If you’re a normal person who is just looking for a fun wine blog to read, run away from this crazy dirt-drinking wino.  Or maybe think about pretending to be a wine expert. Yesterday, I posted my thoughts about a confounding Vitisphere editorial that argues about the downside of digital communications.  What ensues is the obligatory publication [...]

At the European Wine Bloggers Conference (EWBC), Ryan Opaz talked about new web tools that allow people to tell stories more effectively online.  I’ve embedded the video of his presentation below, his slideshow, a list of all the tools he mentioned, and then a couple attempts to use the tools. Storytelling Technology w/Ryan Opaz from [...]

The 2011 European Wine Bloggers Conference (EWBC) happened in Brescia, Italy last month.  I had the honor of moderating a session on Saturday and here is the video recording. Blogger’s Stories – Storytelling in action from Vrazon on Vimeo. The entire conference was themed around storytelling and we had lots of sessions about how to [...]

VinoCamp Languedoc was full of interesting conversations.  One of the round table discussions, led by ethiquettes.fr, was about sharing success stories and fail stories of winemakers going online. This session might itself be seen as a success story (or a fail story).  On the success side, I think it’s remarkable how many winemakers were present [...]

The video went up of my talk at O’Reilly’s London Ignite 4. I announced earlier that I would be presenting on Pretending to be an Expert. And while it went very well, I get the sense that some people were hoping for a how to. Which will surely come soon. I’ll do a tutorial on [...]

–This is part of an ongoing series about the European Wine Bloggers’ Conference– I don’t know why I spent so much time talking about wine, keynote speakers and workshops.  What we all want to see is evidence of wildly debaucherous EWBC parties (drinking wine in moderation all the while) and video montages of Michael Cox [...]

–This is part of an ongoing series about the European Wine Bloggers’ Conference– -David Schildknecht from the Wine Advocate responded to this post here- At the European Wine Bloggers’ Conference in Vienna, Elin McCoy spoke to us all about the future of the Ivory Tower wine critic. It was a keynote so we all got [...]

I noticed that Hervé Bizeul has been on a self-reflective flurry, pontificating on what defines a wine blogger’s philosophical imperatives or something. The point is we all wonder what to blog about at some point or another. I thought it would be funny to share this pie chart that breaks down the content of most [...]

I’m always out there trying to convince Languedoc Roussillon wine people to blog. But sometimes I feel like my proselytizing is a big waste of time. Because outside of a few very devoted winemakers who are taking up the charge to explore the Internet with me, I see very few results. I hear a lot [...]

I want to change the way winemakers think about participation in social media. I want them to stop treating twitter and facebook like some alien ritual that just goes against the grain of their character. I need them to start thinking about social media the same way they think about every other kind of social [...]