USA: Winebusiness.com Appoints VP of Content and Community; Former Excite@Home Exec Leverages Experience to Expand the Wine Industry's Most Powerful New B2B Portal

Winebusiness.com(TM) has announced the appointment of Eric Jorgensen as vice president of content and community. The third addition to the executive ranks of Winebusiness.com since July, Jorgensen's appointment precedes by just weeks the imminent launch of Winebusiness.com's live international B2B eMarketplace. The appointment reflects a recruiting strategy at Winebusiness.com that targets senior executives with proven track records in the wine, Internet and e-commerce-related industries.

Jorgensen has over 14 years of Internet and international business experience. Most recently he was vice president and general manager of messaging and community for Excite@Home, which he joined in its infancy in 1996. At Excite, Jorgensen developed an online community that has become one of the largest and most comprehensive on the Web. Previously, he spent five years at Pacific Telesis International, creating and operating telecommunications businesses overseas. He has also worked in management and finance at Taligent and in finance at Apple Computer.

Jorgensen's first priority is the integration of the content of Winebusiness.com's print publications, Wine Business Monthly and Wine Business Insider, into the company's online platform and the expansion of the community that actively serves the diverse needs of wine industry suppliers and buyers around the globe.

"A wine industry portal that evolves from highly regarded trade publications offers the absolute best scenario for creating the kind of meaningful interaction the Web was designed for," said Jorgensen. "I'm looking forward to providing Internet-enabled solutions for a very fragmented market: a forum for suppliers and wineries to interact as a community, instant access to daily news, and many years of archived information for in-depth research."

"As Winebusiness.com builds a community that includes both content and e-commerce tools, we will benefit tremendously from Eric's experience creating one of the truly successful online portals," said Winebusiness.com CEO Richard Shell. "Eric's proven community development techniques will allow Winebusiness.com to fulfill our goal of presenting a comprehensive community to the wine industry."

About Winebusiness.com

Winebusiness.com is the leading source of worldwide wine industry news and information. The only wine industry B2B portal to merge its formidable publishing experience with the benefits and efficiencies of a virtual private marketplace, Winebusiness.com is poised to enrich the financial success of the global wine industry as the wine world's foremost portal for international content and market analysis. Winebusiness.com is headquartered in Sonoma, California, with offices in San Francisco.