My Twitter Taste Live “LIFE”

I thought it would be nice to add some of my experiences as a export director for a winery about this new trend called Twitter Taste Live, which has become part of my twitter tasting life!

It started on the 29th of October, 2008, in Boston with binendwine and Craig himself leading the show. Exactly a month later, on the 29th of November, a new twitter friend Weiguokong, better known as Chinewinelover, organized the first Chinese #ttl in the city Guangzhou. In the first two #ttl tastings I could be present myself.

This first Chinese wine tasting, was followed by a second, where our wines participated in the second #ttl in China in Shanghai. Now, as of yesterday, our CVP 2007 was one of the wines participating in the #ttl in London.

Four completely different kinds of  wine tastings thanks to Twitter. This is something the wine world should pay attention to, not because it was casavides participating, but because twitter changes the way small wineries like ours can do international wine tastings. It opens up a new world, and I predict many wineries will have to welcome this form of web 2.0 wine tastings whether they want to or not.  Wineries who don’t pay attention to this new trend are missing out not only on new business opportunities, but also some serious FUN. Within a few years, every tasting will have a virtual component, because even if the winery is not initiating virtual events, the participants will, most likely without asking for permission.

As a small winery, these tastings are worth experiencing, even if the direct results from a commercial point of view are not that obvious. Nevertheless, each and every tasting I’ve participated in has resulted into new leads, new projects and new friends. I am sending samples to importers I’ve never heard of prior to these tastings, not to mention the enormous amount of free publicity through blogs, twitter, and even in a local newspaper.

Check out the posts on:

wine conversation1, blog meetup, wine conversation2, flickr photos london, flickr photos london 2,

Twitter and #ttl show that wine tastings can combine real consumers tastings wines with the virtual presence of the wine producer. This is great, even if you can’t take a way a possible language barrier. Consumers meeting wine producers is the goal, and this is just the beginning. I’m curious to see how wine tastings will take place in a few years from now…

See you on Twitter!

Emilio

November INTERWINE and Wine bloggers tasting in China, Guangzhou

It started as something unexpected. I was exploring the Chinese wine websites and blogs, as a part of my market study for my upcoming trip to Guangzhou, where la casa de las vides will participate at the INTERWINE wine fair. As I asked around on twitter about a wine bloggers in China, weiguokong, a Chinese wine blogger offered me his help to set up a tasting.

I am writing this at the airport of Charles de Gaulle where waiting for 4 hours in terminal 2E is not my favourite way to spend my time. I was glad to find a good internet connection here, although the French keyboard is difficult to zrite on, you see, I cqn0t find the q, the , qnd the w and the z are qlzays turned qround, but qpqrt fro, thqt it)s ok, i guess:

So back to typing with two fingers and some extra attention to my keyboard, tomorrow 26 November I will arrive in Guangzhou, where on 27 to 29 November the INTERWINE Canton wine fair takes place.

I know it will be very difficult to enter the Chinese market, and this fair will be tough one for our wines. Nevertheless it is important, especially now, to keep on investigating and trying to make new contacts.

As an extra event Casavides will organise an extra tasting on Friday evening especially for wine bloggers in China as a way to get new and above all different contacts. Last month in Boston a similar tasting resulted in has some great contacts, and in the end it doesn`t really cost me a lot of extra effort to open a few bottles and taste the wines in a downtown restaurant. Actually I love opening our wines, the more the better, especially for those who never before tasted our wines before.

I was told that there would be somebody to translate for me from english to chinese, because I have not been able to find the pomegranatephone yet in the stores here in Paris

The tasting has been prepared by CHINEWINELOVER. To know is behind this carefully selected name: check chinewinelover on twitter on 29 November (chinese time), and his blog http://blog.sina.com.cn/tigerlikewine to find out who Weiguokong, the most active Chinese wine blogger is.

I will publish some INTERWINE AND BLOGGERS TASTING photos soon on this blog!

How Social Media and Social Networking Has Helped Wine Exports in Valencia, Spain

Late August 2008, La Casa de las Vides introduced its blog under the name Casavides.com. The idea of the blog was to create a marketing tool for the export department.  And by default, as a blog is a marketing tool, we also agreed to add all the necessary Web 2.0 tools as well, such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Dopplr, OWC, Linked in, Youtube, Delicious etc.

So, how did we use the various Web 2.0 tools to export our wines? And have we, as a winery, seen any results in the past 3 months? I am writing this post to evaluate my own choice in involving an entire winery in a Web 2.0 strategy that is starting to become a part of our daily life. I am almost 40 now, and I am stuck in between the enthusiasm for Web 2.0 and the lack of knowledge about it to be 100% sure how Web 2.0 works best for me. Convinced as I am to follow the guidelines as lined out in Catavino’s pdf Social media for wineries, I have committed myself to welcome just about everything that comes along my Web 2.0 path. In three months, the strategy has had its ups and downs, like who is writing what post and when and above all why? Well, we do know why, in theory I mean, but our lack of discipline and not having our priorities straight is probably keeping us from doing the things we have to do. This post is about what happened over the last three months at La Casa de las Vides and how Web 2.0 has helped us to export our wines?

In short, we are not exporting yet! Zero, niente, nada, nichts, rien du tout. BUT we do have some very interesting leads, and many of them came through the web 2.0 tools I use!

Do you want to know how? read on…

Introduction at EWBC 2008

The unique event that helped get started was without any doubt the European Wine Bloggers Conference. In one weekend, I received enough contacts to get started on Facebook, OWC and Twitter at the same time. Without all of these invaluable contacts I made there, I probably wouldn’t have had the feedback and comments I needed to get me focused on all these tools.

TWITTER

Twitter was probably the tool I was most obsessed with. In the first weeks, I was watching every single message from everyone I was following. After a while, I understood that life goes on, even if I don’t follow Twitter on a minute by minute basis. However, my astonishment regarding the amount of information coming at me at once, and the dynamics behind it to have a conversation in 5 continents at the same time, was something inconceivable for this export director till now. Now after more than 400 tweets, I use twitter in a more moderate way. I do follow some of the interesting links some leave in their tweets. One of the better posts I read lately came from Wine Brands. Twitter now has become a source of information, a place to hang out, and a great way to get response, like when I introduced a new label for our new casavides 2008 wines. Or the twitter wine box of Slijterijmeisje in Holland who interviewed me at a wine fair Megavino in Brussels, and who will now put some samples of our wines in her Twitterwinebox. Twitterwineblox is an idea that Petra de Boevere put into practice when she discovered that she could get more clients through twitter offering them a six wines in a box that can only be ordered through twitter on her account (slijterijmeisje).

Meisje van de Slijterij meets Emilio Saez van Eerd from Slijterijmeisje on Vimeo.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

During the  month of September, I spent many free hours on checking out all the profiles on OWC, Linked in, Facebook, of interesting people, directly or indirectly engaged in the wine industry. I am still amazed how easy it is to contact people through these social networks. Off course, as an export director, my job is to sell wine.

I used to go wine fairs to try to meet up with importers. Mailings, cold calls, whatever was necessary to get attention, I did it. In general if you are doing a good job, the average response on those mailings would be  around 5% - 10%.  My experience after many wine fairs is that a good wine fair gives you more or less 25 leads, of which 10 are really interested, and if you are lucky, one or two want to start working with you. For that you have to wait until the fair, be lucky and have patience.

Now, with social networks the amount of interesting contacts I got through the above mentioned Web 2.0 tools are much more interesting than the few contacts you can get from a wine fair.  First of all, if you connect with somebody through a network, you already share two of the same interests; the social network itself AND wine. Whereas on a wine fair you only have wine in common. The fact that you both belong to a new and exciting network, makes the cnnection even stronger, because from both sides you want the networks to give you results (why else do you spend time on the social networks?)

The second advantage is that through a social network the communication is relaxed, without the pressure of the wine fair, where most of the visitors already have to work down a list of producers they want to meet, before they want to spend time on you.

The third benefit is that you can be “direct”. You get direct questions and answers if you are both online. In this sense social networks are not less personal, especially if you imagine that you can send al the relevant information about the winery and wines as you speak to each other, share a video of the winery, send technical details, show tasting results on tasting note sites. No way that you can do this on a wine fair. But also for my own information as an export director, I want to know who I am really talking to, and that I don’t waste my time talking to somebody who pretends to be bigger. Internet gives you normally enough information to get a good first impression. No information, or a crappy website, is a serious warning for me. I do spent quite some time on checking out an importer’s website or blog, if he has one (although, until now I haven’t seen many importers with a blog. Does anybody know why importers don’t have blogs?)

In my free time I often follow links and comments through OWC, facebook and linked in, and I found some valuable information read between the lines in the comments of for example linkedin answers and questions section. If an importer is looking for a wine, or an exporter offers his wines, have a look at the comments!

I trust that there are  much more advantages I did not descirbe here! Feel free to add them in the comments.

DOPPLR

The tool that convinced me less, until now is Dopplr, not because of the philosophy of the site, but more because of I don’t find other dopplr users as easily as I find people on twitter, facebook or OWC. For me, Web 2.0 starts when I travel. On Dopplr, though, I can’t find how to use the site on a more frequent basis. I have tried out a few things (read the post about dopplr here), but am still researching Dopplr’s best use. Where Dopplr has helped me to change my perspective is the way in which I view travel.  I now travel around the world with an easy to reach new goal: I force myself to open at least one bottle of my own wine during a trip to anywhere, and share that bottle with bloggers, any blogger, that I can meet through any Web 2.0 tool.

Reflection on Dopplr: probably I need to give it more time, and be more active myself. Check out my next trip to China and Singapore

Web 2.0 EXAMPLES

This led to the best example of how Web 2.0 tools has aided me as a wine exporter: the Casa Vides tasting in Boston. I try to imagine how it must have been in the pre Web 2.0 era to organize this type of event. It probally would have taken years. We (I did not do this all by myself) organized a tasting in Boston only 2 weeks before I went to the US. How did we do this? Simple!

I was looking for Boston bloggers on Twitter, and within seconds, I got a response. Check out “how” through this Boston tasting post I wrote in October.  In the end, two great posts were written about the Casa Vides Boston Bloggers Tasting. One by the hand of Passionatefoodie and the second by Bloviatrix

Casavides got a lot of attention on twitter through many posts, we did a Twitter Tasting Live thanks to Binends. It went all so fast, and being a Web 2.0 dummy, I couldn’t understand the impact at the moment itself.

Bloggers tasting: THE RESULTS

For me, the blogger’s tasting was a success by itself, because it received some great feedback from people stemming from different backgrounds. Food, media, marketing, wine, sales, retail, etc. Put this mix together and you receive more information than you can process.

My surprise was even bigger when I got an e-mail from a major Boston wine importer, who contacted me two weeks afterward. He was seriously interested in our wines after hearing about the tasting notes from one of the participants.

Other examples include a trip we did to Ireland with Bubbelbrothers, a.ka. the blogging wine importer. I met Julian through an interesting conversation last year about undisclosing the process of exporting wines through internet, when I did some blogging for Tintoralba, another Spanish wine producer with a blog.  Actually this conversation even got the attention of some wine marketers in Spain. Julian was so kind to invite some Cork based bloggers and clients for a tasting and the effect of this gathering was absolutely felt at the winery.

It’s been one month after the tasting in Boston, and three months after the introduction of the blog. I assume that you would like to see some concrete results. So does my boss! We can’t live from the great feedback we get, do we? More important questions have to be answered soon like, how many bottles were sold this month? When is the importer going to order at all? etc etc.

It’s kind of contradictory that the most non Web 2.0 activity, the wine fair itself, in a way is the driving force behind my trips, which allow me to do some Web 2.0 activities along the way, like blogger’s tastings. Costs for these extra Web 2.0 activities are almost zero, taking into account that the two major costs items, the trip to the country and sending samples are counted as costs for the wine fair. And although Web 2.0 something I almost do in my own time, let’s after or before working hours. So yes you must like to give up hanging out with friends and family, or do as we did and unplug the tv. But hey, if that means that your (net)working time is becoming more effective and fun, then it makes a lot of sense.

So, my conclusion as a export director for now is that Web 2.0 has not yet taken over my non Web 2.0 activities, but it sure helps me do my job better, quicker, directer, and above all, with more fun.  And as I feel we have so much more to tell and to share, the whole Casa Vides team is getting more and more involved in what they are doing on a daily basis. Videos and photos, stories and comments has makes us realise how lucky we are that we can work with wine, every day!

Comments are more than welcome.

Keep you posted about our interesting discoveries about using Web 2.0 for wine exports!

Hasta luego

Emilio

Free Advise on How to Use the José Peñin Spanish Wine Guide

José Peñin is the Robert Parker of Spain, and many wine importers around the world, are using his guide to search for new and exciting Spanish wines. In my distant past, when I was wine agent, I used Peñin’s wine guide a lot.  Many of the Spanish wines I worked with, I first spotted in this thick green book that over time has become a Spanish wine bible with more than 8,500 tasted wines, 13,500 references, and 2,900 wineries.

At the end of the book, on page 1,325 of the 2009 edition, there is a chapter called, Las Mejores Compras, or Best Buys. Now, this is the chapter you should pay close attention to if you want to learn which wines are available at a very competitive price. Take into account that most prices are winery prices - meaning the price you pay when you buy the wine at the winery. Normally, the wines are slightly higher priced when you buy them at any store. Wines listed in this chapter are rated with 5 stars, which stands for extraordinary Quality Price Ratio or QPR.

You will find 4 wines scored at 94 points priced at 5,90 euros on the low end and up to 8 euros on the high end. And guess what style all of these wines fall in? Delicious Sherry wines! This explains why I am such a sherry freak

At 93 points and priced only 6,95 euros is the first red wine made with Monastrell from the DO Alicante called Beryna, from our friends in VIllena, Bodegas Bernabe Navarro. The first white dry wine can be found at 7,50 euros with 93 points, is the Etim Garnacha Blanca Verema Tardana 2006 from Agricola Falset Marça in the DO Montsant. And to make this short list complete, the most attractive rosé is the Gran Feudo rosado 2007 from Chivite from DO Navarra at 3,50 euros with 91 points.

On page 1311, the best wines per region are mentioned. As Casavides makes wines in D.O. Valencia, I’ll take this region as an example. The top three wines made in DO Valencia, an emerging wine area in the same league as Alicante and Montsant, we find Maduresa 93 points at 16 euros and Les Alcusses with 91 points at 8 euros made by Pablo Calatyud from Celler Roure.  Venta del Puerto made by Bodega La Viña also scored 91 points and costs 9 euros.

Normally these so called “top wines” are already selling abroad in many countries, or are made in such small quantities that you have to beg for the wines. But sometimes, just below the top wines, you find the extraordinary 90 point wines. And if you are lucky, some of these wines are new on the market, and if you are even luckier, the whole winery is new to the market. So just because you know how to use the Peñin Guide well, you might be able to spot the newest wines from the most emerging areas in Spain.

Let’s take the 90 point wines in Valencia.

Aculius 2006 tinto, Angosto 2006 tinto, Megala 2005 tinto, Pasamonte 2005 tinto, Rafael Cambra 2006 tinto, Sueño de Megala 2005 tinto, Trilogia 2006 tinto, Uva d’or Moscatel, Venta del Puerto 18 vendimia sel. 2005 tinto.  Nine wines in total, 8 of them are red wines, and all scored 90 points. These are worth trying your luck if you can find them. But I can already promise you that with the Aculius, the chances that we are exporting to your country is almost zero, because we started to export our wines just 2 months ago for the first time.

Then, if you want to look up the winery, for example “La Casa de las Vides”, you can go the winery page and get an overall picture of what they are producing. How many wines are rated as best buys? The wineries with a whole range of 5 star wines and with consistently high points, are usually the most interesting ones. These are the wineries worth following, or even worth asking samples from.

One thing though that is missing in the Peñin guide is an overview of the last 3 years to compare the previous vintages of the same wine. There are enough guides that offer this valuable piece information, and to be honest, opening three or four of these dense books does require some extra skills and space on your desk.

Good luck with your search for your next top Spanish wine!

Hasta luego

Emilio Saez van Eerd

Twitter for Wine Producers

Twitter is becoming more and more accepted. I saw that even BBC and CNN uses Twitter for the comments from voters to back up the election news. So it most likely won’t take long before Twitter will show up for other mass media activities.

Maybe twittertastelive.com is not a mass media thing, but it certainly will an important role in the wine sector. And the good thing is that the traditional printed media starts to admit it as well. See photo from article in Wine Enthusiast. So I guess twitter and internet marketing are becoming a part of today’s reality.

I just hope it helps to break down the wall between producers and consumers, as I experienced it during a blogger’s tasting at Melissa’s Main street Bistro, a nice little restaurant in Stoneham.

Yesterday’s tasting of Casa Vides wines was a great way to get some honest feedback from my Boston blogger friends.  11 bloggers participated together with several other bloggers in the world from the US,  China, Spain, the Netherlands to name just a few countries, who watched the livestream set up by binendswine.

We tasted four wines. The white Vallblanca 2007 with Verdil, Macabeo and Gewürztraminer. This wine was a surprise for most of the bloggers.  Verdil is a grape that is produced by only a handful of producers in Southern Valencia. And the Gewürztraminer certainly gives the Verdil what it needs to become extra attractive. The blue bottle conversation was a definite NO ,in favor of a white or green bottle. The shape (Rhine style) was perceived as attractive.

The rosé Rosa Rosae 2007, a combination of Garnacha and…no not syrah, but Cabernet Sauvignon to give it structure. I really have high hopes for this wine, as I am a big rosé lover.

Both the white and the rose will be priced around 10 to 11 dollars in the US

Third wine is the CVP (Roman/Latin way) or CUP 2007 red. Here Syrah does play an important role as part of a  50/50 blend of Syrah and Tempranillo and is doing very well in Valencia. With 6 months of oak, it is still a fruit driven wine.  At the tasting, this red was a bit too young to drink, but it certainly showed a lot of potential. This wine will sell for around 15 dollars.

The Aculius was the best wine of the evening, according to most bloggers. Although I personally think this wine still needs some time to develop, it is a great blend of Tempranillo, Syrah and Merlot with an expected price level of around 18 to 20 dollars.

It was great to get all the feedback on the wines. As a export director of a fairly new winery (2008 is the 4th harvest), Casavides is eager to get as much feedback as possible from wine professionals and wine lovers around the world. As their Export Director, I have to transmit this feedback to Ana Martin, our wine maker, and Fran, the owner of the winery, currently studying wine at the University of Orihuela (Alicante).

I was very pleased to receive some great comments, and it confirmed my trust and belief that the wines of Casavides have some good possibilities in the export market. Maybe the presentation doesn’t convince all bloggers at the tasting and wine professionals I talked to at the Miami Wine Fair, which is why I decided to show the latest design. Some OOOHs and AAAHs again confirmed that Casavides certainly is going into the right direction.  See photo new wine labels white-rose-red above.

Thanks Craig of Binendswine for the effort to organize this TTL in just a few days,

Thanks Leslie for initiating this tasting in Boston. If it wasn’t for your first reaction, this tasting could have taken place somewhere else.

Thanks Richard for bringing me back to the hotel!

Thanks all other bloggers for your great comments!

Thanks to all watchers for staying up that late, if you were in Europe, for waking up early in China.

And last but not least A Big thanks for Ryan and Gabriella, who are guiding me and protect me from doing anything stupid on the web.

Oh yes, if you are a wine importer and you stumble across this post, even if this post is already some months old, feel free to contact me. Casavides is still looking for importers and distributors. ( What do you expect, we started just 2 months ago to export our wines!)

Hasta luego

Emilio

Coming Up: Miami & Boston Blogger Wine Tastings

In a previous post, I mentioned the possibility of hosting some blogger wine tastings on my trips abroad. Here is the follow up:

Next week, I will fly to Miami. The Miami WIne Fair has collaborated with IBERWINE, which has attracted quite a few Spanish wineries that will be present in Miami from 25 to 27 October. It will be Casa Vides first trip to the US with our wines. Our aim is clear: to find serious wine importers who want to import our wines. OK, so the wine fair is nice to meet importers, but why should you care? What’s important for you to know as a blogger is what I am doing when I am NOT at the wine fair.

I think it would be great to do some bloggers tastings like the one I did three weeks ago on my trip to Cork (Ireland) or in Valencia at Enopata.

Wouldn’t it be fun to have at least one in Miami on the 25 or 27 October?

IMPORTANT: If you are a blogger and like to taste some Spanish wines from Valencia in Miami, please contact me, I am still open to any suggestion for the Miami Tasting.

The second blogger wine tasting will be held in Boston, although preparations are still in progress. Why Boston?

Thanks to Twitter some bloggers (note: not only wine bloggers) have showed interest to meet up in an informal way to taste our wines and have fun talking about wine and drinking it. The place and the hour will soon be announced, and I’ll be sure to bring along at least a Valencian rosé and a red wine to taste.

If you read this and you are interested in meeting with me, please do contact me with a comment below.

My only concern is that the laws in the US will make it too difficult for me to ship the wines to Boston. I can use some help from somebody in Boston to guide me how to get my wines there, because it is incredible how many rules each US  state invents to make things more difficult for wine exporters to get their wine samples into the US. Maybe I will have to share my experience with you after my US trip, and dedicate a post to “how you get your wines to the US”.

Follow casavides on twitter and stay tuned. Maybe the next bloggers tasting will be held in your town.

Saludos

Emilio Saez van Eerd

Dopplr me and let’s taste some wine soon!

I just read a great post about Dopplr from Ryan Opaz of Catavino. He claims that every (wine) export manager should use Dopplr, and I totally agree with him. Of all the tools on internet, I know Dopplr is probably one of the most interesting ones for people who travel a considerable amount like me.

Dopplr is a tool that can be used to meet people in cities where you are traveling to.  Thanks to Dopplr, you can see who’s going to the same events, same cities, and even the same hotel as you are.  So it’s perfect way to keep in touch with people you know on your trip abroad. Plus, they not only explain the tool in a very simple, and user-friendly way, but the actual use of it is equally painless. The effort that’s required is that you discipline yourself to use it.

I am an export manager, I blog, and now I am trying out Dopplr as well.

One of the great things of being an export director for a winery is that you always have wine in your neighborhood (or “close by”), especially when you travel. When a wine export manager travels to a client, a wine fair or a tasting, normally he takes along a few bottles extra, just in case. But one thing a wine export manager hates to do is to bring unopened wine bottles back home.

Important tip for bloggers who like wine!

What bloggers should know about a wine export manager who travels, because there is a good chance that he/she has some extra bottles on hand. So what happens if I’m interested in meeting up with a few wine bloggers, or if a few bloggers want to meet me? Nothing easier than a short message saying, “Hi Emilio, I see you are in London. Why don’t you come over with a bottle of your wine and we’ll pair it with some food”.  Everybody who travels has to eat, don’t they? And eating alone can be very unpleasant sometimes. So, night time, after working hours, is the perfect time to meet each other, anywhere.

I will be the Mr. Nice Guy that brings along some great wines, just so that we can chat about wine together. I think this is a much more attractive alternative than sitting alone in your hotel room watching a stupid movie you actually don’t want to see anyhow.

So I invite bloggers around the world, traveling or not, to following me through Dopplr. And If you share your Dopplr with me, or send me a message that you are interested to meet up on one of my next travels, please let me know, and I guarantee you a bottle of our wine - assuming that I have some with me. If not, we will send a sample afterward.

See my dopplr here: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/Emilio

And do contact me.

Cheers

Emilio

The pioneers of the European wine bloggers tasting

The wine bloggers conference gave me a real boost to get started with my blog.

What did I expect from the European Wine Bloggers Conference? Not much and everything at the same time. After the conference, I find that I am still a little bit confused about the whole blogging thing. I know that a blog does not guarantee me anything from a commercial point of view. It will, without any doubt, cost me time, which I will not have as I will be traveling a lot. Nobody here in Europe seems to care about it, and those who do are labeled a “geek”. So where does that leave me? I am not a geek - or am I ? - and I don’t get  much out if it, at least not in the short term, and my clients don’t care at this point, as I haven’t posted anything (yet). So why do I want to blog, spend precious time, money and energy, WHY?

I think I got the answer in Logroño!

I guess it is the same as with learning about wine. When you start you get enthusiastic about it. Then you really need to go into it to fully understand all the concepts. I remember when I was studying wine, I had some moments when I thought: “I am never going to learn everything about wine”. But when I found myself talking to winemakers a few years later at wine fairs or tastings and contributing to detailed wine conversations, I must admit that I have come a pretty long way.  Something similar, I hope, will happen with wine blogging. As a new wine blogger, I’m really excited about my own blog, casavides.com. The more I get into it, and the EWBC helped a lot, the more I know I have to learn more everyday. But in the end, I hope I will be able to say that blogging has become a part of my way of working, that many of my new contacts are made through my own or other bloggers´blogs.

Of course, it was great to meet a few more wine bloggers in person, but what I like the most from the conference was the drive behind them. Some are doing some amazing technical things on the Internet like Doug from ablegrape and the guys from adegga. Others are completely focused on their own winery, one country, or one region, a grape, whatever. In the end, what counted was that approximately 40 bloggers from Europe gathered to exchange experiences on how to use a blog to communicate wine and wine culture. It was one of the most dynamic get togethers in the wine world I have ever had.

For me the big question remains: how will the blog casavides.com help me to get our brand known in the big world, and how will its presence be translated into sales. On the Internet, I am pretty sure I know what to do to get better rankings etc., especially after a few sessions at the conference when I heard some pretty interesting things about ratings, micro retailing, and so on. But will that help me to get better known in the “real world”? Of course, I will talk about my winery, and about wine from Valencia and Spain, and I will even talk about other wines on my page - although I still don’t know how to sell this to the owners of the winery. They probably think I am the crazy guy running around with the camera all day, asking them if they have a good story.

I guess all bloggers are pioneers, which is probably the best part of the conference: sitting together with fellow passionate pioneers knowing that what we do will make a difference.

Hasta luego

Emilio