Cabernet Day is an international virtual and in-person event, and De Bortoli Wines opened its cellar door last Thursday to celebrate the beloved grape variety and encourage locals to post their thoughts on a range of social networking sites.

De Bortoli Wines promotions and sales support manager Carrah Lymer said the day was a success and highlighted the importance of social networking for businesses.

"We had a good turnout and we had the Twitterfall up during the tastings which showed what other people were tweeting about on the day," she said.

"We feel that it's so important to get involved with social networking because it's an excellent way to keep in contact and communicate with our customers and I think these sorts of things will continue to grow and businesses will either participate or be left behind."

Griffith IT expert Livio Mazzon agreed that businesses must recognise social networking sites as important business tools.

"Cabernet Day is a classic example of the use of social networking sites for marketing. The beauty of things like Twitter is that you can push your product and attract a large following very cheaply - it's basically free advertising," he said.

"This is a bizarre but great idea and I'm sure events like these will become more common in future."