Live wine blogging?

Yes that’s what happened today November 10, 2017 at the Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa: Live Wine Blogging that included a range of white, rose, sparkling and even non-alcoholic pot infused wine!

In live wine blogging, a winery rep, often the wine maker or someone else very close to and knowledgeable about the wine, presents the wine in five minutes to a team of 6-10 avid bloggers who hang on every work and instragram and tweet every moment. Many of us, myself included, used to live blog it, sometimes producing a series of posts about each wine in five minutes or publishing one post about all of the wines. I was always impressed by Chris Watkins formerly of Ridge Vineyards who would tweet his notes in haiku!

These days most of us focus on tweets or instagram posts. For myself, I find that campaign the moment in photos and a few choice words is more valuable but it is different than taking notes. I’ve found I just can’t do them all at the same time: take photos, tweet, and blog.

Also the first year, back in 2008, we tried to live blog white, rose, sparkling and reds and that was just way too crazy making!

These days it is broken up into two sessions, white/sparkling/rose and red. Red wines are up tomorrow!

Regardless of how it is done, it is very intense and you want to get your best game on! For me that also means remembering to bring in crackers to refresh my palate.

Here’s the hour in tweets. Cheers!
Our table started with FEL’s Chardonnay — which is named after their grandmother.

Next up was the best Frank Family wine I’ve ever had.

I was expecting Vermentino from southern Oregon’s Troon poured by Craig Camp and was totally confused by what was in my glass except it was NOT that wine: instead it was a co-ferment of viognier and marsanne. The co-fermenting process is significantly different then blending in that blending basically combines finished wines while co-fermenting means they are married — they are commingling — they are sharing their juices and creating  a new wine altogether. That plus this is a winery that is organic and moving in the direction of biodynamic and that brings its own creative juices to the party. Sounds like an orgy? You just might think so when you taste this wine! There’s a lot going on!

Next we were hit with Davis Bynum’s Chardonnay:

and then we had a non-alcoholic wine infused with a very special green herb:

followed by a refreshing viognier from Ledson:

Next I went down memory lane with Reno Walsh who I met in 2008 at the firsts wine bloggers conference. Either that year or the next, this wine was poured in the live blogging and blew my socks off. I recently opened this wine at home and I still love it. There’s a wonderfully complexity and texture, plus floral notes.

Next the lovely Tia Butts shared Gloria Ferrer’s 4oth anniversary sparkling wine. YUM

and then it was over!!

So there should be 10 tweets but somehow I missed one…

Here’s the rest of conference schedule. Follow along the hashtags #WBC17 and #wbc2017 on twitter from wherever you are and check out what we re doing and what we are learning! Sure to give you #FOMO!