The reach and influence of wine bloggers and wine social media mavens have exploded over the last couple of years, particularly in the last 12 months. Major wine critics have
have noticed and responded,
wineries and all three tiers of the wine business oligarchy have also taken notice and begun to capitalize on that influence (or are already playing catchup). The recent exhaustive and outstanding industry whitepaper by
VinTank,
Wine & Social Media is the first to encapsulate and quantify this influence and serves as a very important reference for these interactions between wine business, their consumers and the
key social media mediators (human and software/websites) of these connections. It is a groundbreaking accomplishment and a signpost of the rapid, continuing maturity of the wine social media sphere.
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.
I'm very excited to be attending the Wine 2.0 San Francisco Expo tonight at Crushpad! I first mentioned the event in my precap a week ago and since then, many more details have been added. I'll be blogging throughout the event in the WineLog.net sponsered Bloggers' Lounge, that the WineTwo folks have again provided for this event (thanks Cornelius, Smoke & Co!). Watch this space for further details and updates through to 10pm tonight!
