European Wine Bloggers Conference 2010 - Ongoing Series
I am finally back in the comfort of my own winery after a long and wonderful trip to Paris and Vienna. The European Wine Bloggers’ Conference was an absolute blast. The word for the week was overwhelming. Lots of wine, lots of learning, lots of laughing, lots of beauty. Everything was just wonderful.
I guess we should break this up into multiple posts because the trip was sooo varied and momentous.
Alright, an ongoing series on the EWBC 2010 in Vienna and the surrounding Austrian wine country. As the series goes on, I’ll update this post to be a sort of index or table of contents for the EWBC posts, photos and links.
Keynotes and Tastings that virtually everybody did:
Other pertinent, less insane articles about the EWBC:
Mr. Payton goes to Washington.. err .. Parliament in Vien. This is a really ingenious piece where Ken Payton visits the Austrian parliament without an appointment (or any idea of who he even wants to talk to) and asks if anybody can help him learn about Austrian wine law. I wish I had ideas like this.
Adegga’s list of wines tasted during the conference proper – Although this list is very very long, it is not exhaustive. We must have cumulatively tasted over 1,000 wines in the five days.
Jancis just did a write up on varietal days (eg Cabernet Day, Grenache Day, Champagne Day) and I’ll admit that it seems like every day of the year might soon have a varietal celebration associated with it. Like patron saints of wine-drinking. Not just Saint Vincent anymore.
Jancis’ Article on Grape Days
In her article, I pick up on two very different messages. On the one hand, Jancis acknowledges that the celebration of certain varietals seems a little commercially motivated. For example, Cabernet Day was conceived and brought to fruition somewhat autocratically by Rick Bakas, the social media engineer at St Supery, and it’s a day devoted to a varietal that already has a lot of notoriety when it comes from the right side of the tracks (in this case the right side is the Left Bank). People ask “Does Cabernet need a day?” and I kind of get that vibe from bits of Jancis’ writing.
On the other hand, she managed to use this day in a very personal way. She opened a bottle of Figeac and toasted the passing of its winemaker who was so proud of his unique contribution to Cabernet Sauvignon on Bordeaux’s Right Bank. And this is why Cabernet Day was good. We found ways to personalize and celebrate delicious wines.
My Thoughts on Grape Days
And I think this mirrors my experience. I’m going to reiterate how happy I am with the Cabernet Day celebration we had at O’Vineyards and around the world. We didn’t know how the day would turn out, but we ended up surrounded by neighbors and friends and enjoying some really delicious wines that showed off totally different expressions of Cabernet Sauvignon.
And people around the world cheered us on. Americans trapped in the office in the early afternoon could see us sipping as the sun set in the south of France. And as the French started to get sleepy, folks on the west coast of the United States popped corks in their time zone where the party was just starting.
I’m just so happy. I want to say I’m proud, but it’s hard to be proud in the face of such a massive, humbling event. Next to the work of all those winemakers (and don’t forget how much promotional work goes in on the part of Rick Bakas and all the event organizers around the world), what did I really do? I just threw a little party and drank some good wine.
And next to my neighbors who have been working here for generations or names like Thierry Manoncourt who made Jancis’ Figeac, a newly arrived winemaker like me starts to feel pretty small and unimportant.
These days can be important
Anyway, I know it seems like the varietal days are piling up fast, one after the other. And I personally have to question who decided to put them all right before the northern hemisphere’s harvest, a very busy time of year. But I hope that varietal celebrations don’t become trivial. I hope that people go beyond novelty.
Whether you use these days as an excuse to open a special bottle that you really cherish or you use them as an opportunity to explore a varietal you don’t know very well, the important thing is that you’re attaching real emotions to these wines. Drinking wine is fun, but it’s also effortlessly profound.
Next up: Grenache Day
Anyway, enough waxing poetic. Grenache Day is coming up on September 24th. I don’t make any Grenache, but I love to drink it. The Languedoc-Roussillon does a great job with it. I’ve been looking forward to the day ever since it was proposed at the Grenache Symposium held at Chene Bleu. I’ve been told that some other folks in the region are already organizing stellar events.
I personally will strive to swing down to Domaine Gayda and check out their Grenache Day celebration. A workshop with Vinecole followed by a cuve tasting at Gayda with the winemaker. If I can’t go there, I’ll surely be celebrating at dinner with some of my favorite Grenaches. After seeing all the energy and enthusiasm at the Grenache Symposium, I know just how important September 24th is to all the people involved with this grape. From the growers to the winemakers to the writers and the sales people and NEVER FORGET the drinkers… And I hope you all find a way to make the day personal by opening a special bottle of Grenache or by raising your Grenache awareness.
Thanks again to everybody who makes these celebrations possible. Amazing, tireless winemakers, promoters, and wine-lovers.
Cabernet Day is tomorrow! September 2nd. The wines and last minute RSVPs are filing in.
And you can still come too! I hope a lot of you swing by Domaine O’Vineyards tomorrow starting around 19h00. We’ll have some stellar wines open. You can show up earlier, but we’ll put you to work. ;D
For those of you who cannot come in person, you can still follow along on the live streaming broadcasts. I’ll have a laptop set up to broadcast a live stream through Live That Languedoc, my ustream channel.
I finally got the flastcreen set up to show cascading tweets all hashtagged with #Cabernet Day. So you had best be tweeting your little hearts out. Tweet til the Cab ripens!
Or if you don’t tweet, feel free to leave a comment in this post or in other posts about Cabernet Day.
See you all tomorrow!
Does the French government snoop through your wine blog?
Finally a post where I can really flex my paranoia muscle. But before getting too far ahead of myself, let me say that my answer to the question in the title of this post is “No, the government doesn’t really snoop through your blog, but it CAN and it MIGHT!”. The heavily anti-wine atmosphere in the French government coupled with a new series of reforms in the way winemakers are controlled can cause a bit of paranoia in a place where a ton of crime is discovered through dénonciations.
A recent story popped up in the Beaujolais that has paranoid winemakers like me wondering how much of the vines we can safely show on our blogs.
Lilian Bauchet’s inspection
The story that has me thinking comes from Lilian Bauchet who recently came to my attention as a bit of a French blogging sensation. He’s an offbeat blogger working in the Fleurie (an appellation within Beaujolais) and he’s got no nonsense and a lot of personality. So when he blogs, he says what’s on his mind and it can be pretty colorful.
His vines were recently subject to an unannounced inspected by a government-approved control group (I’ll explain this later). And somewhere, in the back of our heads, we start to wonder how his vines were chosen for inspection.
“A moins que le récit de mes aventures de néovigneron dans les vignes sur ce blog ait intéressé à ce point les gens du CIBAS qu’ils se décident à venir y jeter un œil de plus près ! “
Lilian’s comment is tongue in cheek. But still… is there a chance that blogs bring unwanted attention to the vineyard?
Obviously, the control groups cannot inspect every single vine in France. So they have to select a few parcels from a few winemakers and they rotate through a representative sample of vines every few years. But we all know that it’s tough to be random. And hearsay, rumor, and politics can often influence these decisions.
Is there a risk that outspoken blogging can win the attention of bureaucratic enforcers?
Why I think we’re mostly safe.
I feel sort of silly saying this next bit. The good news is nobody in the business reads our blogs! I don’t think that folks in the control offices, or at customs, or the prefecture, or even our fellow winemakers spend time reading our blogs.
Most of my direct neighbors in the winemaking community have just a vague notion that I do something on the Internet which has inexplicably raised sales and they usually narrow their brows and raise their shoulders when they talk about it. And they occasionally say something about facebook.
Even people who seem overly dedicated to antagonizing me don’t seem to really look at the website. I have neighbors who are constantly denouncing me to the cops for weird pseudo-crimes that I’m not committing… if those guys ever started reading my blog, they’d probably be able to denounce me for an actual crime that I’m really committing!
I mean, I run more than one website dedicated to wine without slapping around that disclaimer required by the Loi Evin about “l’abus d’alcool est dangereux pour la santé” or whatever. But no popo. These laws go almost entirely unenforced, to my knowledge.
Where are the blog police? They don’t exist…yet.
Will the Blog Police Exist One Day?
That’s a good question. Does the RG (Renseignement Généraux) read the blog? They certainly could. But could they read ALL the blogs? It’s sort of a major time suck. And as the years go by there are more and more active sources of information online. Eventually, the RG is going to face the same problem every intelligence organization faces. They will have access to too much information.
And the same can be said about the CIBAS or OI. Determining which vineyards to inspect based on blogging is likely to remain a silly fiction spun by paranoid winemakers like me.
On the other hand, I’m always surprised at the lengths spiteful neighbors or rival winemakers will go to just to piss each other off a little. While the blog police won’t likely be a government institution any time soon, I do think citizens will be denounced more and more often for their blog-confessionals.
I thought it would be funny to share this pie chart that breaks down the content of most Winemaker Blogs and Newsletters. Hopefully O’Vineyards blog and newsletters don’t feel like this. ;D
I’m teasing of course. But there are a lot of newsletters that quite predictably remind you the harvest went great, the wine is available through direct orders, and… well nothing else.
While more introspective winemakers like Hervé and me wonder if we should burden people with our daily chores, tales of the stuff that breaks down, worried scribbles about the weird mole on our backs… …. The most important thing is just to have fun and be yourself. As long as you’re not treating your audience like a bunch of mindless wine-buying automatons, you’re doing a good job.
Here’s a more detailed version of the pie chart that includes a few more options:
Best harvest ever
Buy my wine
Sorry I haven’t been updating
It is hot
It is cold
The grapes changed color
I’m at an overpriced wine fair
I was mentioned in a magazine you don’t read
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 of excuses. A lot of complaints about time management. I also get a lot of people who sort of stop talking to me and who go out and pay a designer to create a blog for them (something I would have done for free). And then the people in that last group often post once or twice about the weather and then never again.
I just get down in the dumps when I see this lack of enthusiasm.
But there is still hope around every corner!
I recently noticed a change from one of the region’s behemoths. You know how long it takes for big organizations to implement change. So if they’re altering their course, maybe it will inspire the little guys to do it too.
Sud de France used to have one of those embarassing blogs that posted a small bit every six months. And I noticed that they’ve published two posts in August alone. It’s a little early to call it, but I’m guessing that somebody over there is waking up to the huge opportunity they have.
Then again, if you look at the archives, August-October is the only period they actively blogged in 2009 as well. So maybe it’s just an annual flurry of posts (maybe tied into the Festival Sud de France). I hope it’s more than that. Because if they can’t be bothered to highlight all the people talking about their brand, I don’t know how I’ll ever convince poor, resource-starved winemakers to do the job for them.
I also hope that they personalize it a bit more. Put in a photo of whoever is writing the blog. Let that person write it in a personal, human tone. Et cetera.
I know I talk a lot about how awesome Languedoc Roussillon bloggers are. But today, I’m gonna link to some folks outside of the region. Other young winemakers who use video effectively.
Herrenhof – A small family vineyard. Blogging in German and English. I feel like this guy is as involved in day to day work as my dad and me. That’s sort of the magic of video. It conveys so much without explicitly saying anything. Watch for yourself and I’m sure you’ll agree that this dude is very passionate about his grapes.
Quevedo – Oscar of Oscar’s Wine fame blogs in English and Portuguese. He does a lot of video too. He makes a mistake in this one, but it conveys the point that he is a dude who does videos in the vines. Maybe I just like people who go out and film outdoors.
La Gramiere – Young couple in the southeast of France with some very earnest videos.
Looking at these choices, it strikes me that I really like outdoors episodes. Maybe I should do more myself. It’s just that darned wind! Great for grapes but terrible for my microphone. 😀
A lot of you probably don’t know this, but my internet handle is mroconnell. Like Mister O’Connell. This is an old nickname that goes back to when I was a teenager. A lot of my friends teased me for acting like an 80 year old man so often. I had business meetings, taxes, crazy stories about my adventurous youth, and I had a tendency to fall asleep really early.
🙂
So shortly after discovering that Google released GMail and Odeo released Twitter, I was there with my handle “mroconnell“. In some ways, it was a crappy choice. Most people don’t read it as MISTER and that makes it hard to remember. A lot of people type oconnell with one L. Anyway, I could have made a better choice. But I don’t mind it horribly. And it would be silly to try to start a new account now that I’ve entered the community as mroconnell.
So what do I do about all the mistypes? Well I have two suggestions.
Get additional twitter names. It costs just a couple minutes to expand your Twitter realestate. Just make a new account and claim the name with the typo. I just started up @mroconnel where I can politely redirect folks to the correct spelling. If people consistently mistype your name on twitter, try to reserve the alternate spellings.
The second bit of advice is to post your twitter name clearly in places that people might look for it. I used to have a link on this page that said Tweeeet. While humorous, it was pretty inconvenient for folks who wanted to find my twitter name. They had to see that link and click it. I’ve now replaced it with a @mroconnell which is much more recognizable to twitter users. Saving them some precious seconds and also catching their eyes more easily. Or so I hope.
I guess my point is that you don’t need to have a PERFECT twitter name. But you should try to make life easy for people who want to talk to you on twitter. That goes for any site you’re fond of.
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 interaction.
If you drop in on an independent winemaker, they will generally greet you and offer a tasting of their wines. I’m pretty sure this is standard expectation. When somebody calls you because they read about your wine somewhere, you are expected to do a tasting with them. And you don’t just quietly pour. Most winemakers who acknowledge this expectation to a tasting will also take the time to talk about who they are, why they make wine, and so on. If I’m way off base, let me know in the comments. But I’m pretty sure this is standard fare. If one or two people drop by the winery while the winemaker is there, a large majority of winemakers will take some time with those visitors.
How much time? Even if a single person comes by, I’ll often spend over an hour with them showing the winery, the vines, and talking about winemaking. Even the speedy “gift shop tour” where I just taste bottled wines with them will generally take a good half hour. And I think most independent winemakers are happy to spend this time. 30 minutes for one dude.
Having a little facebook fan page that you update a few times a week will also take about 30 minutes here and there. But a well-groomed fan page will receive hundreds of visitors per week. You see where I’m going with this?
This O’Vineyards website, which consists of a few photos and some sporadic thoughts from the winemaker probably takes me a solid four hours per week. It received 1461 unique visitors in the last 30 days. So for about 16 hours of work, I got to communicate my message to 1400+ people.
Now a significant difference is that these web visitors aren’t necessarily buying wine. The normal expectation is that when you spend 30 minutes with “avertis” wine lovers who swing by the vineyard, they will buy some wine and make it “worth your time”.
But it doesn’t make sense to give up 30 minutes just for a few small 6-bottle sales. Our time is worth more than that! The real benefit of those people who take the time to visit us is that they go home and tell everybody else how wonderful their visit was. It’s good old fashioned social networking. Sans internet.
Some winemakers are shocked at the amount of time and energy I put into the Love That Languedoc wine blog (and to an extent this website). I sometimes spend whole days traveling and filming. And even the off days, I frequently spend 1-2 hours reading other cool stuff on the Internet to be on top of the buzz. It’s a huge time commitment. So why do it?
Because people want me to and it’s pretty fun.
We all have a chance to get thousands of people to visit our websites and facebook pages and twitter accounts and everything else. That’s an amazing opportunity. If I called a winemaker in the region and told him I had a group of 150 people who want to visit tomorrow, that winemaker should naturally want to make some time for them. The Internet is no different. 150 visitors deserve your time. Hell, 10 visitors deserve your time.
So stop saying that the Internet is not for you! Get typing. A few minutes per day just sharing your thoughts and developments around the vineyard might get you a steady flow of visitors. And that has a lot of value.
Agree or disagree? Please feel free (obliged to?) comment!
Well, the people who find this post through Google are going to be exceptionally disappointed, but I promise it isn’t false advertising.
I recently noticed that the youtube video of me drinking dirt had been featured on a tumblr account called Women & Wine. Innocently enough, I went to the site to see exactly how the video had been presented. I would not remain so innocent.
My dirt-drinking video has somewhat hilariously earned a place on this tumblr account devoted to naked girls and wine. I’ve heard google and other search engines can be pretty harsh if you start linking to naughty neighborhoods, so I’m going to abstain from linking. But you can find it by typing in “womenandwine . tumblr . com” without the spaces and my specific video can be accessed at “bit.ly / wineporn” sans spaces. Before checking it out, allow me to remind you that the abuse of pornography can be dangerous for your health. And don’t even try to operate heavy machinery while under the influence of pornography.
I’m sure my parents will be proud to discover that I’ve finally made the big time and broken into wine-themed Internet pornography. It’s been a long time coming given my embarassing knowledge of all things naked and vinous.
How to find us
Domaine O’Vineyards, located in the North Arrondissement of Carcassonne, is just minutes from the Carcassonne train station, the Medieval City, and the Carcassonne Airport.
GPS coordinates: 43.259622, 2.340387
O’Vineyards
Wine, Dine, Relax at our Boutique Vineyard
Unique thing to do in Carcassonne
Wine Cellar. Winery Visits. Wine Tasting.
Wine & Food Pairing
North Arrondissement of Carcassonne
885 Avenue de la Montagne Noire
11620 Villemoustaussou, France
Tel: +33(0) 630 189 910
Best by GPS.
Follow the signs to Mazamet/ Villemoustaussou using the D118. At the end of the last straight part of D118, you will come to a roundabout with the Dyneff gas station.
Take the exit towards Pennautier. Continue 500m to a small roundabout and go straight over.
Look out for the second road on your right, Avenue des Cévennes which curves up hill (about 1km) to Avenue de la Montagne Noire on the left.
At the last juction, bear left. the road sign “Ave de la Montagne Noire” (confusing as it seems to show a right turn)
After another 500m you will see our red brick color building in the middle of the vines.
