At first all Tyler Balliet wanted was to learn a little bit about wine. Now his interest has inspired him to create a platform that has, so far, reached thousands of his fellow wine enthusiasts.
Five years ago, the WeWork Hollywood member came up with the idea for Second Glass, a platform for people who were already interested in or wanted to learn more about wine. It started out as a magazine, and then grew into an app, podcast, and a gathering of wine sellers and drinkers at an event called Wine Riot.
“It’s a huge, massive wine carnival for four hours,” says Balliet.
Since 2010, Wine Riot—which takes place throughout the year in cities like Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles—has attracted 85,000 attendees, half of which were in 2014 and 2015 alone.
At the event, attendees can log onto the Second Glass app and mark the 16 wines they tasted that day out of the 250 to 400 types available. According to Balliet, about 35 percent of attendees utilize the app, posting 275,000 reviews of wine.
Along with the actual wine drinking experience, Wine Riot events feature 20-minute seminars and experts at every booth explaining the products they’re selling.
“The app is really useful at Wine Riot,” he says. “The wine industry is very complicated.”
With Second Glass and Wine Riot, Balliet aspires to educate people, mostly millennials, about wine. When he worked part-time at a wine shop in Boston, he saw that people his age were coming into his store and buying a lot of wine that they knew nothing about.
“I was trying to learn about wine then,” he says. “My only options were a 10-week college level class or a 900-page book, which I did end up reading. People are interested in wine, but they don’t want to make the effort.”
Aside from his first-hand experience with millennials, Balliet says millennials are buying more wine than the previous generations.
“It comes down to availability more than anything else,” he says. “Our grandparents drank cocktails because that’s what their parents drank during prohibition. When I went to college, wine was everywhere.”
Since many millennials haven’t turned 21 yet, Balliet wants to focus on this emerging market. In the future, he plans to go into retail stores and change the way that people shop for wine.
“Wine shops haven’t changed their look in 100 years,” he says. I would love to go in and update them for a new generation.”
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen