WBC NA 2008: Day 3 Brief (P)reCap

Waking up on Day 3, Sunday, of the WBC was definitely harder to do than the the last! Late night Oak Room tastings in the Flamingo, plus even MORE shenanigans afterward with other kids including Anthony (Twitter) from Farmstead and El Jefe (Twitter) from Twisted Oak led this blogger to be feeling a wee bit tired in the morning!  But, a little water and more promises of wine can do wonders to a lad when he’s down!

The following is intended as a brief breakdown of the last half-day of the conference, whereby I’ll follow-up in the coming weeks with more posts that will detail virtually all of the events.

First up on the agenda was the innovative Unconference, where the bloggers take over!  Tables were setup around the room and each table had a blogger-defined topic to discuss for 15 minutes or so.  Since I, ahem, was not present to help decide those topics, I chose to go to Table 74, the Organic Flow table.  Here we discussed whatever topics might arise and, courtesy of Lenn (Twitter) of Lenndevours, we decided that it was time (somewhere in the world) to try some more wine!  Lenn had a bunch of leftover New York wine and we proceeded to open those suckers up!  I mainly stuck with the ’07 Rooster Hill Finger Lakes Dry Riesling.  I found it to be a pretty good example of the varietal, with very crisp and dry peach and pear aromas and flavors.

Following the Unconference, I suddenly realized that it was time to check out and madly dashed back to the room to pack.  That squared away, I strolled back to the main part of the conference and proceeded into the final lunch and tasting, the Luxe Sonoma Tasting. This was a chance for (mainly) smaller Sonoma wineries to show their wares.  It included wineries such as Flowers, Siduri, Blue Rock, Jordan, and Montemaggiore.  It also included one of my favorite small producers from this valley, Medlock Ames.

My palate was introduced to Medlock Ames at the Wine 2.0 event, New Release Only, last November. There I tasted their ’03 Bell Mountain Cab, a tremendously good wine, one of the few 5/5 stars that I have ever given.  Chris Medlock (or was it Ames?) was pouring their soon-to-be-released ’04 Cab and it is another absolute stunner.  Just as with the ’03, this had a phenomenal balance and was deeply complex, with various shades of fruit, silky but strong tannins and great acidity.  What a beautiful wine.

Last up on the day and weekend’s activities was the secret rendezvous at the Wine Spies party, a few miles down the road.  This was being put on in conjunction with Cruvee (my Cruvee profile) and intended to broaden the blogger knowledge about the two wine sites and particularly, Levendi Winery.

Alas, I had to meet the Lady in the East Bay for yet another event that weekend and I headed out and back to the real world. I am still having trouble comprehending the incredible time that I had at this event…it was just so life-changing and surreal that it’s a bit hard to believe that I actually attended such a brilliant weekend in the sunny Fall, there in the Sonoma Valley.

I can’t thank the organizers enough! Joel Vincent (Twitter) from Open Wine Consortium and Allan Wright from Zephyr Adventures did an unreal job of pulling this together in just a few months.  Thank you both, as well as all of the great sponsers!  Look forward to many more posts in the coming weeks that will go into more detail about the many events that I attended this past weekend.

As always, if you’d like to list the wines that I tasted at the WBC in your own WineLog, they are all tagged with “WBC2008NA“.  A couple of them are listed below.  Enjoy and please leave a comment telling me about your own WBC or wine-related experiences of late!

Rooster Hill Finger Lakes Dry Riesling 2007

Medlock Ames Alexander Valley Bell Mountain Vineyard Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 2004