Talk about starting off with a bang. For our first post, we snagged an interview with one of the brightest stars in the wine industry — Paul Mabray, Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of wine industry digital think tank Vintank.

On the wall of the conference room at Vintank is a reproduction of the “flux capacitor” from the movie “Back to the Future.” The toy, which flashes its Y-shaped lights with the push of a button, looks exactly like the original power source for the DeLorean time machine in the classic 1980s Michael J. Fox flick. It also serves as a potent symbol of what Paul Mabray and his team are doing for the wine industry from their offices in Napa, California.

The company is housed in a trendy building in downtown Napa, walking distance to the city’s hippest wine bars, eateries and cafes. The office is a sleekly designed mixture of old and new. A wine fridge stands at the ready, and there are bottles lined up along the bookshelf. Yet, for all the surface enjoyment, it’s clear that everyone here is focused on the serious task of helping a six-thousand-year-old industry stay relevant.

Wine enthusiasts are a vocal lot. Even the most social media savvy wineries will have an uphill battle to understand how to interact with these fickle customers. And there’s a basic mismatch when it comes to a sense of time. Wine, as Paul explained to us, is at its core an agricultural product. Winemakers often think in terms of multi-year cycles. The online social world, meanwhile, is chattering away nonstop, 24/7, on thousands of forums and social networks across the open web. How do you pull these two opposing forces together? Watch this guy.

Napa born and bred, Paul has been in the industry for almost his entire adult life — barring a brief flirtation with Hollywood in the form of film school. To pay his way, he took a sales job at Napa Ale Works, owned by John Wright, the founder of venerable winery Domaine Chandon. He quickly rose to the top of the ranks, and went on to work with big names such as Niebaum-Coppola, Wine.com and Sumitomo Corporation. Film school ended, and a career in wine began.

Along the way, he began to recognize his own gift, which is to build bridges between old and new. In 2003 he founded wine e-commerce company Inertia (now called IBG). It was among the first major companies to plunge into direct-to-consumer wine sales over the Internet. Six years later, in January 2009, Paul moved on to found Vintank, along with colleagues and industry experts Clay Wallin, Eric Hsu, Patrick Angeles and Ashley Bellview.

Vintank is walking a thin line. Their mission is to help bring the wine industry into the 21st Century. At the same time, they must keep an eye on the traditions that make this old world craft such a cherished commodity. Not an easy task, but my gut tells me that if anyone can do it, these guys are the ones to lead the charge.