Portugal's wine community Adegga ramps up digital marketing services for producers

By Erin Smith

Published: 09 February, 2015

Portuguese online wine community Adegga is boosting its digital services by offering producers a shared wine marketing and sales platform.

Adegga, the company that started as an online community, quickly morphed into hosting events that brought consumers and producers together, and says it saw an opportunity to further help producers make inroads online.

In April, André Ribeirinho, one of the founders of Adegga.com, is launching Adegga Selected at the Porto Adegga Wine Market. "We will be helping producers do their digital marketing. But the benefit to producers who participate is that they are not only sharing the cost, but also have access to our aggregated consumers. The platform will help producers tell their stories and it is our responsibility to get the consumers in front of them," he said.

"We saw a huge gap in the market," said Ribeirinho. "The online channel offers a huge opportunity." But the first few years were a big learning curve. "We learned the hard way, but online-only doesn't work. It needs to be offline as well," he now admits.

André Ribeirinho of Adegga Wine Market is one of Harpers' Rising Stars André Ribeirinho of Adegga Wine Market

Ribeirinho is the primary force behind Adegga Wine Markets, Portuguese consumer tasting events which are held across Europe. Adegga first launched in 2005 as an online community. "We didn't want to do whatever everyone else was doing," Ribeirinho said. He described it as an avenue for consumers to connect, review and share wines - but also for them to connect with producers.

So five years ago, Ribeirinho hosted the first Adegga Market bringing Portuguese producers directly in touch with his online community at a consumer tasting event to which he sold tickets.

Adegga Wine Market Adegga Wine MarketSource: Ricardo BernardoAdegga brings wine consumers together with wine producers

Ribeirinho hasn't stopped there. In an effort to make his markets more consumer-friendly, he and his team have designed the Smart Wine Glass. The glass has an electronic chip in it and each exhibitor table has a sensor.

Consumers can swipe the tasting glass at each table visited to keep track of the wines they tasted, eliminating the obstacle that consumers forget which wines they have tried.