Academy of Wine Communications-FLX: February Meeting this Thursday, 2/25/10

Update: February meeting canceled due to winter storm warning for the region.  We’re working on setting up our next meeting for Thursday, 3/18/10.  Watch here for more details. February’s meeting of the Finger Lakes Chapter of the Academy of Wine Communications will be held on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at Three Brothers Wineries & Estates [...]

Source: http://familylovewine.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/awc-meeting-this-thursday-22510/

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Who Will Be The First Wine Blogger Who Raps?

My morning routine starts with visits to my various email accounts and concludes with a quick scan of my Winecast Gmail. If I have the time, I sometimes open my Google Reader to see what blog posts have come in overnight. This morning I stopped in my tracks at a post on Vinography which pointed [...]

Who Will Be The First Wine Blogger Who Raps? originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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Wine Branding Disruption

In an effort to broaden our communication channels, Robert and I are back with a first podcast for some time, this time for the new Wine Conversation. In this episode we talk about an exciting project we have lined up for the Access Zone at the London International Wine Fair. Called “Disrupt”, the idea is [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheWineConversation/~3/QoXvZRDrFF4/

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Rockin? at Wine & Cars

Everyone had a great time at Wine & Cars Under the Stars last weekend. Don’t believe me? Check out the video: The evening was a great success, netting nearly $50,000 for the foundations at Fairplex and their programs. If you missed Wine & Cars, you can taste the award-winning wines of the Los Angeles International [...]

Source: http://blogs.fairplex.com/blog/wine/?p=100

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Great advertising is about message, not product

Many of my readers are not from the the USA, so may not have seen this advert (unless they happen to love American Football) but take 2 minutes and 3 seconds to watch this Superbowl advert: Now, think back about how often the logo, the car itself or anything recognisable as “the product” were shown. [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheWineConversation/~3/NhZTCI9AzCA/

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Stop and Smell the Wine

With the New Year and winter’s recalcitrance toward resolutions now giving way to spring and new life, I’ve been contemplating a wine-related information makeover.

Perhaps not so much, “Out with the old, in with the new” as simply an editing of the wine-related information I consume, which is to say:  There’s a lot of it and I need less of it.  It’s a diet, perhaps.

Hastened by the online wine world where over the last five years wine content has become free, easy and inexhaustible, a wine enthusiast can get sucked into a vortex of infinite information that is unwittingly counter to their ethos.

Simply, one morning, under the glare of ashen bathroom lighting, the wine boor that we all hate so much might be staring back at us in the mirror.

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This past week, I knew I might be in too deep, stuck in the trees and not able to see the forest, when I traded emails with some fellow wine writer’s.  The initial query obtusely referenced Antonio Galloni and his new for-profit venture into conducting events as an adjunct to his wine criticism at the Wine Advocate.

“Huh?” You might say with this tidbit entirely missing your radar.  And, that’s exactly my point. 

Less than two months ago a mention of Antonio Galloni would have registered little more than a furtive calculation against the mental file. “Innocuous” would have been an apropos adjective for Galloni.  Now, weeks later, Galloni, Robert Parker, Jr.’s successor, is the subject of top-of-mind conversation based on an interview with wine writer Mike Steinberger at his Wine Diarist blog, which itself is barely two months old.  The reason?  Galloni has set-up a company called All Grapes Media, LLC that is facilitating winemaker dinners with readers of the Wine Advocate (WA) and select wineries that have been reviewed by Galloni and WA.

This has raised questions anew about ethics …

While not the subject of this post per se, what struck me about my email exchange was that all parties on the email knew about this VERY minor revelation.

Regrettably, this smallest of details, which has zero implication on the enjoyment of wine, any wine, is something that people pay attention to, and even postulate about as a frame of reference.

I’m as guilty as anybody.

Yet, we all control our decisions.  Just as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously said, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are” the information we consume says just as much about who we are.

In the meantime, as we wax to drama, and let wine wane, we are living in a Golden Age of the drop – wine that is universally lauded and accessibly priced.  On the market today a wine enthusiast can access a nearly unlimited supply of not just information, but wine, glorious wine.  The ’07 Cabernet vintage from Napa is an all-time great.  The ’09 Rieslings from Germany are stellar.  The ’08 Pinots from Oregon are of incredible quality.

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These are all available to the wine lover who wants to do a bit of research and seek them out.

So, instead of getting into the proverbial weeds of very small wine-related detail, I’m taking just a small step back to enjoy this moment in time to use my information consumption habits to research and seek out wines, allocating some tax refund money to buying up a parcel of Napa Cabs, Oregon Pinot’s and German Rieslings for my cellar.

10-years hence, I won’t remember a small peccadillo about Antonio Galloni and some wine events, but I surely will remember when I had the foresight to buy up some wines that will pay me great dividends in enjoyment in the future.

You should consider doing the same.

Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/stop_and_smell_the_wine/

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New legislation threatens the diversity of New York?s wine market

Last week in the NYT, Eric Asimov highlighted the wine program at Nice Matin, a restaurant on the Upper West Side that has remarkable breadth of offerings, depth of vintages and sharp pricing. This apparent wine lover’s idyll was not always this way: only in the past few years have the owners built up the [...]

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