The 2008 Wine Bloggers Conference in Sonoma, CA
My birthday is in October and my wife was looking for something to do. A quick Google search later and she found the 1st annual Wine Bloggers Conference in Sonoma. Not that this would be her pick as a birthday vacation destination, but then it is my birthday and she is married to a rather odd fellow.
So Michael and I are heading to the American Wine Blogger’s Conference in Sonoma, which is on October 24-26th.
I do not feel like a blogger. My background is research. In my work world after you do some research, you write about it and have your peers try and poke holes in what you have written. As I have discovered, the world of blogging is very similar, and I am trying to adjust, but I still feel like more of a researcher.
For example, one of the conference events is “live blogging”. In this event, bloggers will taste one wine from each of twelve wineries for five minutes then blog live for one minute about the wine. As a researcher, this format seems, well, rushed. I prefer to taste a wine over time and over the course of a bottle. If I have a wine in my cellar, I may taste a couple of bottles before I write up my notes. It does not seem like a minute is enough time to do justice to the text, let alone to the wine.
Another new thing for me will be the origin of the wines. All of the wines will be from California, specifically Sonoma. I have been more of an “Old World” wine guy for the past decade, but I am looking forward to tasting the wines of Sonoma’s AVA, even if I have to try to write about them in one minute.
The rest of the conference agenda looks like a typical conference with keynote speakers, break-out sessions, and eating and drinking. The important difference, and the reason I am going, is that the topic at hand will be drinking wine! I mean how cool is that! I am going to spend a weekend with people like Alice Feiring and Gary Vaynerchuk drinking and talking about wine, and we will be drinking wines that are, more or less, new to me.
So I guess I will have to get used to the other aspects of being wine blogger, like speed tasting and live blogging, because I can hardly wait for the all of the other stuff.
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Well you may only be able to attend the US event, next weekend you can definately take part in the European Event. http://ewbc2008.wineblogger.info we’ll be live blogging, posting video of the roundtables and asking for feedback from people such as your selves. So please join in! Cheers,
[…] Tomorrow I’m off to the 2008 Wine Bloggers Conference in Sonoma, CA. Neil and our better halves arrived in San Francisco today, but I am lagging behind due to a […]
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