Taste red wine. Write about it. Repeat. It was live wine blogging in the conference room of the Omni in Charlottesville.
Keynote speaker Jancis Robinson is a legendary wine writer for the Financial Times of London, shown here with Touring & Tasting National Brand Manager, Dan Weldy.
Annette Boyd and Mary Catherine Searson of the Virginia Wine Marketing Office
Touring & Tasting attended the 2011 Wine Blogger's Conference in VA!
Dan Weldy: So what is a Wine Blogger's Conference anyway?
I aimed to find out when I visited Charlottesville, Virginia July 22-24 where they rolled out the red carpet for 325 wine bloggers at the downtown Omni Hotel.
Virginia has arrived as a wine region in America. The region "gets it" when it comes to touring and tasting. Virginia's convention planners were approached about hosting the 4th annual wine blogger's gathering about a year in advance. The first three were in California and Washington. They won the hosting rights over Paso Robles, California and Finger Lakes, New York.
If you host a convention of let's say...plumbers in your city, the tradesmen travel in, stay at hotels, have a good or bad time, complain or rave about the weather, and go home and tell people in the office, their families and a few friends what it was like.
NOT SO when you invite wine bloggers to come to town. First of all, none of them have to "earn" their way into the meetings in terms of credentials, certification, education or experience. You just have to own a laptop computer, set up a website where you can write, and consume wine. It's the Blogosphere we live in and it reaches far beyond the subject of wine. We live in a new media world with lots of laptops, lots of voices, and in this setting, lots of wine.
It would not be a misstatement to point out that wine bloggers are hobbyists. It is not a career. They are supporting themselves in other occupations. The only media people earning full time paychecks writing about wine today still work in print (sorry bloggers).
The bloggers are "wine communicators," as one speaker so designated. It's really a good thing. Blogging is an exercise in freedom of speech that would make Thomas Jefferson proud.
If you search out blogs of attendees at the conference, you will read positive and not-so-positive reflections. The opinions expressed about the Wine Blogger's Conference are all over the place. You will discover some quite creative writing too. I met one blogger from Portland who writes all of her wine blogs from the perspective of her dogs. They have creative blog names like, RedWineDiva, GrapeOccassions, DallasWineChick, Vintwined, and Wineoscope, which focused on the science of the wine process. I did not meet anyone with a blog called WineHangover, but it could have been pretty popular after this weekend.
I was impressed with the producers of the conference www.zephyrAdventures.com, the exhibitors and sponsors www.virginia.org and virginiawine.org for their all out effort, the staff at the Omni hotel who poured enough wine to fill Lake Anna, and the friendly wine bloggers I met along the way www.WineBloggersConference.org.
Wine criticism is slightly out of my reach at this time. Wine communication regarding the experience of touring and tasting is within my grasp and I am happy to share what I observe when I'm on the quiet, dusty roads that lead to America's home grown wineries. In this posting, it starts with the Wine Blogger's Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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