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Gary Vaynerchuk, the dynamic wine salesman-turned video blogger-turned social media marketing mega-guru, announced today that he is retiring from the popular daily wine tasting videos he's posted online for more than five years. The Russian-born 35 year old recently announced a multi-book publishing deal and has a high-end consulting practice.

Vaynerchuck's Wine Library TV has offered accessible, enjoyable, informative short-form introductions to a wide variety of affordable bottles of wine. After producing 1000 episodes, it was briefly renamed The Daily Grape starting in March - but it was always "the Thundershow, aka the Internet's most passionate wine program." The show turned Vaynerchuk into a global celebrity and showed what the social web plus a whole lot of hustle could produce.

Today a new social game called VinPass launched. It's an application for wine lovers to "share wine reviews, win badges and earn real rewards." VinPass uses the 'check-in' paradigm popularized by location-based social network Foursquare and extended into other areas by the likes of GetGlue (entertainment) and Foodspotting (food). In a nutshell, you check-in to tasting a certain type of wine. If you write a review, you earn points and eventually unlock badges. VinPass promises that these badges have "tangible value" - including coupons on e-commerce stores, MP3s, ringtones, event tickets and more.

Foursquare is still a relatively geeky app, offering little in the way of tangible value in its badges. But focusing on wine should open up plenty of possibilities to offer value for VinPass.

How can you tell a 1973 Batard Montrachet from a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill? Or a '45 Mouton-Rothschild from a box of Franzia? Well, you could taste the difference, presumably. But what if you had to discern between the '45 and one of the top years of the Eighties? Few could. And while the difference might be taste, it certainly is money.

People collect wines for a number of reasons, but one of the top ones is the fact that a good wine appreciates. If a counterfeiter is good at selling one similar wine as another it can make the difference between $2000 and $200,000. Now some wineries are using RFID to hold the counterfeiters at bay.

Leeks, celery, carrots, cannellini beans and some herbs. Epicurious says put all that together and you'll have an excellent vegetarian cassoulet. User comments strongly suggest using vegetable stock instead of water. But what about the wine?

Two year old wine social network Snooth announced today that it is now powering wine recommendations for the 25,000 editor tested recipes on Conde Nast's food site Epicurious. Snooth says this is just the first of a number of big sites that its custom algorithm will power recommendations on. That cassoulet? Snooth suggests you serve a Montevina Terra d'Oro Syrah 2002 ($15) with it. Nice.