Wine Bloggers Conference tasting insanity…

posted by philip in Wine Industry

I’m here at the inaugural Wine Bloggers Conference (#WBC for the twitterati out there) out in Sonoma and wanted to report in with a quick update.

Its a well attended event with most of the well known US based wine bloggers here. There are a few notable exceptions, but maybe they’ll be here next time.

Most wine bloggers blog in their spare time (ie. they have real day jobs) and so the conference is being held over the weekend (Friday to Sunday). As not everyone is here today, many are still in transit, the conference stuff is tomorrow. Today then becomes a mammoth series of tastings, with over 230 wines being poured in total.

We’ve moved from a lunch event with several wines to taste, past a 16 wine “speed date” style tasting and now to the blind tasting challenge (which I’ve ducked out of to write this). Next is a 100 wine New Zealand tasting, followed by a tasting dinner before the various after parties launch their tastings (I’m going to the New York and Oregon tastings later).

I can easily review 30-50 wines, and have had days of 75+, but 200+ wines is stretching what I can realistically write about and differentiate in such a short period of time. And 100 New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc’s? How many synonyms for grassy can I think of?

Despite what it may sound like, I am actually here for work - I’m presenting tomorrow on Wine Blogger Monetization (will post the slides here next week).

Signing off for now, but wanted to leave you with the power of the masses: at one point so many of the bloggers were twittering each other about their tasting notes on the wines they were trying that the Wine Bloggers Conference became the second highest trending topic on twitter: