For someone so self-avowedly wedded to new media, Gary Vaynerchuk was surprisingly difficult to contact. His shop window is WineLibrary TV, an online wine tasting show that splits the wine world into rabid supporters dubbed “Vayniacs” and disgusted detractors. I assumed that a quick e-mail via the website would be all that was needed to work out how to meet him on a recent trip to New York. Not so. Like the thousand other e-mails he says he receives (and responds to) each day, mine elicited an instruction to watch an online video urging me, inter alia, to “Hustle, because that’s how you win.”

I eventually received a reply from the “assistant to the director of operations”, with an excited postscript from Vaynerchuk, 32, (still not giving his e-mail address away) asking me to be on his show. This assistant and I were just working out when and how I might meet the wine evangelist of New Jersey when his personal publicist took over.