A little while back I was given the chance to attend a very special gathering of established winemaker luminaries and taste a whole slew of outstanding wines, courtesy of a very gracious invite by Monica Collins of All Access Napa Valley. I’ve never seen such a lineup of All-Star winemakers, nor the chance to have such access to speak with those that make or have made famous wines such as Kamen, Screaming Eagle, Scarecrow, The Prisoner, Rocca Family and L’Angevin. The event was held at the innovative ACME Fine Wines in St. Helena. Ever since opening their doors in April of ‘03, co-owners and organizers of this event Karen Williams and David Stevens have consistently reinvented the wine retail, storage and event industries. Their efforts have been noticed by numerous newspapers and wine writers.

It takes a lot to make us who we are. Genetics, environments and most importantly, people help shape the person that we become as we continue to get older. I have been blessed with a number of good, warm people that have surrounded me as I stumble through this life. Friends, family and on this particular day, Fathers, have been a major positive influence on whom I’d like to be whenever I finally grow up.

Another exciting wine festival is coming to Fort Mason this month and I’m very excited to have to have the opportunity to get the inside scoop from the festival Director. Pinot Days San Francisco crushes SF with five days of great, varietally-correct Pinot Noir festivities, starting on June 24th. Lisa Rigisich, together with husband Steve and partners Eric and Teri White are bringing over 200 Pinot Noir producer and vendors of the delicate grape to Fort Mason in San Francisco on Sunday June 28th for the finale Grand Festival Public Tasting, where I will be delighted with the outstanding array of tasty Pinot available to taste!

While bouncing around Twitter one day, I was turned on to a new-fangled wine search engine site by the incomparable Lisa Adams Walter (Twitter). She directed me to GoBYO (Twitter), a wine search engine that might revolutionize the Bring Your Own Bottle searches in your local restaurants, taking out the calling and questions surrounding the corkage policy at restaurants around the country. It is a very user-friendly website that is already exhaustively detailed about wine, corkage and restaurant information in now, 10 metro areas in the US. Devon Segel (Twitter), along with her family and the DiningInfo team launched this effort two years ago and it is continuing to build up at a rapid pace.

Now let’s continue the 5 Questions series and learn a bit more about Devon and GoBYO!

We’ve made a couple of nice improvements to how we push updates to your twitter feed. (more info on how to connect your WineLog and twitter accounts here)

1. We now delay updates to your twitter feed by 5 minutes. This enables us to combine activity on one wine (e.g. if you rate and comment on a wine) into one update that goes to your twitter feed. This will also prevent unnecessary twitter updates if you change your rating on a wine, etc.

2. We have updated how tweets are added to the @winelog feed. We now space the updates out throughout the day based on how much activity is happening on the site. So instead of seeing 20 updates from @drxeno at once, those updates will come every two to ten minutes.

(more after the break)

I’ve just updated the website to use the word “Rose” (missing the accent) where we had been using “Blush” in the past.

What are you talking about?

Well, “rosé” and “blush” are most commonly used to refer to the same thing: wines that are neither Red nor White. These wines are different shades of pink. In fact, “rose” means “pinkish” in French.

According to Wikipedia, “Blush” was originally coned by Charlie Kreck of Millcreek Vineyards in Sonoma to describe a pink colored wine he made from Cabernet grapes. Kreck trademarked the name, but that didn’t stop other American wineries from using it to describe their pink, semi-sweet wines.

Purists may only use Rose for French or European wines and Blush for American wines, but in general both terms are interchangeably.

Facebook has this great thing called “Facebook Connect” that would do this pretty seamlessly, but it will take some coding mojo from me to get that integrated on a site as complex as WineLog. It’s on “the list”.

Until we get that hammered out, there IS a way to push your activity to Facebook with the help of our little friend Twitter. Here’s how:

I think at this point, it comes as no surprise that I like the wines from Carmel Valley and Georis Winery, in particular. They’re my favorite winery, in fact, from my favorite appellation. So, what could be just as awesome as my favorite winery’s, appellation-specific wine? A new wine from the winemaker from my favorite winery in my favorite appellation, of course! Damien Georis, winemaker for Georis Winery (no relation…maybe) has released the second chapter of his personal label, Madeleine.

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.

The reach and influence of wine bloggers and wine social media mavens have exploded over the last couple of years, particularly in the last 12 months. Major wine critics have have noticed and responded, wineries and all three tiers of the wine business oligarchy have also taken notice and begun to capitalize on that influence (or are already playing catchup). The recent exhaustive and outstanding industry whitepaper by VinTank, Wine & Social Media is the first to encapsulate and quantify this influence and serves as a very important reference for these interactions between wine business, their consumers and the key social media mediators (human and software/websites) of these connections. It is a groundbreaking accomplishment and a signpost of the rapid, continuing maturity of the wine social media sphere.