The
2nd Annual North American Wine Bloggers' Conference is almost here, starting tomorrow! It is again at the Flamingo in Santa Rosa, CA, deep in the
Sonoma Valley. Last year's inaugural conference exploded the reach and understanding of wine bloggers, wine & social media and their effect on the wine biz. It also had a
profound effect on myself and my own understanding of social media, blogs and wine. Starting things off, however is a pre-party at
Twisted Oak and downtown
Murphy's, courtesy of that crazy vinoman,
El Jefe, Jeff Stai (
Twitter)!
Making perhaps, one of the biggest viral marketing coups in the nascent
wine social mediasphere,
Murphy-Goode Winery in Healdsburg has blown up the interwebs with its
A Really Goode Job search and marketing campaign. The
basics are these:
- Live on the property in northern
Sonoma Valley in Healdsburg in a private home.
- Work by using all means of social media to promote
Murphy-Goode and its wine and the whole of
Sonoma County with the provided camera video camera, handheld device and/or smartphone. You'll "need" to taste hundreds of wines for free and eat all over the Valley, as well...shucks.
- Get paid 10K/month for a 6 month contract.
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).
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!
