While bouncing around Twitter one day, I was turned on to a new-fangled wine search engine site by the incomparable Lisa Adams Walter (Twitter). She directed me to GoBYO (Twitter), a wine search engine that might revolutionize the Bring Your Own Bottle searches in your local restaurants, taking out the calling and questions surrounding the corkage policy at restaurants around the country. It is a very user-friendly website that is already exhaustively detailed about wine, corkage and restaurant information in now, 10 metro areas in the US. Devon Segel (Twitter), along with her family and the DiningInfo team launched this effort two years ago and it is continuing to build up at a rapid pace.
Now let's continue the 5 Questions series and learn a bit more about Devon and GoBYO!
I think at this point, it comes as no surprise that I like the wines from
Carmel Valley and
Georis Winery, in particular. They're my favorite winery, in fact, from my favorite appellation. So, what could be just as awesome as my favorite winery's, appellation-specific wine? A new wine from the
winemaker from my favorite winery in my favorite appellation, of course! Damien Georis, winemaker for Georis Winery (no relation...maybe) has released the
second chapter of his personal label,
Madeleine.
Last April Fool's day, I received what seemed to be a nicely written, yet rather surprisingly nifty wine event invite in my inbox asking if I'd like to meet with Laurent Sauvage, winemaker for the leading family of wines from the
Languedoc in the South of
France,
Robert Skalli Wines. We were to meet with Laurent at
CAV, the outstanding wine bar and restaurant along Market in the
Opera District of San Francisco (and part-owned by none other than
Doug Cook (
Twitter), founder of
Able Grape).
In the year of their 20th anniversary,
St. Supéry Vineyards & Winery (
Twitter) hosted the 2nd Wine Bloggers Forum (WBF) at their beautiful Estate in
Rutherford,
Napa Valley,
California on Saturday, 04/04/09. The event continued the spirit of intimate and collaborative blogger and industry interaction that was first started as an offshoot of the
WBC that debuted last year. The
first WBF was at
Hahn Family Estates in their
Napa business offices and perfectly organized by the incomparable
Lisa de Bruin (
Twitter). This latest edition was organized by Lesley Keffer Russell (
Twitter), VP of Marketing and Sales at
St. Supéry.
The kind folks at Icon Estates have been worried about all of us out here in US wine-drinker land. They realized back in March that tax time is hard on all of us wine grunts, particularly this year when everyone is still reeling from watching their life savings (and future wine purchasing potential) shrivel by -40% and see a world filled with recession and job loss. They realized that everyone's day or night (or both!) can be brightened by wine, however and put together a great list of wines to have while stumbling through filling out your requisite tax forms: Tax Time Wines! Susan and co. at Icon kindly shot out some wine samples for various bloggers to try including the prolific 1WineDude (Twitter, Twitter2), Luscious Lush Thea (Twitter, Twitter2) and yours truly (Twitter), among others.
