Last weekend, October 24th – 26th, we had the first North American Wine Bloggers Conference.  It was held at the classic Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa north of San Francisco.  It is a fine hotel and the location in the middle of Sonoma County was perfect.

I expected California bloggers but we had people from all over the Western Hemisphere attend.  The original target of 85 bloggers swelled to 176!  The activities expanded also. My wife Katya joined me for the 3 days but didn’t sign on for the conference.  Still, she was able sneak into some tastings.  You know Russians, they’ll never miss a chance.

Friday afternoon was a tough boot camp.  The tasting schedule was brutal.  Just look at the tasting hell I had to survive!

12:00 noon – Tasting and lunch at the beautiful Kick Vineyard near Santa Rosa.  About 10 wineries that source their grapes at the vineyard presented their wines at shaded tables above the vineyard.  I was careful and didn’t taste at every table.  We could have stayed there the rest of the day.  Incredible picnic spot under huge oaks with BBQ smell and a great view.  However, duty calls.

3:00 – The usual conference welcome thingy back at the Flamingo.

3:30 – Live wine blogging tastings.  This turned out to be wild.  Each vintner had a few minutes to pour and explain their wines for a typical conference table of about 9 people. Then they all rotated to other tables.  Some called it speed dating.  There was a dump bucket in the middle of the table but no one felt brave enough to reach out and use it for spitting so we swallowed.  I think we tried 16 California wines.  A few were live blogging on their computers with WiFi but most of us could barely keep up with notes.

5:15 – Blind tasting.  I skipped and went for food at the hotel restaurant with Katya.  We had tasty gourmet sandwiches at Kick Ranch but I only found time for half of one.  Not enough considering the tastings.

6:00 – The wonderful folks from the Dry Creek Valley wineries hosted a tasting in a hotel suite by the pool.  I lost track of the wines poured.  Katya joined us.  I love Dry Creek Valley wineries and had tasted many of them before but there were surprises.  No convenient spit buckets.

6:30 – Self-paced New Zealand wines tasting.  There must have been 200 bottles on tables around the hall and no chaperons.  I focused (?) on reds.  Katya went for whites.  No convenient spit buckets.  The wines were good but I would like to taste them without the previous tastings.  Never turn down an opportunity to taste New Zealand’s wines!  I moved on to the conference dinner and left Katya with the NZ wines.

8:00 – Dinner at the Flamingo, nice steak and fish, and you guessed it, more wine.  Again the Dry Creek folks carpet bombed the tables with bottles of their wonderful wines.  We were kids in a candy store with all this exploration and discovery.  One dump bucket in the middle of the table was awkward for spitting, so no one did.

10:00 – Belly up in bed like a dead fish.  Katya was already very belly up like a dead fish when I arrived.  Next time we bring our own spittoons.

Not all U.S. participating wineries were from Sonoma County.  Twisted Oak from Murphys / Calaveras County and Clos La Chance from the Gilroy region were there along with others.

Saturday morning we had to leave the conference to shoot photography for our Discover California Wine Country video series that is now in production but returned for the sessions.  The rest of the conference was far less tasting and more discussions and information.  Not everyone recovered from Friday.

The hosts and wineries want us to blog about them which is fair.  I’ll try to cover some of them in a future post.  The PR folks in attendance and our hosts think of bloggers as a type of wine media and expect us to behave remotely similar to old wine media and rate and review.   Most of us have our specialties and ratings and reviews aren’t included.  Everyone is trying to figure out how we work together to bring real value to consumers.  I’m certainly not going to be rating those wines, especially after THAT MUCH.

The support from the hotel and various sponsors such as the Dry Creek and other Sonoma County wineries and biz groups was incredible.  They really went out of their way to make this an exciting conference.  I’m seriously considering hosting the first Wine Questers Convention with those sponsors. Join our conference group if you are interested in this project.  I’ll be posting a possible agenda soon.

- jim

Tags: Dry Creek Wineries, Santa Rosa, Sonoma County wineries, WBC, wine bloggers conference

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Wine biz and media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.