The Spirit World

I recently attended the first annual North American Wine Bloggers’ Conference, held at the Flamingo Hotel in Sonoma, CA. Primarily developed by the OpenWine Consortium and Zephyr Wine Adventures, the conference featured a wide variety of activities, many of which differered from your usual conference fare. As a first forray into this arena, the conference organizers conservatively aimed for 75 participants, but actually surpassed this goal ahead of schedule with 174 registrants and the entire block of rooms reserved at the hotel booked well in advance.

The conference kicked-off on Friday afternoon with lunch at the famed Kick Ranch Vineyards, owned by Dick Keenan and Kathy McNamara. Here, participants had an opportunity to view the vast vineyards while tasting wines produced from grapes grown on the property, most of which were single-vineyard bottlings of the Rhone varietals.

Back at Conference HQ, the formal start to the conference included a welcome from Allan Wright and Joel Vincent, along with a brief introduction of the conference sponsors present. Then, the Live Wine Blogging event commenced with winemakers hopping from table to table to pour their wines in a speed-dating format. Each winemaker had 5 minutes to present his/her wine and answer any questions posed by those at the given table. Those interested in doing so, were encouraged to post their tasting notes and other information to their blog synchronously with the event. There were 14 or 15 winemakers participating.

This first event was followed by a Blind Tasting Challenge, whereby participants were given two wines and asked to choose from a list of grape varietals and identify each wine and then its vintage. Those correctly identifying at least one of these wines were able to continue to the next round where wines then needed to be connected with its back label or other marketing description, a task, which I found to be much more challenging that the first. With each subsequent round, the group of participants grew smaller and until the finalists then had to write a tasting note, which was judged by a panel before a winner was announced.

Friday evening continued with a self-paced tasting of New Zealand wines, courtesy of New Zealand Winegrowers, followed by dinner at the hotel, featuring wines from Winegrowers of the Dry Creek Valley appellation and keynote speaker, Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library tv.

Saturday morning found participants selecting from a group of vineyard walks organized by Zephyr Wine Adventures. I chose to take the Alexander Valley South walk, which took us through the Cabernet Sauvignon vines of Silver Oak and into the vineyards of Alexander Valley Vineyards (AVV). At the conclusion, we were treated to a tasting of wines and hors d’oeurves in AVV’s new caves.

The afternoon included two sessions of seminars, during which three topics were offered. I attended the sessions on How to Increase Visitors to Your Blog, with Tom Wark of Fermentation and Alder Yarrow of Vinography, and Blogging for Your Business with Steve Bachiman of Vinfolio and Jason Korman of Stormhoek.

After a brief opportunity to rest before dinner, a Grand Tasting of Sonoma wines was presented. Participants were then bussed to Sebastiani Vineyards, our host for Saturday night’s dinner, paired with their wines. Journalist and author Alice Feiring was the keynote speaker.

The final day of the conference, Sunday, began with an Unconference. This activity wasn’t as successfully marketed and I chose to do my own version of an unconference — visit the hotel’s spa. However, my husband not only attended this program, but also helped to facilitate one of the group discussions. Accordingly, his blog, VineViews, includes a good summary of this event as well.

After the Unconference, the day continued with a tasting of Luxe Wines from Sonoma, followed by a final, buffet luncheon. It was then time to head out for the day or head home, depending upon one’s itinerary.