Le Wine Buffs Survive Manhattan (and so does the city)

So as it turns out, New York is a pretty damn cool place!  My first time in NYC was filled with as much sightseeing, vino networking, shopping, eating and drinking as one could possibly fit into 3.5 days.  I was in the city for the first time on another adventure as Le Wine Buff for the Bordeaux Wine Council (CIVB)’s Enjoy Bordeaux campaign, on a fully paid business trip.  While the point of the trip was to attend the Snooth & Ziff Davis TechEnology event and talk about the full awesomeness of affordable Bordeaux wine alongside my LWB colleagues, I was determined to experience as much NYC as I could handle…and I succeeded.

Held at the new digital & design campus General Assembly, we walked to the space in Union Square from our hotel, the Martinique.  Rob Moshein, Erin McGrath (Twitter) and I hoofed it pretty quickly actually, as we were running a little late to scope out the wines and discuss them with the servers.  Once there we met up with our fellow LWB in arms, Mollie Battenhouse (Twitter), Rebecca Chapa (Twitter) and Megan Wiig.

The event was just an awesome mob of mainly younger wine and tek-oriented vino enthusiasts, with a distinct flair for networking.  I was hoping to spend more time sipping the wines as they got more air, but I was all wrapped up in interesting discussions about fascinating new intersections between wine and technology.  Indeed, the only people missing were the minds behind that digital wine ingenues at VinTank.

Highlights from the event for me included meeting Dr. Andrew Waterhouse, a luminary in viticulture and enology research at my alma mater, UC Dvais.  He is one of the pioneers for research around resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant found in wine and the subject of one of my articles for Mutineer Magazine.  Another biggie was the newly invented Tweetelier (Twitter) for that particular event, in fact!  Created by members of CreativeFeed, the creative minds behind Enjoy Bordeaux.  You attach the little transmitter to a bottle and setup the radio receiver along with the software and then BLAMMO, a unique tweet each time a bottle is poured during your event.  Simple, yet awesome.  The last highlight was the afterparty dinner at craft, Tom Colicchio‘s flagship restaurant, he of Top Chef fame.  It was another epic, 3+ hour long dinner, quite reminiscent of our meals while together in Bordeaux last summer. It was a tremendous meal and completely lived up to the hype. Yum!

The rest of my time in the big city was spent tearing around trying to see and taste as much of Manhattan as possible and to find the appropriate gift for the Lady.  This involved lots of coffee in small places, beautiful silence at the Public Library, oysters and bubbly with Rob at Grand Central Station, drinks in a oversized library and green-lit escalator and drizzly rain with mind-blowing lighting effects in Times Square.  Very good times and I left with a deep appreciation of the subway and taxi system of the Big Apple.

Very good times and I can’t wait to go back to judge the 2011 Today’s Bordeaux competition and select the new Top 100 Affordable Bordeaux in June.  Cheers!

As Le Wine Buff for EnjoyBordeaux.com, I am paid a nominal fee for most of my participation.  I also receive free wine samples and my participation on this trip is courtesy of the CIVB.