This week marks the kick-off of the 4th annual North American Wine Bloggers Conference, held (for the first time in its history) on the Right Coast (Charlottesville, VA, to be exact).  And I’m excited to be attending for the fourth time.

I’m excited to see old friends. I’m excited by the fact that this year’s conference is on the East Coast. I’m excited to be moderating one of the breakout session panels.  I’m excited to see who takes away the 2011 Wine Blog Awards (even though I’m a finalist for Best Overall Wine Blog, my money in that category is on Tom Wark – like Japan in the recent Women’s World Cup, he’s the sentimental fave, after all).  I’m excited to see the keynote speakers and get a chance to talk to them again in person, because I can tell you from personal experience that they’re as gracious, talented and delightful a duo of wine communicators as ever walked the planet.  I’m excited that every year I personally know a smaller and smaller percentage of the conference attendees.  I’m excited about the whole f*cking thing.

Ok, I’m not that excited about the drive down I-95, actually. But other than that, I’m looking forward to all of  it.  Even the wine speed-dating stuff, if just to see which producers pull it off successfully, and which ones stumble and do the on-line equivalent of a vinous face-plant (dear wine producer participants: sorry in advance for the schadenfreude).  If you’re attending, then I’m excited to meet you – even if you’re that PR guy who keeps emailing me about when I’ll try your clients’ wines (your answer, by the way: I don’t know). I’m excited to see people walking around in colonial reenactment garb… and teasing them with offers to sip whatever wine I have in my glass at the time (okay, I wouldn’t stoop that low… I think…).

I’m excited because I’m a geek, I’m in love with wine the way that I’m in love with music and almost as much as I’m in love with my wife and daughter – and I’m about to go hang out with a supportive community of like-minded geeks for the better part of three days, in a beautiful part of the country, in an area where an historic-and-now-budding wine industry is trying to secure its footing in the national wine market.

I’m not sure it gets much better than that. Actually, I’m quite sure it doesn’t get better than that.  Unless vintage port will also be poured… by lingerie models in swimwear… (note to my wife: the items preceding ellipses in this sentence are, in fact, included for humorous purposes only).

But what I’m most excited about?

My past forays with VA wine have had mixed results, and there have been no shortage of people offering me but-onlys and what-ifs about those experiences.  So, I’m most excited to see if those people are right – I’m most excited to see if the VA wine industry brings its A-game to this conference.

More to come from Virginia, where the proof will be in the anti-Federalist pudding…

Cheers!

The 2011 West of West Wine Festival is almost around the corner – held in Occidental, CA, the festival will showcase cool-climate (well, cool-climate for CA, that is!) Pinots, Syrahs and Chardonnays; limited production wines from wineries that are not usually open to the public. These are West Sonoma Coast producers who are making vino that is not easy to get your grubby wine-lovin’ hands on – unless you’re selected as the winner of our latest giveaway, that is.

I’ve got one ticket to the the West of West Wine Festival’s Grand Tasting on Saturday, August 6th from 3:00-6:00 pm in Occidental, CA – a $125 value, which we’re giving away to one lucky randomly-selected commenter! The giveaway also includes free access to the Barrel Tastings & Open Houses on Sunday, August 7th (details to be provided in the Grand Tasting).

The skinny: YOU leave a comment on this post, letting us know your fave Sonoma wine recommendation (in keeping with the theme, Coastal recommendations are preferable but let’s keep it open to all of Sonoma). At 8PM ET on Wednesday, July 20 I will randomly select a winner from the commenters, who will be notified via e-mail.  Easier than suckin’ down a chilled Sonoma Coast Chard on a hot Summer night. So get crackin’, peeps!

The fine-print: This ticket admits one person to the above-described Grand Tasting event on August 6th and includes free access to the event’s Barrel Tastings & Open Houses on August 7th. No travel, meals, accommodations, “escorts,” hovercraft (though that would be awesome, wouldn’t it?), monkeys (also awesome) or anything else provided.

Looking forward to reading about your faves!

Cheers – and good luck!!

Those of you planning on attending the upcoming 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference in Charlottesville, VA will have your choice of interesting break-out session panels during the afternoon of July 22nd. I’ll be moderating one of them, titled Millennials and Wine.

Millennials are Democratic (by a slight majority), thoroughly on-line and plugged daily into social networking tools, and (by a huge majority) sleep with their cellphones (really?) .  They are young enough that they might not get the reference mentioned in the title of today’s post.  They are fast becoming the wine consumers of the modern era, drinking a lot of the stuff (even in the shower… not sure I get that one entirely), especially if it has bubbles.

And there are nearly 25 million more of them than there are Gen Xers.

With a potential market that big,  if you’re even thinking about wine writing, wine blogging, wine sales, wine marketing, or wine making, you’d better start to understand what makes Millennials tick when it comes to wine.

And you’d better do it quickly…

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I’m a member of the Wine Media Guild of New York, which probably makes little sense to many of you reading this considering that a) I don’t live in New York, b) I’m not formally in the media trade and c) I posses (maybe) one tenth the talent of WMG members like Kevin Zraly.  Members are required to attend a minimum of one WMG event per year, and so I carted Mrs. Dudette up to the Big Apple last week to attend the annual Hall of Fame dinner at the Four Seasons.

This year saw four people elected as Hall of Fame Inductees, none of whom, puzzlingly, were actually present to accept their honors (though in the case of Leon Adams, whose induction was posthumous, the absence was understandable!).

While it’s nice to rub elbows with the Right Coast’s wine media heavy-hitters, one of the biggest draws of the WMG annual HoF dinners are the wines brought by the members – many of whom pull out interesting/special/older bottles from their personal cellars, and I’m not above mooching off of the vinous bounty of my fellow members (not by a long way, in fact).

I guessed (correctly, it turned out) that most of the Right Coasters were going to go French (and older) with their selections, so I went a bit rogue with my choices…

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