The new wine reviewers: Bloggers and the art of speed-blogging
August 1, 2009
We continue to meet great people as we go out and about around the Bay Area, pouring wine and connecting with wine lovers wherever we go. We’ve poured at Giants games at AT&T Park, at the San Mateo Wine Walk, at a recent Bridal Faire at the Ritz Carlton, and something totally new – a speed blogging session at the annual Wine Bloggers Conference that just took place in Santa Rosa. As technology changes our daily lives, it is also changing how we receive information and the world of wine is by no means immune to the forward march of innovation. Speed blogging was sort of like speed dating. There were 21 round tables in a large ballroom at the hotel where the conference was held. At each table were eight to ten bloggers, laptops aglow, waiting anxiously to taste the wines of the twenty some-odd vintners who signed up to pour. Each vintner worked in teams with one person pouring samples, the other speaking about the wine poured. We had five minutes at each table, then a signal would sound, and we had to move on to the next table. It was chaotic and fun and so different from the formal structure of traditional media tastings. It is refreshing to have a community of wine aficionados sharing their impressions as a complement (or antidote) to the more authoritative views of the few power critics. The bloggers were furiously typing their impressions of the wines to Twitter or their own blogs and their readers were seeing, real-time, what they were experiencing as they tasted the wines. If you’d like to see some of the comments, go to www.twitter.com and search for #wbc09 and you’ll see the myriad of comments that were shared. We are interested to hear your thoughts on this new source of wine information, so please share your comments here. We poured our 2007 G.E.O Chardonnay and it was very well-received and considered to be a great value – a very positive trait, and one we are proud of in these challenging economic times.
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