A couple weeks ago I was chatting with John Rode of Hardwood Estate Vineyards and he mentioned .wine and .vin domain extensions are now available. I haven’t seen one (mind you, I haven’t really looked) but today I got an e-mail from Go Daddy, my domain register company announcing them – so I’m sure I’ll start to see them. (“The connoisseur’s domain”, so the ad copy says.)

My first thought when I got the e-mail today was that these new extensions aren’t really something I, as a consumer, find particularly helpful. Would it make finding a particular winery on-line any easier? Doubtful. In fact, if anything, I mainly see the potential for abuse: trolls buying up .wine and .vin domain names for well-known wines and wineries and then being willing to sell them for a fee.

So, I called John Rode to chat about it again. He had a more positive take – at least for winery owners who take a pro-active approach. He said he sees these extensions as a chance to have a defacto trademark of a name at a pretty low price. In other words, now that Harwood Estate Vineyards has locked up the .wine and .vin extensions – no other winery – whether here in Ontario, elsewhere in Canada, the U.S., or the world, can have a web presence with the name Harwood Estate Vineyards. True enough…

But still, seems like overkill to me – and just more stuff wineries have to pay attention to…