wine, a strong and personal new customer-winery relationship is formed.

Without getting too nitty-gritty with the details of how the winecliQ works, how does this idea sound to wineries? To wine consumers? To people in the wine industry? To anyone at all?

For a bit more info, go to http://winecliq.com, or go to my page on wine 2.0 to see one version of the widget in action!