Up to date information on TasteLive events and announcements
September 17, 2009
Three Big Events at TasteLive Next Week!
Next week is shaping up to be a pretty busy week at TasteLive! Three days… three great and very unique events!
Wednesday September 23rd: #WinesofArgentina resumes full speed ahead after a weeks hiatus. This, the third in our wine blogging journey through Argentina’s great regions will bring us back to Mendoza and south to the region of San Juan. This event will be pairing 15 top wine bloggers with the winemakers in a round table style discussion.
Producers are being confirmed today and so far include:
Thursday September 24th: We’re very excited to announce that next Thursday will kick off our unprecedented series of five events that will focus on the Wines of Germany! We’ve teamed up with trade organization Wines of Germany for the entire month of October (and then some) to showcase the wines and appellations of this great wine producing region.
Thursday’s event will bring us winemaker Christian Ebert from the Mosel’s Weingut Schloss Saarstein. Selections include:
Riesling QBA 2007
Riesling Kabinett 2007
Reisling Spatlese 2006
Schloss Saarstein is lucky enough to be classified as one of the few monopole sites in Germany, meaning this top single vineyard site is solely in the hands of one owner, which is rare. The 24-acre vineyard is situated on a steep southwestern-facing slope that rises up from the Saar river. The soil is mainly slate, which is perfect for growing Riesling. Saar Riesling’s are known for their steely, lemony acidity and crisp, vibrant fruit notes. “Mouthwatering” is a key word in describing Schloss Saarstein Rieslings. Christian Ebert is the current owner and winemaker, and his wife, Andrea,does their marketing.
About Wines of Germany:Wines of Germany is the exclusive U.S. office of the Deutsches Weininstitut. Wines of Germany is focused on creating greater awareness to further enhance the image and increase sales of wine in the U.S. through educational and promotional activities. It is the primary information source on wines deriving from the 13 German wine growing regions for members of the wine trade, the media, and U.S. consumers. The promotional and educational efforts of Wines of Germany focus primarily on Riesling, the most famous German grape variety.
Friday September 25th: Distillery Live 2009! The premiere spirit event at TasteLive! We’ve teamed up with Distillery Live 2009 to broadcast live video and tweets from this incredible live event happening at the Makers Mark distillery. We’ll be tasting through the Makers Mark and Laphroaig linups along with President of Maker’s Mark Bill Samuels Jr and their Master Distiller Kevin Smith, as well as John Campbell, Distillery Manager for Laphroaig and famous whisky writer John Hansell.
I’m sure I’m not the first to say “Who the f*** is Selena Gomez and why did she crash Twitter at 7:30pm last night??” And while we’re at it what is the relevance of #glee?
These types of questions have become far too common for me and lead to major mental breakdowns almost weekly at this point. Twitter’s stability or lack there of has become a major disruption to the TasteLive events, and we’re dealing with it.
I’m going to leak something here, and the dev team is going to kill me: We’re within weeks of not having to worry about this anymore. That’s about all I can say right now, but I will tell you that this issue is top priority and will be addressed along with the game changing new features we’ll be releasing to the platform this autumn.
Ok, enough about that… #selenagomesonfb, god bless ya!
Matter at hand! Wines of Argentina and more importantly Mendoza!
Despite the late start, and some rather seasick wines to our far-away tweeps, the event managed to go off quite well. In the end we held onto all four star winemakers and managed to get fairly organized by around 9:15pm EST. I want to personally thank the winemakers for hanging in there. This is a totally foreign concept to many of them and it happen to fall smack dab in the middle of the Argentina vs Paraguay match. These guys were troopers, so Muchas Gracias a todo!
598 tweets/ Reach of over 30,000 people
Strong showing! The wines overall showed great with very varied styles and takes on world class Malbec. I won’t recap tweets as they are visible on the feed. Thanks to everyone for participating!
Due to travel there will be a schedule change for the next two events; San Juan/ La Rioja and Patagonia. I will be sending out an email later today. Also, please stay tuned for information on October’s Wines of Germany events!
The search API seems to be down as of 7:20pm. Hopefully it will be cleared up prior to the start of tonight’s TasteLive event, it usually is. Just in case, please remember that we have a backup “room” set up. You can access it by clicking “Back up” at the bottom of the TasteLive.com homepage.
I’ve put together some initial results from last week’s blogger Wines of Argentina- Salta event, and it’s pretty amazing stuff!
Let me remind everyone this was supposed to be a “small round table discussion”. The limited participant size and blogger to winemaker ratio (3/1) did accomplish the goal of creating more of a conversation which in turn gives more take away to both parties. I equate it like this: A normal TasteLive event with participation levels between 50-100+ is equal to a stadium or arena concert. Great event? Absolutely but missing the intimacy and personal nature of a smaller venue… No eye contact. This new format is more like a small club event. Real back and forth communication, a true connection with the wines and winemakers.
Actually an intimate club with an enormous stack of Marshals cranked up to 11 and the windows and doors wide open is more like it! Even with a limited size group, last weeks event accounted for over 500 tweets in just over 2 hours! All this from about 12 people! That’s pretty insane when you think about it. Even more… Combined the 12 people in the “club” have over 20,000 followers!
THAT is the power of social media for wine. By all accounts a tiny number of people, but each of these people represents their own network. 500 posts with visibility to over 20,000 people is astounding!
Tonights Mendoza event will be one for the record books. We’re still in “club” mode but we’ve doubled the space. It should be an incredible event.
Tonight is going to be a banner night at TasteLive.com. Wines of Argentina month is continuing with what may be the most exciting event yet… Mendoza… The heart of the the Argentine wine world! Not only is this an over the top line up of wines representing the regions best, but we have what could be thought of as the Mendoza “all-star” team of winemakers joining in live from Mendoza!
Leading the way will be:
Daniel Pi- Chief winemaker at Trapiche
José Manuel Ortega Fournier- Winemaker at O Fournier and nominee for “Wine Innovator of the Year” from Wine Enthusiast magazine.
Leandro Lowi- US Export Director for Zuccardi
Stephan Reiss from Domaine Jean Bousquet
This is a blogger “round-table” event that has doubled in size from it’s original 10 person goal. To put that into perspective… over 500 tweets were sent during last weeks Salta event and that was only 8 people! This one is going to be amazing!
