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!

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.

Last April Fool’s day, I received what seemed to be a nicely written, yet rather surprisingly nifty wine event invite in my inbox asking if I’d like to meet with Laurent Sauvage, winemaker for the leading family of wines from the Languedoc in the South of France, Robert Skalli Wines. We were to meet with Laurent at CAV, the outstanding wine bar and restaurant along Market in the Opera District of San Francisco (and part-owned by none other than Doug Cook (Twitter), founder of Able Grape).

In the year of their 20th anniversary, St. Supéry Vineyards & Winery (Twitter) hosted the 2nd Wine Bloggers Forum (WBF) at their beautiful Estate in Rutherford, Napa Valley, California on Saturday, 04/04/09. The event continued the spirit of intimate and collaborative blogger and industry interaction that was first started as an offshoot of the WBC that debuted last year. The first WBF was at Hahn Family Estates in their Napa business offices and perfectly organized by the incomparable Lisa de Bruin (Twitter). This latest edition was organized by Lesley Keffer Russell (Twitter), VP of Marketing and Sales at St. Supéry.

The kind folks at Icon Estates have been worried about all of us out here in US wine-drinker land. They realized back in March that tax time is hard on all of us wine grunts, particularly this year when everyone is still reeling from watching their life savings (and future wine purchasing potential) shrivel by -40% and see a world filled with recession and job loss. They realized that everyone’s day or night (or both!) can be brightened by wine, however and put together a great list of wines to have while stumbling through filling out your requisite tax forms: Tax Time Wines! Susan and co. at Icon kindly shot out some wine samples for various bloggers to try including the prolific 1WineDude (Twitter, Twitter2), Luscious Lush Thea (Twitter, Twitter2) and yours truly (Twitter), among others.