Crush It!

Gary Vaynerchuk (Vay-ner-chuk) has captured attention with his pioneering, multifaceted approach to personal branding and business. A self-trained wine expert, Vaynerchuk revolutionized the wine industry with his video blog, Wine Library TV (affectionately known as The Thunder Show). His enthusiastic, unconventional, and often irreverent wine commentary attracts more than 80,000 viewers per day worldwide and has earned him national television appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Ellen Degeneres Show, the Today sh ow, Mad Money with Jim Cramer, and The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. Vaynerchuk's roots in wine-tasting come honestly—his Russian immigrant parents owned a liquor store when he was growing up. Bored at the cash register, he began reading Wine Spectator and The Wine Advocate and realized collecting wine offered an allure similar to his previous hobby of collecting baseball cards. As a teenager, tasting wine was legally impossible, so Vaynerchuk set out to train his palate “backwards.” To study various flavors associated with wine, he tasted obscure fruits and vegetable