Sharing the Wealth the OWC way–part 1
Recently a joke made the rounds of conservative and Republican emails, blogs, and forums calling into question Obama’s ideas of redistributing the wealth by taking an Obama supporting server’s well earned tip and giving it to a homeless person outside the restaurant (here’s my post with the full version of this story).
I practiced a little Obama style redistribution of wine wealth myself in the past few days following the First WIne Bloggers conference hosted in part by the Open Wine Consortium (of which I am a new member).
First, on my way home, following the Sonoma County Luxe tasting (mmmmn, Jordan chardonay, mmmn, Siduri Keefer Ranch pinot noir!), I made a stop near UC Berkeley to see my wine appreciating nephew Kyle who lives in Lothlorien which is the kind of Berkeley style student cooperative living situation which we all assumed went out with the 60s and 70s. This is simply a place of legend. Here’s Kyle and some of his friends hanging out on the roof with its views from the Oakland Hills to the SF Bay.
Lothlorien
I’d never been there, even though Kyle’s lived at Lothlorien for over a year. So it was time to place the stories not to mention I was in great need of a triple espresso from Peet’s on Domingo nearby.
Lothlorien North and South more or less defy description. If I tried, we’d both be here all day and I still wouldn’t be close, so I’m not going to even try. It’s like a combination of Art City and homeless shelter. Besides, the point of this post isn’t about Lothlorien, but about sharing the wealth Obama style.
As you can imagine, at this time of the weekend, I had quite a collection of open bottles of wine in the car. Read more…
Wine, wine, wine & Alice too
“Wine, wine, wine–pass that bottle to me!” sing it to me, Sticks McGee with Brownie McGee helping out on guitar and vocals. Then on the flip side, “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water…”
After the two blogging sessions at the Wine Bloggers Conference, it was back to drinking with a tasting of Sonoma wines with well over 200 wines in the room and at least 30-40 wineries pouring.
I tried to save myself from temptation but I succumbed–and I dumped wine into the bucket too, sacriligious but absolutely necessary. I even saw folks carrying around small plastic cups for spitting into.
So instead of attempting any sort of catalogue, I will merely mention two small, memorable wineries with a limited selection poured by the passionate winemakers themselves: Enkidu and Verge. From the Enkidu website, I found that the origin or meaning of the name “Enkidu” comes from the oldest story ever written, the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story originated in Sumeria (Iraq) almost 4,000 years ago, which fittingly was the birthplace of wine. Enkidu, created by the gods, was the lover of land and protector of animals. He embodied strength and passion, with incredible bravery, and yet at times was truly fearful of unknown dangers.
Enkidu was told by the sacred slave: “Eat bread, oh, Enkidu! It is the fountain of life; drink the wine, it is the custom of the land.” Then Enkidu ate the bread till he was full, drank the wine, seven goblets…” http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab2.htm
How can you go wrong quoting Gilgamesh? Enkidu was also featured at the kickoff lunch at Kick Ranch–but I had barely left home to drive up there when that gathering was coming to a close, so I was pleased to get a chance to try a selection of their classy wines:
Verge Pours Syrah
When I asked people which wines they remembered from the event, several people mentioned being impressed with Verge (their table is pictured above; the photo came from their site). Here’s a quote from their manifesto:
Syrah, long in the shadow of the evil twins of greed and false devotion, Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, is hereby declared the world’s finest grape varietal with no second or equal.
Syrah, a vigorous vine indeed, must suffer and strain to produce great wines but can only do so when planted far from the likes of the fertile valley.
Syrah, when found on the outlying tracts of viticultural areas, in the hills, off the back roads, next to forests and the natural habitats of insects, mammals and fowl, on the fringe, is supremely good.
Syrah, when grown organically or biodynamically in this type of place, is intrinsically superior. Why continue the use of harmful agrichemicals?
I knew right away these were my kinda people! I certainly intend to keep track of what they are up to!
And instead of going on about Alice Feiring’s brief keynote at Sebastiani to her fellow “pot stirrers,” I will refer you to Tom Wark’s reverential post on his Fermentation blog “The Battle for Wine and How I Fell in Love with Alice Feiring.” I do intend to review her book sometime soon…
In fact, what I really want to talk about in this post is the after party! Read more…
Blog Tips: 2 Conferences, 2 Continents
We did more than drink wine at the First Annual Bloggers Conference.
Not much, admittedly, and it might not sound like it. We ate, certainly. Didn’t sleep much that’s for sure since that interfered with the drinking (excuse me) tasting of wine.
But Saturday afternoon we had two sessions focusing on blogging in the wine business with transportable ideas to other areas of blogging and three topics each to choose from:
1:30 PM Breakout Session I
Increasing Visitors to Your Blog (Flamingo Room)
Beyond Blogging – New Technologies and Social Media (Courtyard 1)
Wine Blogger Credibility (Courtyard 2)
2:45 PM Breakout Session II
Making Money from Your Blog (Flamingo Room)
Blogging For Your Wine Business (Courtyard 1)
Wine Blogger & Industry Interaction (Courtyard 2)
It took me a few minutes to collect myself and my laptop and my iced coffee after the drive back from Quivira so I was a bit late for the start of “Increasing Visitors to Your Blog” by Tom Wark’s Fermentation and Alder Yarrow of Vinography and arrived for number 6 of Tom’s Top 10 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Blog.
From my notes of Tom’s words with some of my commentary:
#6 BLOGROLLS:
why do you deserve to be on their blogroll? make sure they are on yours
email the dude—make a list of 100 blogs you want to be on
#7 look for non-wine blogs which might be interested in your post
major blogs—posting 30-40 a day will pick up your post if they can figure out how to–they are RAVENOUS for material…do you just email them? how do you hook them I wonder
#8 link baiting –creating a post which people will want to link to
use surveys, top 10 lists (controversial), interview w/heavyweight, Tom has the American Wine Blog Awards—take nominations, do strategic blogging
#9 answer every single comment
so that people see you’re engaged in your community—Alder says he can’t underscrore this enough –gotta repay that effort. And email. Say thank you—pay them back. Most traffics are those which generate conversation—and you have to participate.
#10 use social networking tools—
open wine consortium for example
Today there are maybe more blogs but there are more eyeballs, too, they point out.
From Alder:
1) blogroll—recipricol linking works until it doesn’t
he has 400-500 links! so he moved them to a singe page
2) writing good content is the #1 way to increase traffic and the only way that matters
3) understand how google works: it sucks up your site and looks for tags: description, keywords—to site and to the page, the title of page and tile of blog as well as text tells google what it’s about, pays attention to headers, what links w/in pointing out, and coming in tells how important (generates page rank 0-10 download google tool bar and it will show rank of pages visited—also on firefox plugin)
70% of traffic from search engines
4) be sure you are listed on various directories and search engines—submit to get listed
- consider: what you title your article is what google will think it is
- search google webmaster guidelines and follow them all
- sitemap??? WP? Xml doc for google to read
- rss fed—make sure you publish it (check–is mine?)
- email newsletter—subscribe with links to articles
- participate in blog events like wine blogging weds link baits
- make sure out going links are concise and complete
5) traffic doesn’t matter since you can’t make a living or quit your day job (read his post on his site)
6) so figure out your reasons why you do this—
- enjoy it
- to practice being a good writer–10,000 hours of practice in order to be competent—
- to prove you can do it
Essentially, to monetize your blog you will need to work your butt off selling ads yourself or with a dedicated sales team or by finding affiliates or doing contextual ads or by some other creative method which may not be invented yet… But there is money to be made, as Gary Vaynerchuk said in the opening address, and someone is going to be making it so why not you?
Mid-presentation I took a stroll and found the session by someone important from Stormhoek (but not Hugh McLead of Gaping Void–he was at Blog 08 with other Rock Stars of the web in Amsterdam where he reportedly said “Blogs aren’t dead, people are!”) and drew this cool cartoon…
cartoon by Hugh McLeod; photo by Anne Helmond
Here are some of the main points: Read more…
Biodynamic & mostly organic: Quivira
Saturday morning I packed up and left my sweet zin suite at the Flamingo Hotel to jump on a shuttle with other attendees of the First Wine Bloggers Conference for a hike through the wine country…except I watched the shuttles head off into the morning without me.
Fortunately, I could jump on my cell and talk with organizer Allan Wright who sent me to Quivira, and since I had both a car and Quivira marketing director Nancy’s card, I was set with a quick call from her for directions. Off I went down the chill autumn, chasing after the van, and dodging bicycles on the back roads of Sonoma County’s Dry Valley Creek Road until I found myself pulling into the idyllic, picturesque barnyard setting of Quivira, chickens, solar panels, and all.
Farmer and winemaker Steve Canter was at work with the dozen or so bloggers, explaining biodynamics and homeopathy and everything else under the sun including cleansing and purification rituals he uses (go for the power of the earth, Steve!!).
And then we went for a lovely walk, visiting goats, and Ruby the pig, and picking grapes off the vines (my favs were the old zins of course), looping along unusually dry Wine Creek to Dry Valley Creek, both which eventually feed into the Russian River, then under a fig tree, and up a ridge planted in zin and down along the olive trees to the barn.
Steve and Nancy tag teamed a bit, telling stories about the vines, the wines, and the processes both of biodynamics and organics in practice here. Of particular interest to me was how they are healing Wine Creek by building weirs to slow down the water to create better habitat for steelhead and other native species practically wiped out by the previous channelization and control of the creek.
The idea behind biodynamics seems an obvious one: Read more…
After Zin, Comes New Zealand Vin
Unfortunately, my sweet suite at the Wine Bloggers Conference at the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa was going to charge me to get on line so I poured myself a glass of Mauritson’s Rockpile 2006 Zin (which I liked even better than the reserve–not as “fruity” but more cherry and better structure and balance and depth), grabbed my MacBook Pro and some crackers, and wandered back into the lobby which had quieted down significantly save for the music blasting “Brick House” from the bar. I used the code from my Wine Bloggers Conference Welcome packet and got right on.
I didn’t stay on for long, certainly not long enough to get a post written or an email sent, as I struck up a conversation with three gentlemen with some open wine bottles across the lobby, and quickly found myself on their couch with a sample of a New Zealand Pinot Noir in my glass–something completely different than the zins in the sweet suite or the Aussie shiraz I spent the summer drinking!
I found myself in the presence of David Strada, New Zealand wine guy, who had organized a wine tasting of New Zealand wines which went on while I was in the sweet zin sweet snacking on cheese and crackers. Next thing I knew, I was in the presence of a roomful of New Zealand wines, with permission to swoop up any that interested me–but I had to do it quick!
I didn’t even try to think–I just walked past all those tempting whites and headed for the pinot noirs–after sampling what was on the table in the lobby, I had to try more!
I grabbed pinot noirs by Wild Earth, Forrest Estate, and Wooleston, plus a syrah by…(oh, no I don’t remember now! Trinity Hill maybe?)
“Good choices!” said David. “We have a nice selection of wines on the table, a selection from the different wine growing regions of New Zealand–the Wild Earth from Otago, Forrest Estate from Marlborough, and Wooleston from Nelson. Did you know that? How did you choose them?”
“Well, I liked the label on the Wild Earth,” I admitted.
Award Winning Wild Earth Pinot
“Yes, Americans do like that one,” he said with a smile.
“And I wanted to try a New Zealand shiraz to compare with the Australian ones I’ve been drinking lately… and these two pinots were half full!”
Now of course many would advise Read more…
Zinfandel Heaven
So there I was, in the Grand Ballroom of the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa at the Wine Bloggers Conference, surrounded by empty dinner plates, empty dessert bowls, empty wine glasses and empty wine bottles.
My stomach too was empty. But the hotel was full, full, full, as full as the bellies in the banquet room.
What’s a gal to do?
Get in a conversation with Leslie who reps the Dry Creek Valley wines, of course, and get invited back to their hospitality suite and load up on crackers, cheese, grapes, nuts, chocolate, and–most importantly for a budding wine blogger–lots and lots and lots of Dry Creek Valley ZINS!
“Bring a glass–we’re all out!” she urged.
I followed her through the swarms of wine bloggers, across the lobby, passed the bar with a funk and r&b band blaring, through the courtyard and around the pool toward a banner proclaiming “Dry Creek Valley Vineyards” or some such. Inside, two tables were laden with 2 dozen or more half full wines, and another table held the promised cheese and other munchies. Where to start first?
I set my bag with my laptop down and staring me in the face was a bottle of Mauritson 2005 Growers Reserve Zinfandel so I started there. Only 257 cases were produced of this 15.5 alc wine with plenty of fruit and zin attitude to stand up to the alcohol. Ahhh, finally, heaven, zinfandel heaven. And for a wine lover who cut her teeth on Ridge Zinfandel, it really was.
I felt positively schizophrenic, manic even, trying to decide what to do and doing everything at once: drink? eat? help them pack up? do all at the same time and stay out of the way?
It didn’t really matter though, with all those beautiful wines waiting…wines which unfortunately were getting packed up quicker than I drove up here. My day was just starting–but Leslie’s very busy day was about done!
“Here, take some,” she urged. “Taste them tonight at your leisure!”
I grabbed some bottles, more or less randomly since they all sounded great, and she threw in more: “Dutcher Creek, you have to have this. And you liked the Mauritson? You have to have this Rockpile. Oh and this Quivira, and this Red Rooster was poured at dinner, you missed that, and …”
Next thing I knew Read more…
At the last minute I heard from organizer Allan Wright that I could get into the (busting at the seams full!) First Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa, California. After dropping the Big Monkey and the small boy off at the train station so they could go south to Legoland, I jumped on Interstate 5 and zoomed north as fast as I could.
I arrived right in the middle of Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote address–and watched the plates get cleared, the creme brulee served, and the port poured…for everyone but me as I stood on the sidelines and drooled. No clean glasses in sight for water or wine–either one would have worked for me after the 7 hour long drive. Admittedly, Allan had warned me there might not be a seat at a table or food for me, but my goodness, I did expect to find a glass of wine while I listened to Gary’s enthusiastic address!
Gary Vaynerchuk
I stood on the sidelines which felt good after 7 hours of sitting in the car, held a table up, and took some notes. While some of the conference was devoted exclusively to wine, quite a few of the ideas transport easily to other on-line communities, and I will focus on those ideas here.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s claims to fame are broad and bold–at least in the world of blogging, and especially wine blogging. His bio on his site says:
On February 21, 2006, Gary launched Wine Library TV (WLTV), a free daily video blog in which Gary tastes and reviews wines. Gary made television appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Ellen Degeneres Show, and he has garnered widespread media recognition including features by the LA Times and Washington Post. In February and March of 2008, Gary became increasingly known throughout the Web 2.0 community. His remarks on branding within the social media landscape at FOWA, Strategic Profits, and South By Southwest occasioned praise from established web denizens including Kathy Sierra and earned the admiration of countless bloggers and aspiring entrepreneurs. Gary even made headlines with an impromptu free wine party during South by Southwest.
At the Wine Bloggers Conference, Gary suggests that
10-20% of our time as bloggers should be spent building community.
That means visiting other bloggers and leaving comments etc. Where to find the time? a winemaker asked. Stop looking at your stats, he joked, and cut back more on sleep, he said not kidding.
Now I don’t imagine that winemaker spends much time on the naval gazing phenomena of so-called “stats analysis” (at least that’s how I justify my time there!) We all have the same challenge of figuring out how to prioritize the amount of time in the day we are each allotted–24 hours, no way of cheating on that.
In order to have a healthy developing, growing blog with more and more readers, he argued, we must participate in our communities.
And we must blog regularly–at least once every day. As I reported in an earlier post, he asked how many blog. Of the 200 or so people there, about 160-180 people raised their hands. When he asked how many post daily, with daily defined as 5 days a week, only about 10 hands were raised, with my hand one of them. I try to post every day, and to have almost as many posts as there are days in a month. I have found the more often I post, the more traffic I get, and I’ve been able to develop an audience of both new and regular readers and 30,500 page views over this, my first year of blogging (my first blogoversary is election day!)
People perked up quite a bit when he talked about monetizing blogs.
Any wine blogger can make six figures in ad revenue in 2009, claims Gary Vaynerchuk. Read more…
A 2008 3:15 Experiment Poem for the Moon
8/26/08
never notice you moon
when you wake up this late
a big gulp out of your face
you’ll be high in the sky
when we wake up
but we won’t see you
we’re not looking
there is so much we don’t see
it’s amazing we can tie our shoes
c. Gwendolyn Alley aka Art Predator
I am still trying to finish transcribing my 2008 3:15 Experiment Poems and to get them on the 2008 3:15 Experiment website! (For the uninitiated, the 3:15 Experiment is where participants wake up every night at 3:15am to write…and then post their hypnopmpic/hypnogogic scribblings w/o editing on the website!)
Distractions, distractions, lovely, yummy distractions…
I promise to return momentatily to the following series of posts: the WIne Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa last weekend, and buying a car the previous weekend for me to drive to the Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa!
My Morning Wine
At 10am on this particular Sunday, I am not in a typical church.
Instead I am sitting in the Church of the Early Morning Wine Drinkers, surrounded by 8 laptops and one iPhone. The bloggers wildly tap, tip, and talk, discuss twitter and whatever else comes up in our unconference topic, “Organic Flow,” facilitated by Nick Goveric, of Wine Scholarship.
We’re holding church at the First Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa, CA.
Six folks at the table are twittering actively. I seem to be the only one at the table without a twitter account (Nick says do it NOW!), and while I wasn’t accosted more about it, I can certainly see how I am left out in many of the conversations going on at this conference–and beyond. (The question is of course, how necessary are these conversations in comparison to other actions in my life?)
The idea behind this table discussion at the “unconference conference” session is that the best conversations occur around the edges, along the seams of the conference, so why not make that an official part? And with the help of Lenn Thompson of the blog lenndevours.com a well known authority on New York wine, we’re pouring a fine selection and collection of fresh, bright, cold, wines starting with a 2007 Rooster Hill Dry Riesling from the Finger Lakes region of New York, a perfect accompaniment to my bran muffin.
However, this King Ferry Treleaven Gewurtztraminer 2007, with my muffin is superb, even better than the riesling–it’s perfect for morning wine blogging or it’d be wonderful with a holiday brunch. I sent Lenn after the residual sugars but he couldn’t find the info. He did figure out where to go to watch the Giants Steelers football game, and most of this table, made up of east coasters, is going. Guess they’ve had enough wine–I hear rumours they’re moving on to beer and scotch. (Ahhh but a winery with a pinot has come calling and it looks like some of them at least will hit the wine trail one more time today!)
Next up, another New York wine, this one a Palmer Sauvignon blanc. It has a bit of funk, I agreed with John Witherspoon of Anything Wine, but overall, we liked it since it truly tastes like a sauv blanc, light, grassy, some pineapple, totally unlike a chardonnay. This seems like an obvious point but we’ve all noticed the trend toward turning sauv blanc into something heavy, syrupy, and chardonnay like. (Was this the one Elodie loved I wonder?) Nick thought at $17 it might be a tough sell.
We’re still drinking, over here, having moved onto reds (some people anyway–I’m sticking with the whites) while the various tables report on their conversations. One debate at one table was about ratings, rankings and reviews, and they pointed out that we bloggers should stick with only writing about what we find that’s worth writing about–wine that’s good as opposed to wine that’s not. The danger with blogging about something, anything that we don’t like we run certain risks (how do we know it’s not a bad bottle or??) Why not seek to create a positive environment in the blogosphere?
Joel Vincent of Open Wine Consortium talked about niches, and the pros and cons of exploiting that niche. Niches range from writing about regional wines like Texas (Chateau Bubba anyone?) or Lenn with New York. But he points out that to find the niche that reflects what you as a writer do best.
Next up a tasting called “Sonoma Luxe”–wines from wineries which don’t usually open their doors or participate in big events. Then time to roll on south to home.
Oh, and watch for photos from Beverly Taylor of Wine Sublime!
WiFi on the bus: only in America
There’s wifi on this bus taking attendees of the First Wine Blogging Conference to Sebastiani for dinner and a keynote address by Alice Feiring.
“Amazing,” says Elodie my seatmate.
I may be the only person blogging from this bus but here I am.
“Only in America eh?” Elodie says. She’s French and currently living in Prague. She and her husband have devloped a cellar tracker application for Mac users. I’ll add the link when I find her card… “I am always surprised when I come here.”
We’re on the way to Sebastiani in Sonoma for dinner at the Wine Bloggers Conference after tasting Sonoma county wines. Somewhere I have all the cards and misc propaganda about the wines which I will share sometime I promise.
I ask Elodie about her favorites, and she says, “I liked a sauv blanc but I tasted so many I can’t remember it. In the red, I liked all of them but I can’t really say there was one I appreciated more than another one. The reds were quite tasty; some were spicier than others. I usually hardly drink white wine but this sauv blanc was excellent. It made me rethink drinking white wine. If I see the bottle or the website I’ll remember it. It has an effect, something inside, you feel something special but you can’t really explain it. Makes you think, wow, I like this wine. the first rough feeling you have.”
“Email the name of the wine to me when you find it,” I beg.
And then you wil have it too.
art predator 