After I announced that I’d be sitting on the “Meet the Bloggers” panel at Wineries & Breweries Unlimited 2014 in Richmond with Fredric Koeppel and David White, a few (dozen) of you asked me (mostly privately) if the session would be recorded. Thanks to some help from the friendly Nomacorc folks, here is the panel, all just-about-one-hour of the thing.

Fredric, David and I took questions from moderator Tina Caputo, editor of Vineyard & Winery Management magazine, during which we discussed the importance of blogs to the wine industry, waxed pseudo-philosophic about the leveling of the brand awareness playing fields provided by social media, and relayed how we think wine brands can best approach wine bloggers to get them to tell their stories. Fredric was pointedly and intelligently acerbic (and wore his shades), David was soft-spoken and articulate, and I was my normal spastic self.

There’s not much more to tell you about the event, unless you’re in the market for barrel cleaners, tasting room signs, wine business loans and legal services, tractors, or steel tanks. But I had a great time meeting new friends, reconnecting with old ones, and offering a bit of (somewhat toned down… hey, it was a friendly crowd, alright?) tough luv for the local wineries and media types who attended our little blogging panel session.

Ok, start watching, already!

1WineDudeTV Episode 60: How Wine Brands Can Get Blogs to Tell their Stories

Cheers!

Two years ago, after tasting at the 2012 incarnation of the In Pursuit of Balance event (a bi-coastal roadshow of largely classy, vibrant, and restrained California Pinot Noir and Chardonnay offerings), I expressed surprise at the quality of wines coming out of the collaboration between sommelier Raj Parr and winemaker Sashi Moorman.

So after tasting at the 2014 incarnation of IPOB in NYC earlier this year, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the quality of wines coming out of the collaboration between sommelier Raj Parr and winemaker Sashi Moorman.

But I was, because where they’d hit it out of the park in 2012, they launched it clear out of the park, bounced it off the hood of a shiny Corvette Stingray convertible in the stadium parking lot, and sent just about into escape velocity and geosynchronous orbit in 2014. But more on that in a minute or two, after you watch the interview I did with Raj’s cohort and IPOB’s co-founder Jasmine Hirsch, to discuss the impetus behind the event, and how they graduated from brainstorming a wish list of participating winemakers and wines on the back of a cocktail napkin, to formally selecting the IPOB touring lineup. [ Special thanks to The Drunken Cyclist for the camerawork, and to Jasmine for staving off minor starvation for a few minutes so we could chat on vid. ]

1WineDude TV Episode 59: In Pursuit of Balance with Jasmine Hirsch

All done? Good. Now let’s get to the tasting notes, because in this case, the wines themselves are most definitely the story…

Read the rest of this stuff »

It’s been too long since we had a 1WD TV episode, and so today I give you a hastily-recorded (but carefully considered!) take on the arguments both for and against the inflation of wine ratings by popular wine critics (yes, there is a good argument against it!):

1WineDude TV Episode 58: The Arguments For and Against Wine Ratings Inflation

Mentioned in this episode:

• The 2010 Romanee Conti vintage tasting
• MW Mary Ewing Mulligan calling me a hard-ass grader

Cheers!

In this episode of 1WDTV, I rant about why it’s stupid to make a distinction between wine bloggers and fine wine consumers, as if the two populations couldn’t possibly overlap (they do); and yet, the wine media tries to make this distinction time and time again, effectively setting everyone off on a wild goose chase.

To illustrate this, I play off a theme I tackled during a recent interview I gave in South America, only this time with a (very crude) graph to show how I believe the U.S. population of wine consumers and wine bloggers is distributed, which involves a standard deviation bell curve (actually, alcohol consumption probably more closely follows a Gamma distribution, but that’s splitting hairs).

Anyway, enjoy!

The Artificial Distinction Between Wine Bloggers and Consumers 

Cheers!