While writing my book, I had to make a lot of decisions about self-publishing, format, layout, sales channels, imprints, and a lot of stuff that never really occured to me until I was up to my neck in publishing information.  I found one article from Jancis Robinson’s site particularly useful.  It was written by Monty Waldin, who you might know from Channel 4’s Chateau Monty or his extensive reference work for biodynamic wines.

The article describes Monty’s journey through self-publishing (subscribers only) and it really helped inform my decision-making process.  My book is different in many ways but I faced a lot of the same decisions.  Anyway, for other winemakers who are considering writing a book, check out that article.  And also How to publish your own wine book (free for all).

Then I saw that Monty commented about my book.  He said some nice things about me and the book, and I’m flattered that he’s flattered.  But all that fluffy stuff aside, he said some really cool things about wine books being self-published.  Gives you a sort of global perspective of how things are changing.   He recalls the period where wineries would commission wine writers to devote a book to their Domaine.  Off the top of his head, he mentions Chateau Yquem, Chateau Margaux, and Daumas Gassac (Languedoc in the house).

These differ from my book since they are full length and each one is really centered around a single estate.  But back in the day, you would have been crazy to spend the hefty chunk of cash to promote your region generically.   Like buying a thousand billboards and having them just say “Drink wine.”  without any mention of your own estate.

But today  the costs are different.  The metrics have changed.  I can put out a shorter book and make it about the whole appellation and it’s not exorbitantly expensive.

Monty’s comments appeared in the subscribers section, but I imagine nobody minds if I relay his comments here for you to read.

Flattered Ryan O’Connell found my article on e-publishing useful but even more pleased to see a wine-grower like Ryan putting e-pen to paper.

Professional wine writing is in flux at the moment, seen as an extravagance by most newspapers and book publishers.

Since Jancis published my article a well known female wine writer has been in contact to say is doing what Stephen Skelton MW and myself have done, which is to ditch slow- and low paying publishers for fairly risk-free print-on-demand self-publishing using lulu dot com (Stephen’s books are on Viticulture and UK Vineyards, mine on biodynamics). Said wine writer also appears to relish the greater freedom she will have editorially over what is published by going it alone.

In the old days some of the wealthier wine producers commissioned wine writers to write books about them. Off the top of my head such books already exist in English on Chateau Yquem (Olney), Mas de Daumus Gassac (Mackenzie) and Chateau Margaux (Faith) – but all three tomes could perhaps do with a revision having been published in the 1980s (or earlier) and to be published on paper an in e-form.

What Ryan has done is an example of how technology is allowing smaller, lesser known producers to do what only the big boys and girls could do until recently.

While this blog can sometimes go on tangents based on my strange, exploratory moods, it is still a winemaker blog.  And it is late September which means HARVEST in the south of France.  So here it is, my first obligatory vineyard harvest of 2010.

We’re starting with the Merlot, as usual.  It’s all by hand this year because we’re worried about the disparity between maturity levels of the grapes this year.

I’ll be posting about the particularities of this year’s vintage.  But for now, just pictures of Merlot being harvested … with a vengeance!!

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. 😀

Awesome!  Google Maps updated its satellite images of Domaine O’Vineyards and several other estates in our area.  The satellite images are in much higher detail than they used to be.  And the new images of O’Vineyards includes the winery which didn’t exist in the old images from 2005.  COOOL.  Check out the map yourself by googling O’Vineyards.

I really like Google Maps.  I haven’t checked our map in a little while, but I think this is a very recent update.  It appears to be an early spring photo which could mean I caught it just a few weeks after the photo was taken.

For some reason, the map updates seem really important to me.  I remember a few years ago (2007?) when Google updated its images of New Orleans and you could see the blue tarps still covering the leaky roofs all over town.  You could see some parts of the much publicized lower ninth which had been so destroyed by the canal break.

Now, a more cheerful memory has been built into the Google Map.  Domaine O’Vineyards!  The winery is built and life has been restored to these vines that were once destined to be ripped out of the ground.  Hurrah for new beginnings!

I hope you enjoy this little French wine map from O’Vineyards and Google.  The Languedoc deserves a lot more of these updates because there’s a lot of beautiful french wine country.  If you find some other vineyard satellite images you like, please let me know and I will post about them too.

It’s spring and it’s wonderfully hot. We went from one of the coldest winters to one of the hottest Springs. And in brief, it feels like Summer at O’Vineyards.

And now we’re starting to get our dearest vacationers so it feels even more like Summer. The other day, Anthony Swift from Wine Pleasures came through with a group of Norwegian wine women. These wine ladies had just visited Carcassonne’s castle ramparts in the morning where I met the group and led them back to the vineyard just a few kilometers away.

I like all the tour groups we get, but Wine Pleasures was a special pleasure because Anthony is as obsessed with the Internet as I am (maybe more?). So the group doesn’t get shy around cameras. And we get to share the tasting with you.

We did a live stream that you can still access here:

What you don’t get to see in the stream is the delicious schmorgesborg that my mom prepared for the luncheon after the wine tasting. The photos don’t do it justice. But if you follow the blog or visit us with any frequency, you know that my mom is a cooking machine.

You can follow Anthony Swift on Twitter and Facebook.

I get a lot of questions about the nuts and bolts of vineyard finance.  Honestly, I’m not really comfortable posting all our costs and returns on the web or even talking about them openly at wine tastings.  But I understand when people get curious.  I mean, somewhere in the back of their minds, they want to know just how much dough it takes to buy and operate a vineyard.

I found a really interesting breakdown over at the Tablas Creek blog where they discuss the math on buying a new property and trying to make it profitable.  SPOILER: the boat sinks.  But it’s interesting to hear a real winemaker talk shop on the nuts and bolts of dollar costs in the US.  I’ll try to add a couple differences with costs in France later on.  But for now, here’s the link to Haas’ article on vineyard finance.

Micro-blogging time.  We visited Freixenet outside of Barcelona and it was enormous.  My whole production fits ten times in each of their individual wine tanks.

But the most interesting thing is that they make really good wine other than the very drinkable, very affordable black label.  They’ve got some “micro-cuves”, again: thinking of my entire vineyard as a micro-production, that are superbly worked.  But these smaller quantities never really make it out of the region so you should try to visit the winery when you’re in Barcelona.  If you like sparkling white, they use Methode Champenoise and it’s delicious.

Now off to Alimentaria!!  Looking forward to see what Catavino has in store for the rest of the trip.

PS – The Cava Choo Choo is a train ride through Freixenet’s massive James Bond villainesque underground complex.  It is the scariest parts of Universal Studio’s The Big One ride mixed with the most exciting robotic arms and scientist encounters from Half Life.  It could beat the Napa Valley train’s butt in a street fight.

“The web is theoretically infinite; readers value blogs that sort through the confusion to find things of interest. Some of the highest-traffic blogs provide nothing but links.”

That’s a bit from Tom Johnson’s article on Palate Press about the pitfalls of contemporary wine blogging.  He runs his own blog which will apparently change names frequently.  I think the quote above summarizes a concept that I talk about a lot with winemakers.  Aggregate content!  Link to other people!

While Tom’s article picks on wine reviewers and wine bloggers in general, I deal specifically with wineMAKER blogs and I think we have some additional psychological baggage.

Winemakers feel like running a vineyard blog means talking about yourself all the time.  And it’s cool to do that sometimes.  As the Hosemaster of Wine once said, it’s hard to find a blog that primarily focuses on a topic other than the blogger.   But don’t spend all your time doing that.

Unless you’re already insanely famous, very few people will devote time to you on a regular basis just to find out what the weather is like on YOUR vineyard.  And while it’s fun to drum up support for real world wine tastings, only a small geographical area can show up to your tasting.  The Internet gets read by everybody!

“So what do we blog about!?”  You blog about everything.  Writing a good wine blog is probably 90% reading.  You read newspapers and other blogs and then you blog about the most interesting stuff.  But winemakers have an edge.  We are uniquely positioned to hear stuff firsthand instead of discovering them through traditional wine press.  So keep your ear to the ground and talk about things that you find out about in the wine world.   Talk about everybody.

If you spend all day pruning, it’s likely you didn’t get exposed to any cool ideas to put in the blog.  But on a day where you see other people, keep your eyes open and think “would this be interesting to wine drinkers?”

I really hate manifestos.  I think that most of my favorite movements start to die the day they write down what they’re really trying to do… like defining the movement is overly restrictive and dogmatic.  But I was busy writing up a general presentation of Love That Languedoc, and I found myself falling into this militant prose that sounds a ton like a manifesto.  Well, if I go around saying “no manifesto” all the time, then I’m still being just as dogmatic and restrictive as if I had written down my goals.  OH WELL.  Here it is:

I refuse to leave our fate in the hands of the global press who are, at best, mildly curious about our region.  And, at worst, totally oblivious to it.  Aside from a few rare examples, the world’s largest wine producer is also the world’s most ignored beauty.

Well this is the part of the movie where the downtrodden Languedoc takes off her horn-rimmed glasses and lets her hair down and the popular kid (or Henry Higgins, depending on what age you are) suddenly realizes that the coolest girl he knows was there under his nose all along.

Love That Languedoc is my personal project to show the world what it’s missing and now it’s developing a new branch.  I want to teach our winemakers how to communicate (without relying on journalists or  critics or ME) to a world that is ready to hear them.

I guess I’m thankful that the region needs me.  But the day I’m unnecessary will be a great day indeed.  We have an amazing advantage in sheer number of winemakers.  And our wines are distributed globally as both prestigious cult winesand large volume convenience store wines.  So people are already talking about us and our wines.

The next step is responding to that conversation.  We need to start training our winemakers to check email and set up a google alert for every estate in the Languedoc-Roussillon.  If only 1% of our winemakers spoke up every time somebody mentions their wines online, we would flood the Internet with our voices.  We could show our consumers that we appreciate their drinking habits.

And once winemakers start communicating successfully with the consumer, it’s much more likely that they will be willing to adopt more advanced online tools like a blog or a twitter.  And they’ll be much more likely to “get it” because it’s part of an authentic foray into communication and not some contrived business effort with no ROI.

And on that day, I’ll just be a happy little winemaker who runs a video blog for the fun of it.  And who will laugh about the old days when he would accidentally write a manifesto while trying to explain why he blogs.

There.  So I guess the conclusion is nice because it points out why this manifesto is silly.  I only blog because it’s fun.  I’m happy that it’s increasing my exposure and wine sales and I’m definitely finding ways to maximize the synergy between my blog and my website.  But ultimately, the blog is for fun.  And sometimes I get these lofty goals to sign everybody up for Google Alerts or whatever.  But ultimately, even those initiatives are an attempt to make my blog redundant.  One day, when everybody does their own online promotion, I’ll be useless.  And it’ll just be for fun again.

Until then, sign up for a freaking Google Alert.

I’m throwing a Flickr party on December 19th at my vineyard. There will be free wine, good company and lots of photo opportunities. Please consider attending! Almost all the invitations are going out through Flickr so it’s a big group of strangers with a common interest in documenting the Languedoc with their photography.

On a lot of the flyers, it says there’s a 5€ entry fee but that entry fee is waived for anybody who sets up a free Flickr account or already has one.

You are welcome to the vineyard all day and you’ll have the opportunity to visit the winery and enjoy the peaceful vineyard atmosphere before the party gets started. The main festivities will be from 16:00 – 21:00, with small trips to la Cité de Carcassonne scheduled throughout the day for people who want to visit the castle.

I’m already getting positive RSVPs from as far away as Barcelona. If you live in the area, and want to have some camera fun, flash mob at Domaine O’Vineyards.

Domaine O’Vineyards
885 Avenue de la Montagne Noire
11620 Villemoustaussou
Saturday December 19th
16:00h – 21:00h

Ryan O’Connell
Tel 33 630189910 / 33 963063172