On Saturday December 13 we had our first Wine Questers Tweetup Tasting.  Three of us from the Twitter wine community met for lunch at Gerre Vineyard and Winery’s wonderful cafe.  We then proceeded to taste and micro-blog our impression on Twitter at 6 wineries starting with Garre’s tasting room for the next five and a half hours.  (We poured out.)  Many in the wine community followed and discussed our impressions during the tasting room visits.  Our Tweetup was exposed the hundreds of tasters around the US and the world.

We will be developing the Wine Questers Twitter Tastups into regular events.  The wineries quickly recognized the value of live micro-blogging at their tasting bars and offered us nice discounts.  If you are interested in joining us and being in the wine media for a day please join the Tweetup Tasting group!

Below are the wines that I bought that I considered to be particularly interesting to taste. Red Feather and Little Valley had some killer wines that they wouldn’t sell us because their labels weren’t approved yet.  We tasted them and wanted to try them in a home context.  I’ll be blogging about the wines below as we try them.  If you are looking for interesting and tasty wines please try these and comment on them.  None are too soft to be boring but they won’t bite you.  The list below is in the order I pulled the wines from the case and bags.

Charles R Vineyards:

• 2006 Livermore Valley Zinfandel.
• 2005 Livermore Valley Cab Sauv.

Crooked Vine Winery:

• Stony Ridge Malvasia Bianca undated sparkling wine.
• Stony Ridge 2005 Livermore Valley Cab Sauv.
• Crooked Vine 2004 Livermore Valley Cab Sauv.
• Crooked Vine 2007 Livermore Valley Charve – Chard & Viogneir blend.
• Crooked Vine 2004 Aromatica Dessert Wine.

Red Feather Winery:

• 2004 Livermore Valley Merlot.
• 2005 Livermore Valley Jaiden’s Dessert Wine – unusual, dry, and tasty!

Les Chenes Estate Vineyards – specializing in very small case lots of Rhone style wines:

• undated Livermore Valley Deux Rouge – red wine.
• 2007 Livermore Valley Roussanne.
• 2007 Livermore Valley Mourvedre.  We finished the bottle over two days and sipped before dinner, during, and after.  Katya and I considered it better after it had time to breath and open up. Good quality and interesting but it this varietal takes a little getting used to for those unfamiliar with it.  Worth the “learning curve” though!

Little Valley

• 2002 Livermore Valley Cab Sauv.

Gerre

• 2005 Livermore Valley Syrah.
• 2006 Livermore Valley Merlot.

WineDiverGirl made a blog post about wine bloggers and wineries working together. Famous, or infamous, Wine Enthusiast writer Steve Heimoff cut up her thoughts on his blog.

I posted this response on Heimoff’s blog and would like to share it with you:

Steve brings up some good points about the perception of independence and objectivity. As a former CPA I worked with that issue daily. CPA’s doing financial work are supposed to be independent of the clients who are paying them directly. Mostly this works, except at Enron …

A “Going Concern” opinion in a financial statement will often tank a company and the CPA may not get paid. However, we do it when standards require it, except at Enron… I’ve had to fire large clients who tried to hide financial deals from me. Terminating 10% of your annual revenue is a far more important action than a bad wine review.

I believe that bloggers can develop the same integrity that CPA’s do. Like CPA’s, bloggers can dig into the operations as WineDiverGirl suggests. (She works for a winery by the way.) Bloggers need to develop some professional standards to do that but it can work and can have value for the consumers.

Steve is applying standards from wine writing which I support. Steve is not seeing the world from a perspective outside his discipline. Wine blogging can be a very different discipline from wine writing that Steve is invested in.

I have no clue if wine bloggers will make this type of objectivity a goal and achieve it. However, I’m experimenting with such CPA type concepts with my blog.

Last point, are casual wine bloggers or professional wine writers more like the average consumers? I think this matters because I am strongly against the point rating system process and any other kind of evaluation that is out of the context that the average consumer would taste in. Tastes change dramatically with context.

Wine bloggers are the mainstream consumers by definition. Social media is the average consumer rising up to be heard. Few are paid anything and almost all have a net outflow of cash for their efforts. They are widely dispersed culturally and rarely, if ever, review wines in the meaningless sterile environments that the “pros” do. Bloggers ARE the consumer rabble rising up to be heard.

I appreciate Steve’s thoughts and hope he continues with blunt criticism. I enjoy and respect the discourse.

Jim @ WineQuesters.com
The wine tasting road trip lifestyle
California

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

Wine is all about emotion and connection to people, food, and place.  A place could be a dining room, tasting room, vineyard picnic, romantic restaurant, or wherever else.  As I’ve blogged before, context heavily influences taste.

Out of curiosity I attended a media tasting for small Napa Valley wineries last Tuesday.  There were a few wine bloggers there but also the wine press.

The tasting was in the Rudd Center at the Culinary Institute of American just north of St. Helena.  Stunning place!  It is an old stone building at the former Christian Brothers Winery that was remodeled for wine instruction and tastings.  It is a cross between a small lecture hall and a chemistry lab.  We each had our own sink.  It was designed to be the perfect place to focus on wine tasting – but is it?

Our winery hosts were very nice and I really enjoyed them.  The wines were all excellent.  Mostly we tasted Cabs which are my favorite anyway.  The major problem is context.

We silently tasted the wines, and spit, in complete isolation from any type of environment that a consumer would experience.  Everyone was focused on each sip and the nose in a perfect environment for sipping and smelling. During the tasting it was silent in the room.  I tried to discuss the wines with a blogger on my left and a wine magazine publisher / editor on my right but someone behind me wanted quiet.  Basically we had to reduce sensory input as much as possible to “taste” the wine.

Some of the old wine media in the room were going to rate the wines and publish them.  If a wine doesn’t get a 90+ rating then it won’t sell from retail shelves.  That means that some poor vintner who has poured his or her heart into the wine is going to suffer a serious set-back.

So I made notes and decided to do a context experiment.  After the tasting I drove a short distance up Highway 29 to Benessere Winery and bought one of the wines we tasted.  I brought it home and shared it with my wife over dinner.  It tasted very different.  I’m not going to say better or worse because that is a meaningless value judgment.  I will say their blend cost $62 which I felt was way too high.

Experiments like this prove to me that pro tastings are worthless for the consumers.  I consider the popular point rating systems to be a fraud to be ignored by those of us who want to enjoy wine without the deep technics and at the time, place, and circumstances of our choosing.

I also want vintners to be freed from the huge constraints of the wine raters.  In Wine Questers we have a rating feature that was requested by dozens of vintners.  Those ratings will only be valid when large numbers of consumers rate the wine in their various environments and circumstances.

Compared to the old wine media tasters in attendance I’m just a barbarian invader.  A hairy beast from the hill country of California that doesn’t fit into the real wine world.  OK, but I’ve had a fair amount of wine education over the past 40+ years and I think those folks shouldn’t be making baseless judgments that affect the rest of us.

I really don’t like them terriorizing winemakers and stiffling innovation and creativity with their value judgments.  I want to taste that innovation even if it burns my nose hairs.  When I taste wine I want it to be an intimate affair between me and the winemaker and the context around me.  The techno-snobs are certainly welcome to enjoy their hobby as they wish but leave the rest of us alone.

Will you consider the wine rating the next time you buy wine?

- jim

I’m sure that most wine bloggers sense that the days of wine subject dominance by the old media gang of Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, Parker, etc. is coming to a slow end. Many California vintners definitely want their influence to end.

What started me on this post was a growl from the owner of a winery in the Temecula Valley. He was displeased that I shot a couple of photos of his crush in progress. He’s “sick of coffee table book publishers” and others trying to “ride the back of the wine industry”. In other words, those of us doing the industry’s marketing with our own time and money are nasty parasites.

I’ve met about 200 vintners in the past year and this guy and a woman owner at a winery in El Dorado County were the only negative reactions I’ve had. The vast majority are wonderfully supportive. Still, I was a bit insulted and started thinking about us wine industry parasites.

I’ll develop the story a bit.

While GPS mapping hundreds of California winery tasting rooms last year for my www.winequesters.com project dozens of vintners requested that I add features to the site that would help them escape Parker, et al. I’ve added a variety of ratings and reviews features to help them do just that. Now their customers can rate their tasting experience, the wines, and other marketable features like landscaping, picnic areas, and architecture.

Customer ratings and reviews is testimonial advertising and the best there is. Yelp and other sites are also offering these features to a lesser extent.

So ratings and reviews is being democratized.  Bloggers are chipping away at the rest of the content that the old wine media offers. Where once the industry had a few voices we now have at least hundreds. This makes it much more difficult for vintners to work the media but those who master our new wine media will win.

Will wine bloggers and Web sites eventually kick old wine media butt?  Yep.  As I tell vintners around California, each blogger has a much smaller audience than the old media but collectively it is growing and this form of communication is more personal and trustworthy. It is more effective than the old media and cheaper. It also fits the way humans evolved to learn. The old media will eventually die on the vine.

As a vintner look at it this way. Any industry would be delighted to have a horde of free bloggers and Web sites creating buzz and generating sales. It saves the wine industry hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and marketing costs.

In some 40 years of tasting in California and around the world I’ve never cared what Parker, Spectator, or the others have to say. I pay attention to personal recommendations. From my observations I believe that the vast majority of tasters feel the same way.

Maybe if you don’t live in a major wine region then Parker and the magazines are important. However, with all the Web sites and bloggers available you now virtually live here and get all the latest scoop.

So let the old wine media shrivel up and die on the vine. The messy and uneditable barbarian wine blogger hordes are marching through wine regions around the world and munching up every bit of information efficiently, effectively, and free for the tasters and the industry.

- jim

I sense a bubble.  Only a couple of years ago $18 a bottle was commonly available in tasting rooms in most California wine regions.  Now $26 is the lowest price almost everywhere.  Winery tasting rooms are being added to all regions at a rapid pace.  Little Geyserville in the Alexander Valley has gone from two to four tasting rooms in the last few months, and nearby Healdsburg is up to 24, at least as of a few days ago.

I’ve seen a lot of booms go bust.  The recent housing and mortgage collapse was easy to see well ahead of the loud pop we heard not long ago.  I sense over-investment in the wine tasting industry and increasing consumer resistance to prices.  It will happen and is unavoidable.  Whether we have a gentle correction or a painful one is a big question.

As usual in business booms the last businesses into the game will be the first to fail.  They are usually under-capitalized for a prolonged decrease in business and usually have paid inflated prices for resources and usually with heavy debt.  They don’t have the option of lowering prices to adjust to the market.

There is a ceiling to how much tasters are willing to pay and it is being explored now by wineries in all regions.  Interesting times should soon be coming to the tasting industry.

- jim

The American Association of Wine Economists met for their 2nd annual conference in Portland, Oregon on August 14-16, 2008.  For the full article in Wine and Vines, the industry news Web site, please visit their Article about the conference. A quick summary of why this read is worth your time!

• Wine Spectator sting!  Two economists set up a fake restaurant in Italy, only a Web site, no actual restaurant, and submitted their wine list to the Wine Spectator for an award of excellence.  The list included wines that WS has rated poorly in the past.  For their $250 application fee they got their award of excellence along with 21 other Italian restaurants.  So would you trust WS???
• The same wine is judged differently at different competitions. If there are actually some kind of standardized criteria for wine taste, which would be the only way to actually compete on taste, then why a gold at one competition and no rating at another?
• Winemaker’s reputations elevate the perceived value of wines even if the winemaker had nothing to do with the wine.

At Wine Questers we feel that the intrinsic value of wine, not the price necessarily, has much more to do with the consumer’s value of the tasting experience than what judges decide or how wineries price their products.

We believe that when wineries compete on the total experience it is less expensive marketing for the winery and brings greater consumer satisfaction.  The existing system of magazine ratings and competition is mostly a fraud and offers little value to consumers.

- jim

During 2006 Katya and I visited dozens of tasting rooms and did ethnographic research while tasting.  We wanted to blend into the environment and observe people’s habits, preferences, and activities.  We paid no attention to their wine preferences, only how they react to their experiences.

Our purpose was for product design inspiration.  We are unhappy with the residential interior products available for our lifestyle design preferences.  We are developing Intiri Designs to design and sell lifestyle residential products, focusing first on California Wine Country.

The ethnographic research results are confidential but that is when we realized that the experience of a wine tasting road trip is more important than the wine for something like 80% of the visitors to tasting rooms.   The concept behind Wine Questers developed during 2007 as we evaluated winery picnic sites and designed our California Wine Country table setting collection.

Ethnographic study is more commonly known as anthropoligists living with remote tribes and learning about them by integrating into their culture.  However, the same techniques work for market research and product design.  We observe then create hypotheses, test the hypotheses with conversations and further observations, and then use the results to influence our designs.

The objective of the research is to understand the lifestyle, design, and style preferences of tasters so we can create products that give them the opportunity to create their own wine country lifestyle at home.  We are a long way from knowing if we are succeeding, but at least this project is interesting.

- jim

Hard to believe that this wasn’t allowed before since many wineries offer wines-by-the-glass and most let you buy a bottle to consume in a picnic area.  So last Wednesday Arnold signed a law to let us do this legally.  Good to get that over with.  Thanks legislature and governor!

- jim

Katya and I are currently entering the data from our GPS mapping and winery data collection trips last fall (2007).  We visited about 600 wineries with tasting rooms regularly open to the public, our initial criteria, and we have about 300 more winery profiles to set up to hold the data.  We are also collecting information from the Web sites to add to the profiles.  What a challenge!

I long ago gave up on using the Web to plan wine region visits.  Information I need as a taster/visitor is too hard to get.  It is dispersed, disorganized, sometimes missing, and on the association and other third-party sites it is inadequate and frequently wrong.

So like many tasters, if not most, I stayed in wine regions I was familiar with.  Occasionally I would travel to some region I hadn’t explored and drive around and hope for the best.  Only during our mapping odyssey did I discover the many wonders of California wineries.  Very few tasters can spend months driving to just about every winery tasting room in the state.

So now I’m back into winery Web sites and frustrated daily.  I really feel the value proposition or benefits of what WineQuesters.com is becoming.  Even when there is a Visit Us page I frequently can’t find the days and hours of operation or the address!!  Sometimes this information is buried several paragraphs down in About Us.  Sometimes the Visit Us page has enough information to visit the winery tasting room but the hours are in Contact Us.

Of the roughly 300 winery Web sites we have visited so far I think there were only one or two that were decent.  Still deficient, but at least useful.

But finding a winery is only a small part of what tasters want.  They have about a hundred other questions that are even harder to find answers for.  We collected those questions and they are now available to answer in the winery profiles.

It is like the wine industry in California decided to conspire against tasters and play hide and seek.

- jim