From his well-known Bonny Doon Vineyards, Grahm has made big waves in the wine world.  As a writer, Grahm has contributed to numerous wine journals in addition to his well-known blog, Been Doon So Long, which was not only the 2010 Best Winery Blog winner but has also been made into a book, composed of a collection of sometimes-satiric but always thoughtful pieces. Randall is also very involved in social media, with his winery’s page gathering over 5000 Facebook likes and another 5000 Twitter followers.

Grahm says he is thrilled to be speaking at the conference.  He says the Wine Bloggers Conference is “a perfect venue to publicly air all of my profound insecurities about the whole proposition of wine blogging.  Wine blogging is a fairly imperfect art.”

We are eager to hear your thoughts on Randall as a keynote speaker!

Take a look at our outline Agenda on this site. Many of the components are already set but we do need your input on these three sections:

Keynote Speakers: Who would you like to see speak at the 2012 Wine Bloggers Conference? We have had a great lineup of past speakers including famous wine writers, bloggers-made-good, tech experts, and wine industry celebrities.

Breakout Sessions: Hour-long breakout sessions are the chance for you to hear from experts in the field, be it blogging, writing, technology, or wine. Do you have suggestions for breakout session topics and speakers?

Blogger Discussions: We will have one time period where we’ll break into three groups for community discussions about topics of interest to wine bloggers. Last year we discussed The Present and Future of Wine Blogging; Wine Blogging and the Wine Industry; and Reaching Outside the Wine World. If you could sit down and talk with your fellow wine bloggers, what would you like to discuss?

To provide suggestions, please either comment on this blog post or email conference organizer Allan Wright at allan@ZephyrAdventures.com. Please be specific as to the topic and whether you are recommending a keynote speaker, breakout session, or blogger discussion. Please also provide us with names and, if you are suggesting someone else to present, whether you know the person!

We will take suggestions over the next week and then conduct a public vote to determine which potential topics are most popular. Thanks for your input!

First Wine Tourism Conference Riveting and Revealing

The inaugural Wine Tourism Conference was held November 16-17 at the newly revived Napa Marriott hot on the heels of yet another inaugural Napa event, the Napa Valley Film Festival.  This is the first conference focused on increasing and enhancing tourism to wine regions around the globe by discussing industry trends and issues as well as sharing best practices.  It was interesting to hear that 35% of attendees were from states other than California.

Zephyr Adventures, creators of the well established Wine Bloggers Conference and industry-leading adventure travel tour operator, partnered with MartinCalder Productions to organize the conference bringing a mix of speakers from the California Wine & Tourism Commission, San Francisco Travel, Sonoma State University, Google, as well as wine experts and personalities that included Michael Mondavi, Allen Shoup, Ray Isle, Leslie Sbrocco, Paul Wagner and Sara Schneider just to name a few.  Every session was informative, full of valuable information and often entertaining.  And let’s not forget the wine provided by the event sponsors.  Here are a few highlights that grabbed my attention…

Leveraging the Nearby Metro

Catherine Beteta, President of the California Travel and Tourism Commission, talked about their “Visit California” program.  She shared that tourism (by hotel revenue per room) to the San Francisco bay area increased by 11.3% in August (latest data) and is California’s top export by more than 3x the next category.  To execute their strategic plan they focus heavily on branding and engagement including the use of videos, traditional print publications and premier sponsorships.  Social media is very important to the marketing mix in that it provides critical peer-to-peer conversation.  Catherine states that video is a key tool for them and that the California Wine Month campaign held in September by the Wine Institute was an example of a successful social media effort.  She states that the level of success you achieve depends on “how you package your brand to trigger that interest or emotion you want.”

Michael Mondavi notes that wine eventually led to the arrival of tourists to the Napa Valley, while Allen Shoup described how that was the opposite for the state of Washington.  The Walla Walla region was discussed often throughout the conference of an example of a remote wine region that has a challenge of attracting visitors from the Seattle metro area due to its remote location.  Both agreed, though, regardless of situation, “it’s about the story… the appeal, the history, and how we got here” that helps attract visitors to wine country.  People are also planning vacation destinations based on the complete culinary experiences they can have, according to Catherine.

Tasting Rooms

When it comes to attracting visitors to winery tasting rooms there is a dichotomy of increase selling pressure in these trying times vs. the loss of longer term customer, a hypothesis put forth to Steve Cueller of Sonoma State University by John Jordan of Jordan Winery.  What Steve found, among a lot of other cool statistical data in studies he performed in both Sonoma and Napa, was an inverse relationship of attendance and sales revenue/person.  This makes sense, and is practically obvious, when considering what Michael and Allen spoke of earlier.  When you have more visitors, there is a smaller amount of time spent with each, depending on tasting room resources, to tell the story and sell the product.  Keep in mind that each tasting room is also competing with another 5.2 wineries that wine country tourists will visit per trip.

There is an opportunity for wineries to stand out before visitors even arrive through the use of online review sites and, of course, social media.  Up to 70% of all tourists use the Internet to gather information and develop itineraries for their trips and 40% of travel researchers use user-generated content online.  This means blogs, search engines, micro blogs, social media sites, review sites and more.  The key here is to “make yourself relevant at the point someone is looking for information, or what we call ‘the moment of truth’,” according to Joe Rosenberg of Google.  TripAdvisor’s Todd Skelton further explained the “importance of monitoring review sites for your tasting room, maintaining the information and responding to comments as appropriate.”

Note to wineries:  take a moment, or better yet make it an ongoing exercise, and search for yourself on Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Twitter, Foursquare (tips), SocialMention.com, wine forums, or use a free tool like Vintank’s Social Connect (just to name a few) to get an understanding of what tourists can read about you.  Do you like what you see?  If not, you better start working on your online image because Google searches about wine are up 33% since 2006.

Direct to Consumer

Barbara Insel of Stonebridge Research provided some interesting, although somewhat dated (Nielsen, 2007), statistics about Direct to Consumer (DTC) purchasing habits:

* Only 3% of all wine sales in the U.S. are DTC
* Roughly half of DTC sales are from the tasting room
* 88.5% of U.S. adults have never bought wine direct!
* 8.23% purchase at tasting room
* 1.94% purchases from wine club

It would be interesting to see how these figures have changed over the past 4 years as new media adoption (including mobile) continues to increase as a rapid pace.

A Case for Social Media

A compelling case was made for social media use in the wine industry by a fellow blogger, Marcy Gordon of Come for the Wine.  She described how her Wines of Croatia (#WoCroatia) effort not only increased awareness for the wines but also for the region.  Her journey is well documented on her blog (start HERE), so no need to repeat it here.  Ultimately, she was able to build awareness in this country for Croatian wines and the buzz reach was wide enough to gain followers and engagement from Croatians themselves.  Eventually, it lead to Marcy being invited to the country to continue the story she had started.

It clear that social media must be part of the marketing mix and that this topic is much bigger than just Facebook and Twitter.  It’s about a winery’s overall online presence, availability to and engagement with consumers, as well as significant value proposition in the face of competition.  There was “argument” on Twitter (#winetourismconf) during this part of the conference regarding whether or not Twitter is a direct sales tool.  What’s your take?  Does the altruistic view of being solely a community of conversation and sharing of valuable information by early adopters prevail or has that ideal become diluted as more and more everyday users register?  A recent study showed that 43% of Twitter users follow brands specifically looking for deals and offers.

Summary

In summary, the wine industry needs to continue to think outside the box and perhaps the box is our own wine country region.  As a winery, are you leveraging your local metropolis and do you understand your online presence?  Are you talking about the amenities in the area to attract visitors and are you providing the right information at the “moment of truth?”  How can wineries target tourists to surrounding areas that provide products and services that round out a complete experience for them?  90% of visitors to San Francisco do not bring their children with them.  Recall the statement by Catherine about travel planners looking for a complete culinary experience.  Joe Rosenberg shares these top reasons people come to wine country based on Google search trends (see anything missing from your value proposition?):

* Taste wine
* Wine knowledge
* Experience
* Scenic beauty
* Culinary
* Fun/Relax
* Wine Culture/Romance
* Architecture/Art
* Eco-tourism
* Health

Wine Bloggers can help in this regard in that they can expand their focus and reach to write about some of these amenities in your favorite wine region.

Located at 1000 NE Multnomah Street, the hotel is directly across the river from downtown and an easy light rail ride from the airport. It was also the first Green Seal certified hotel in Portland.

We have a block of rooms on hold for conference attendees and highly suggest you stay at the Doubletree since all conference activities will either be held there or will start and end with transport from and back to the hotel. Our group rate is $139 (or $159 for a “premium room”).

Please book your room today using the Doubletree Hotel WBC site as the host hotel has sold out the past two years.

We are happy to announce that – yes, several months late – Tamara Belgard from Sip With Me has volunteered to steer the Twitter ship for WBC12. Tamara is a Portland area resident and attended WBC10 in Walla Walla, so is a perfect candidate. She Tweets herself at #SipwithMe.

Welcome to Tamara! Please make sure to keep up with all the news from the conference by following #WineBloggersCon.

As you look at the draft agenda, notice these changes from previous years:

First and perhaps biggest, we have moved the wine country visits to Friday afternoon from the traditional Saturday time slot. This was suggested by a 2011 WBC attendee and independently requested by the Oregon Wine Board. We think it will allow people to join these fun excursions and meet other participants right at the start of the conference and, as one of our advisory board members pointed out, allow participants to concentrate on the academic content for Saturday and Sunday morning.

We have also structured the Thursday Welcome Reception to be more amenable to meeting new people and renewing old friendships. The Oregon Wine Board will be sponsoring this reception, meaning we’ll still have great wines, but we will hand out name badges for those in attendance and create opportunities for people to meet each other. This is still optional – you won’t miss any conference content if you can’t arrive on Thursday.

On Friday night we have added a new event called the Night of Many Bottles, essentially a bring-your-own-wine party.  We have done this the last two years at the Beer Bloggers Conference to great success and this has gone on since the very beginning of the WBC in an informal manner. This year, we are giving the wine sharing its own time slot. Bloggers Christophe Smith and Drew Lazorchak have volunteered to coordinate this party, so look for good things to come.

We have moved the Blogger-Led Discussions, so popular this past conference, to a prime time slot on Saturday morning and increased the length to 80 minutes. Also at the suggestion of a 2011 attendee, we have added a Sunday morning Q&A with Wine Blog Awards Winners who are present. Combined with a repeat of the Ignite Wine event, which will be limited to bloggers, there will be plenty of time for blogger participation.

What hasn’t changed? We will still have pre-conference excursions into Oregon wine country, breakout sessions (three hours with three sessions per hour), keynote speeches, and Live Wine Blogging.

We hope you like the agenda!

If you want great food, consider attending the International Food Bloggers Conference in Santa Monica, California November 11-13.

Organized by Zephyr Adventures with our partner Foodista, the IFBC focuses as much on providing outstanding food as anything else. We recently completed the first of two IFBC conferences this year, this one being at the end of August in New Orleans. What incredible food.

A total of 18 local restaurants came in to the host hotel to volunteer their time (and product) to cook for attending bloggers. Check out this menu at just the Friday evening dinner:

La Petite Grocery, Chef Justin Devillier
Chilled corn soup with hearts of palm
Pork cheeks with tomato jam

Ste. Marie, Chef Chris Foster
Spicy tuna tartare with avocado mousse, coriander, grilled country bread
Rabbit ragu with house-made pappardelle, parmesan

Sylvain, Chef Sean McCusker
Shaved brussels sprouts with apples, pecorino, hazelnuts
Chicken liver crostini with Maras Farm’s sprouts, dandelion gastrique

The Grill Room, Chef Drew Dzejak
Gluten free gulf shrimp dip
Gluten free Louisiana crab dip in endive

Langenstein’s
Shrimp & orzo
Crawfish etouffee

Sucre, Chef Tariq Hanna
Black truffle hazelnut macaroon ‘PoPs’
Local honeyed rice cream parfait

GW Fins, Chef Tenney
Gluten free bite sized chocolate bombes- white & dark chocolate mousse on a base
of flourless chocolate cake, covered in chocolate ganache

In addition, we provided two excellent wines from Jordan Wines, courtesy of the always-cheerful Lisa Mattson. So if you want to experience something similar, consider signing up for the November conference in Santa Monica!

The organizers of the WineFuture Hong Kong11 Conference have been kind enough to provide us two free passes to give away to Citizen Wine Bloggers in North America, worth 950 Euro each. If you are interested, please leave your name in a comment on this blog post or email us directly. The drawing will be held one week from today, September 16, 2012. Airfare and hotel are not included.

WineFuture is a three-day summit of 50 of the most influential personalities in the wine industry, including folks such as Jancis Robinson (our recent keynote speaker), Robert Parker, and Francis Ford Coppola.

From the conference’s website:

“Organized by The Wine Academy of Spain, Winefuture 2011 brings influential industry experts together to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the business side of the wine sector; sales, communications, marketing, trends, and economics. Expected attendance is more than 1,500 winemakers, Masters of Wine, technical experts, distributors, importers, buyers, journalists, and sommeliers.”

We will be adding “bloggers” to that list of attendees!

In a more professional analysis, Virginia Wine sent us the following statistics from their Row Feeder analysis of the conference:

Twitter Statistics from July 21-24 (Thursday through Sunday)

Tweets with #wbc11: 14,989
Potential Impressions on tweets with #wbc11: 43,238,099

A few thoughts:

• We underestimated. The total potential impressions is over 43 million.
• This number reflects just the four days the conference was running and does not include the many Tweets before and after the conference.
• As we all know, “impressions” does not mean that 43 million people read about the WBC on Twitter. Many of these impressions reflect multiple hits to the same Twitter user and many of them go unread. This is similar with any other form of media where impressions are counted.
• Still, 43 million potential impressions is a huge number.
• 15,000 Tweets in four days is also impressive!

Thanks to all of you who Tweeted, posted, or Facebooked about the conference.

We at the WBC try to limit our impact on the environment and so like this focus. In fact, I am staying at the Portland Doubletree now as we run the Beer Bloggers Conference and I wanted to provide a hotel guest’s perspective of what this means.

First, when I hang a towel on a rack, it doesn’t disappear when the maid comes in to clean my room. Isn’t that cool? I am always amazed how hotels leave little signs saying they won’t put out new towels if they are on the rack and then totally ignore their own suggestion.

Second, the garbage can in the room has two compartments, one for garbage and one for recycling. We all recycle at home now and it is crazy businesses aren’t following suit. The Doubletree is. What’s more, they don’t even have a garbage bag in the garbage can, which is totally green because we all know it makes no sense to add a piece of garbage (a plastic bag) to the garbage we throw out each day.

On a more subtle level, the shower does not gush water. Yes, “power showers” are nice. They are a waste of water, though, and if we are going to be nice to the environment we will have to give up some of our luxuries.

I am sure the hotel does many other things in their kitchens (composting, for example) and other operations but these are just a few of the items I noticed in my guest room. Beyond all that, the staff here is excellent and the facilities are nice. You’ll like the hotel. For complete info about their enviro practices, see their Green Hotel website.

Note: Follow Tweets about the Beer Bloggers Conference at #bbc11.