After finishing up at the last WBC lunch and tasting, the Luxe Sonoma lunch, I headed out with the Brix Chicks, Liza (Twitter) and Xandria to another party, this time hosted by Agent Red and Agent Green (Twitter) of The Wine Spies.

The Wine Spies is a interesting and effective wine sales site that specializes in 1 great wine a day.  It helps both the winery to connect directly with its clientele, and allows consumers to discover a new wine each day and at significant, one-time savings.  It is extremely effective at getting the word out about small boutique wineries and their choice of wines is top-notch, including some of my own favorites such as Galante (WineSpies) and Parsonage Village Vineyard (WineSpies). Their style of James Bond-ish secrecy and elite info dissemination keeps the wine very accesible and fun, while refusing to compromise on great background and techinical information.

Cruvee (pronounced CREW-vee), is a powerful new addition to the wine social network universe and takes the direct to consumer approach for wineries even further than ever has been attempted before. They look to actively recruit both consumers and wineries to their free social realm and directly link them with a dynamic and real-time social media web. They also have more powerful social media consulting options for wineries.

Completing the day’s trifecta, Levendi Winery was pouring three of their wines in accompaniment to the tasty hors d’oeuvres provided by Cruvee. Levendi is a family owned boutique Napa winery that has a long history of wine within their Greek ancestory.  The name “Levendi” is actually a Grecian toast that is meant to celebrate hard work and the personal achievement that results from those efforts.  They had their ‘06 Red Hen Chard and two ‘05 Cabs, the Symphonia and the Sweetwater Ranch.  All three were outstanding examples of fine Napa wine and I was very pleased to end the weekend with such great wine and nibbles.

The event was actually a much larger production than I imagined.  Hosted at Agent Green’s home, the weather was still just wonderful.  A fair amount of bloggers made it over to the event, but I don’t think that any of us were prepared for the thought and care that went into the planning.  We were provided with a raffle cork, press kits on all three participants and a glass to begin our tasting of the Levendi lineup. Unfortunately, I did not have a lot of time to spend before I had to head out to meet the Lady at another event in the East Bay, so I missed the various games and activities (and raffle!!) that started after I was leaving, about an hour into the afternoon. A very nice surprise was discovered when we were leaving, however.  We were each handed a half-bottle of the ‘05 Sweetwater Ranch Cab, with the request that we review the wine, good or bad, in the coming weeks.  I was later to find out the following weekend that after some decanting, the wine was even tastier than I first thought when I tried the dark fruited, balanced effort by the pool that sunny day.

While rather disappointed that I had to leave the event too early, I was very impressed with Agent Red’s event and it struck me that the event itself was an immediate example of the direct impact that the WBC has had on the wine industry.  Here was an event that was planned specifically to take advantage of the co-locality of much of the nation’s most active wine bloggers.  It was well-planned and a very interesting take on the usually more staid style of wine tasting events. While I understand how Agent Red would want to keep the theme of secrecy when planning any events, I did find the lack of any proior notification of the event’s agenda to be a problem.  I could have planned the rest of my day around a longer stay at the party if I had known ahead of time that I needed to reserve a certain block of my time.  Regardless, I thought that this was a very innovative sort of wine and wine site debutante party and I felt very fortunate to have been a part of it.  I look forward to many more events by The Wine Spies, Levendi, Cruvee and anyone else with enough daring and social media sophistication to plan such a gala.

Please see my wine reviews from this Post-WBC event below.  They are tagged with “Ws2008levendicruvee” if you would like to list them in your own WineLog.  Please drop me a comment if you attended this party, as well!

Levendi Napa Valley Red Hen Chardonnay 2006

Levendi Napa Valley Symphonia Cabernet Sauvignon 2005

Levendi Napa Valley Sweetwater Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon 2005