Category Archives: adventures in wine

(WBC 10) Lots Wine, Plenty for All!

Sharing the Wealth the OWC way–part 1

Recently a joke made the rounds of conservative and Republican emails, blogs, and forums calling into question Obama’s ideas of redistributing the wealth by taking an Obama supporting server’s well earned tip and giving it to a homeless person outside the restaurant (here’s my post with the full version of this story).

I practiced a little Obama style redistribution of wine wealth myself in the past few days following the First WIne Bloggers conference hosted in part by the Open Wine Consortium (of which I am a new member).

First, on my way home, following the Sonoma County Luxe tasting (mmmmn, Jordan chardonay, mmmn, Siduri Keefer Ranch pinot noir!),  I made a stop near UC Berkeley to see my wine appreciating nephew Kyle who lives in Lothlorien which is the kind of Berkeley style student cooperative living situation which we all assumed went out with the 60s and 70s. This is simply a place of legend. Here’s Kyle and some of his friends hanging out on the roof with its views from the Oakland Hills to the SF Bay.

Lothlorien's Roof

Lothlorien

I’d never been there, even though Kyle’s lived at Lothlorien for over a year. So it was time to place the stories not to mention I was in great need of a triple espresso from Peet’s on Domingo nearby.

Lothlorien North and South more or less defy description. If I tried, we’d both be here all day and I still wouldn’t be close, so I’m not going to even try. It’s like a combination of Art City and homeless shelter. Besides, the point of this post isn’t about Lothlorien, but about sharing the wealth Obama style.

As you can imagine, at this time of the weekend, I had quite a collection of open bottles of wine in the car. As in several cases of open bottles. As in, how in the world could I consume this much wine before it turns into something I have to pour down a drain?

So at the end of my tour, and my espresso, I went through the wine and handed off a case of treats to Kyle to share with his housemates. In particular, as this coop tends toward the more earthy, crunchy, organic type college student, I handed off the tail end of two biodynamic wines, the  Quivira grenache and the Truitt-Hurst Red Rooster zin, as well as others I’d thought they’d appreciate, including some New York cab franc for variety, and as a special treat for my Princess Bride loving nephew,  The Spaniard, an exquisite blend predominantly of Tempranillo by Twisted Oak.

The Spaniard was actually one of the more memorable wines of the weekend, making it one of my favorites, so I told him to save that for himself and a special friend, and that if he kept it in a cool dark place, it would be good for a couple more days. We also talked about taking a trip together to Calaveras County to visit the winery, and for him to meet owner and fellow Princess Bride fanatic,  El Jefe (Jeff Stai), who could serve as a role model to him as well, as someone who found success and made money as an engineer in Silicon Valley then used his funds to fuel his passion for wine and winemaking.

To quote from Kyle’s email the next day:

Gwenny,

The wine was fabulous.

We were having a long drawn out council and I went up to my room and brought down the whole box with glasses (jars) and got two helpers to uncork them in the library and help me place them in the middle of the room.

It was so funny to watch people slyly inch towards the sleek bottles, like rolly pollys. It lightened the mood considerably and people were like “where did this come from”. “Kyle’s Aunt” was the answer. You have to understand that $2 buck chuck is the only wine ever seen here!

I set the cabernet francs together, and the zinfandels together. I really like the cabernet francs from New York, esp the 2004 Wölffer Estate Cabernet Franc, from the Hamptons, on Long Island.They had such a light taste. I couldn’t stick around too long because I had to get back to writing my report but I brought a glass of  that Woofler cabernet franc up with me and made myself some kathy bread (sourdough bageuette grilled face down, drowning in butter and fresh minced garlic. It was so sweet, listening to sitar and eating alone on my new red sheet fitted bed with a beautiful glass of red wine and crispy golden brown garlic bread, lit lowly with one dimmed lamp.

Ahh, Thank you!

Glad you made it home safely,
Love, Kyle

Share the wealth indeed!

One day most of these students will have plenty of money to buy the wine they want. Let’s hope they come back and buy some of the wines that were generously shared with me.

Maybe we should call it the Obama Wine Consortium!

Next up: Sharing the Dry Creek Valley Zin wealth in a tasting with friends!

(Warning: Unless you are related to me by blood, or Jeff Kaiser, you are NOT allowed to call me Gwenny!)

(WBC 9) My Morning Wine: Whites of New York

My Morning Wine

At 10am on this particular Sunday, I am not in a typical church.

Instead I am sitting in the Church of the Early Morning Wine Drinkers, surrounded by 8 laptops and one iPhone. The bloggers wildly tap, tip, and talk, discuss twitter and whatever else comes up in our unconference topic, “Organic Flow,” facilitated by Nick Goveric, of Wine Scholarship.

We’re holding church at the First Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa, CA.

Six folks at the table are twittering actively. I seem to be the only one at the table without a twitter account (Nick says do it NOW!), and while I wasn’t accosted more about it, I can certainly see how I am left out in many of the conversations going on at this conference–and beyond. (The question is of course, how necessary are these conversations in comparison to other actions in my life?)

The idea behind this table discussion at the “unconference conference” session is that the best conversations occur around the edges, along the seams of the conference, so why not make that an official part? And with the help of Lenn Thompson of the blog lenndevours.com a well known authority on New York wine, we’re pouring a fine selection and collection of fresh, bright, cold, wines starting with a 2007 Rooster Hill Dry Riesling from the Finger Lakes region of New York, a perfect accompaniment to my bran muffin.

However, this King Ferry Treleaven Gewurtztraminer 2007, Continue reading →

(WBC 8) Wine, wine, wine & Alice Feiring too

“Wine, wine, wine–pass that bottle to me!” sing it to me,  Sticks McGee with Brownie McGee helping out on guitar and vocals. Then on the flip side, “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water…”

After the sessions featuring blogging tips at the Wine Bloggers Conference, it was back to drinking with a tasting of Sonoma wines with well over 200 wines in the room and at least 30-40 wineries pouring. Continue reading →

(WBC 7) Wine Blogging on the Bus to Sebastiani

WiFi on the bus: only in America

There’s wifi on this bus taking attendees of the First Wine Blogging Conference to Sebastiani for dinner and a keynote address by Alice Feiring.

“Amazing,” says Elodie my seatmate. Continue reading →

(WBC Post 6) Top Wine Bloggers Offer Tips to Improve Your Blog

Blog Tips: 2 Conferences, 2 Continents

WINEBLOGGERs-LOGO

Saturday afternoon we had two sessions focusing on blogging in the wine business with transportable ideas to other areas of blogging and three topics each to choose from:

1:30 PM  Breakout Session I
Increasing Visitors to Your Blog (Flamingo Room)
Beyond Blogging – New Technologies and Social Media (Courtyard 1)
Wine Blogger Credibility (Courtyard 2)

2:45 PM  Breakout Session II
Making Money from Your Blog (Flamingo Room)
Blogging For Your Wine Business (Courtyard 1)
Wine Blogger & Industry Interaction (Courtyard 2)

It took me a few minutes to collect myself and my laptop and my iced coffee after the drive back from Quivira so I was a bit late for the start of “Increasing Visitors to Your Blog” by Tom Wark’s Fermentation and Alder Yarrow of Vinography and arrived for number 6 of Tom’s Top 10 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Blog.

From my notes of Tom’s words with some of my commentary:

#6 BLOGROLLS:
why do you deserve to be on their blogroll? make sure they are on yours
email the dude—make a list of 100 blogs you want to be on

#7 look for non-wine blogs which might be interested in your post
major blogs—posting 30-40 a day will pick up your post if they can figure out how to–they are RAVENOUS for material…do you just email them? how do you hook them I wonder

#8 link baiting –creating a post which people will want to link to
use surveys, top 10 lists (controversial), interview w/heavyweight, Tom has the American Wine Blog Awards—take nominations, do strategic blogging

#9 answer every single comment
so that people see you’re engaged in your community—Alder says he can’t underscrore this enough –gotta repay that effort. And email. Say thank you—pay them back. Most traffics are those which generate conversation—and you have to participate.

#10 use social networking tools—
open wine consortium  for example

Today there are maybe more blogs but there are more eyeballs, too, they point out.

From Alder:

1) blogroll—recipricol linking works until it doesn’t
he has 400-500 links! so he moved them to a singe page

2) writing good content is the #1 way to increase traffic and the only way that matters

3) understand how google works: it sucks up your site and looks for tags: description, keywords—to site and to the page, the title of page and tile of blog as well as text tells google what it’s about, pays attention to headers, what links w/in pointing out, and coming in tells how important (generates page rank 0-10 download google tool bar and it will show rank of pages visited—also on firefox plugin)
70% of traffic from search engines

4) be sure you are listed on various directories and search engines—submit to get listed

  • consider: what you title your article is what google will think it is
  • search google webmaster guidelines and follow them all
  • sitemap??? WP? Xml doc for google to read
  • rss fed—make sure you publish it (check–is mine?)
  • email newsletter—subscribe with links to articles
  • participate in blog events like wine blogging weds link baits
  • make sure out going links are concise and complete

5) traffic doesn’t matter since you can’t make a living or quit your day job (read his post on his site)

6) so figure out your reasons why you do this—

  • enjoy it
  • to practice being a good writer–10,000 hours of practice in order to be competent—
  • to prove you can do it

For Snooth’s presentation on Monetizing your blog, I direct you to the Snooth site which has the presentation on their blog!

Essentially, to monetize your blog you will need to work your butt off selling ads yourself or with a dedicated sales team or by finding affiliates or doing contextual ads or by some other creative method which may not be invented yet… But there is money to be made, as Gary Vaynerchuk said in the opening address, and someone is going to be making it so why not you?

Mid-presentation I took a stroll and found the session by someone important from Stormhoek (but not Hugh McLeod of Gaping Void–he was at Blog 08 with other Rock Stars of the web in Amsterdam where he reportedly said “Blogs aren’t dead, people are!”) and drew this cool cartoon photographed by Anne Helmond…

photo by Anne Helmond

cartoon by Hugh McLeod; photo by Anne Helmond

Here are some of the main points:

  • using social media for brand identification
  • social media makes everything happen quicker
  • branding arc moves fast–up and down
  • the market makes us smarter

Jason from Stormhoek used lots of cartoons and one-liners by Hugh McLeod to illustrate his points like this one:

So tell me something interesting about yourself.  Lie if you have to. Hugh McLeod

What’s the story? Traditional wine story: Where it came from. Who.  Everybody tells the same story to argue why theirs is so good. It’s only about me the producer. Droning on about the same stuff. Same discussion all over the world.

What a lovely grain of sand you are. Too bad you’re lying on the beach. Hugh McLeod.

It’s a sea of sameness and we expect them (consumers) to study our product enough to understand what we’re talking about. So how to use 2.0 to DE-commodify yourself and create a unique product? when we all have the same social lubricant–wine–to sell?

Social media can disrupt the status quo because the costs of publishing is next to zero. So how to subvert?
Impact the info silos—distribution/communication and regulation of info.

Social media allows the winery to directly communicate with the consumer and bypass layers of gatekeepers between the winemaker and the drinker.

How to engage people and create grassroots interest in the brand?

Stormhoek hosted wine dinners by offering to consumers to sponsor a dinner and they’d hook up people with the wine. 100 days, 100 dinners was the goal and they had 90 attended by 4-5000 people, ultimately changing the  conversation about wine.

How to harness social media? If you wanna have a cool product you gotta do cool shit!
1. Great product a given
2. It’s even more important for having a reason for being: a purpose.
3. Start a conversation
4  Use all the tools/toys/play try it see what happens
5. A global microbrand can be created online and at little cost. It’s about creativity not budget.

Can’t look at direct return on investment—it’s longterm brand building.

So there you have it in 1100 words–some of the highlights of blogging conferences on two continents during the same weekend!

Whew. Now really to increase my page views, I should have broke this down to 4 posts averaging 250 words each as seems to be the common practice…

Upcoming: commentary on this social media report–“FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report”

(WBC Post 5) Biodynamic & mostly organic Quivera

Biodynamic & mostly organic: Quivira

Saturday morning I packed up and left my sweet zin suite at the Flamingo Hotel to jump on a shuttle with other attendees of the First Wine Bloggers Conference for a hike through the wine country…except I watched the shuttles head off into the morning without me.

Fortunately, I could jump on my cell and talk with organizer Allan Wright who sent me to Quivira, and since I had both a car and Quivira marketing director Nancy’s card, I was set with a quick call from her for directions. Off I went down the chill autumn, chasing after the van, and dodging bicycles on the back roads of Sonoma County’s Dry Valley Creek Road until I found myself pulling into the idyllic, picturesque barnyard setting of Quivira, chickens, solar panels, and all.

Farmer and winemaker Steve Canter was at work with the dozen or so bloggers, explaining biodynamics and homeopathy and everything else under the sun including cleansing and purification rituals he uses (go for the power of the earth, Steve!!).

And then we went for a lovely walk, visiting goats, and Ruby the pig, and picking grapes off the vines (my favs were the old zins of course), looping along unusually dry Wine Creek to Dry Valley Creek, both which eventually feed into the Russian River, then under a fig tree, and up a ridge planted in zin and down along the olive trees to the barn.

Steve and Nancy tag teamed a bit, telling stories about the vines, the wines, and the processes both of biodynamics and organics in practice here. Of particular interest to me was how they are healing Wine Creek by building weirs to slow down the water to create better habitat for steelhead and other native species practically wiped out by the previous channelization and control of the creek.

Approved Biodynamic wineries like Quivera can use this seal

Approved Biodynamic wineries like Quivera can use this seal

The idea behind biodynamics seems an obvious one: in order for a wine to reflect the land where it came from, it needs to be fed as much as possible by an integrated series of local, native, natural influences. That means Continue reading →

(WBC Post 4) An Armload of New Zealand Pinot Noirs

Wine Blogger’s Conference: After Zin, Comes New Zealand Vin

Unfortunately, my sweet suite at the Wine Bloggers Conference at the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa was going to charge me to get on line so I poured myself a glass of Mauritson’s Rockpile 2006 Zin (which I liked even better than the reserve–not as “fruity” but more cherry and better structure and balance and depth), grabbed my MacBook Pro and some crackers, and wandered back into the lobby which had quieted down significantly save for the music blasting “Brick House” from the bar. I used the code from my Wine Bloggers Conference Welcome packet and got right on.

I didn’t stay on for long, certainly not long enough to get a post written or an email sent, as I struck up a conversation with three gentlemen with some open wine bottles across the lobby, and quickly found myself on their couch with a sample of a New Zealand Pinot Noir in my glass–something completely different than the zins in the sweet suite or the Aussie shiraz I spent the summer drinking!

I found myself in the presence of David Strada, New Zealand wine guy, who had organized a wine tasting of New Zealand wines which went on while I was in the sweet zin sweet snacking on cheese and crackers. Next thing I knew, I was in the presence of a roomful of New Zealand wines, with permission to swoop up any that interested me–but I had to do it quick!

I didn’t even try to think–I just walked past all those tempting whites and headed for the pinot noirs–after sampling what was on the table in the lobby, I had to try more!

I grabbed pinot noirs by Wild Earth, Forrest Estate, and Wooleston, plus a syrah by…(oh, no I don’t remember now! Trinity Hill maybe?)

“Good choices!” said David. “We have a nice selection of wines on the table, a selection from the different wine growing regions of New Zealand–the Wild Earth from Otago, Forrest Estate from Marlborough, and Wooleston from Nelson. Did you know that? How did you choose them?”

“Well, I liked the label on the Wild Earth,” I admitted.

Award Winning Wild Earth Pinot Noir

Award Winning Wild Earth Pinot

“Yes, Americans do like that one,” he said with a smile. Continue reading →