Massimo is a lawyer admitted to the Turin Bar Association in 1996. He is specialised in commercial and contract law, with a focus on intellectual property. He carries out the main part of his activity in the IT/ IP and telecommunication sectors, negotiating and drafting IP/IT agreements, as open source and free licenses contracts, advising public and private entities in special projects as well as in judicial proceedings. He carries out regular teaching activity at Masters and specialization courses and writes for national and international journals. He is member of Turin Bar Association Commissione Informatica, International Association for Entertainment Lawyers Executive Commettee, “Centro Studi di Informatica Giuridica” Scientific Committee and fellow of Nexa Center. He participates to the Italian working group for Creative Commons licenses.

We are very excited to announce that Elin McCoy has agreed to share her experience and insights at the European Wine Bloggers Conference this fall! According to Elin, her talk will be based on:

“Beyond Ivory Tower Wine Criticism
The internet and the explosion of wineries and wine regions worldwide have changed the landscape of fine wine criticism forever. What will the future bring? Is the era of gurus ending? A look at what wine writing is in 2010 and how I’d like to see it evolve in the future.”

Biography: Elin is an award-winning journalist and author, focusing on the world of wine. She is a wine and spirits columnist for Bloomberg News, where she writes a bimonthly column for their global news wire as well as a monthly column for Bloomberg Markets, and a columnist at Zesterdaily.com. McCoy’s most recent book is The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste, which garnered international praise and has appeared in seven foreign editions. She is also the co-author of Thinking About Wine, as well as several children’s books, a parenting book, and a travel guide.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, McCoy attended graduate school at the University of London and New York University. She was a contributing editor on wine at Food & Wine for 25 years and has been a columnist for House Beautiful, Las Vegas Life, Shattered, and Drink. In addition, she has written on a wide variety of subjects for many national publications, including The New York Times and House & Garden. McCoy serves regularly as a wine judge in American and international competitions, appears on radio and television, and is a frequent speaker at wine festivals, symposia and industry events.

“The digital dawn in book publishing opens up a whole new world for publishers – direct to consumer sales. The delimiting factors to success will be finding ways to logically, and cost effectively, amass an audience of readers who don’t shop for content based on publisher brand. In this talk, he will offer a vision for community based content portals that work with multiple content types from books to blogs to video to magazines and beyond.”

To understand a bit more about Evan’s new role at Bloomsbury, please take a look at the press release copied below:

Bloomsbury makes senior appointment
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc announces today that Evan Schnittman has been appointed Managing Director Group Sales and Marketing, Print and Digital. He will lead Bloomsbury’s sales and marketing in the UK, US, and Germany across all divisions of the group.

Evan Schnittman comes to Bloomsbury after eight years at Oxford University Press where he was vice president of corporate & business development and responsible for digital partnerships and licensing across OUP’s various content divisions. Evan has over 24 years of publishing related business experience having held positions as Executive Vice President at The Princeton Review, Senior Editor at Little, Brown, and editorial and sales positions at FA Davis. Evan started his publishing career at Barnes & Noble’s main store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Evan is widely known in the industry as a thought leader – and is widely sought out to speak and write on the key issues facing content companies in a digital world – across Asia, Europe and the US. His blog, BlackPlasticGlasses, has become required reading for anyone wishing to understand book publishing in the digital age.

Nigel Newton, Chief Executive of Bloomsbury, said “I am delighted to welcome Evan to Bloomsbury. The creation of the role of a worldwide head of sales and marketing and the appointment of a highly experienced American with considerable digital experience reflect our view of the future of the publishing market place.”

We’re very excited to have Evan join us at the EWBC, and we’ll be announcing more exciting news in the coming days! So please give Evan a big welcome and stay tuned to further announcements!

EWBC 2010 is coming up sooner than many of us would like to admit. We know that most of you are thinking that October is a long, long way away. But guess what?! We’re living it already. Hence, we kindly ask that all of you step into our world for a moment and lend us your expertise.

This year, we’re working on a slightly different format for the event. Based on a considerable amount of great feedback we’re trying to squeeze in more content and ensuring it’s relevant as well as fun and exciting. In an effort to do this, we really need you, the heart and soul of the EWBC. We’re hoping that you will share your expertise to make suggestions on content, considering that many of you are very well educated in the ways of wine and the web.

We have various types of sessions, all in English at this stage, so as to offer a greater variety and range of content. First, we’ll do an hour and a half of “quick burst” 20 minute sessions. The concept: present an idea, get some immediate, creative, and specific feedback and then move on. In total, there will be 6 of these sessions. They will be fast and quick moving, but the idea is to give a “burst of information”, or better yet, pitch an idea to be discussed by others on their websites.

Second, we’ll have 3 one hour sessions, where you can really dig in and present an idea, flesh it out and engage the room. We will reward those whose ideas engage and challenge the audience, as opposed to a monologue, slowly lulling us to sleep.

Finally we have 3 one-hour Workshop sessions on offer. These are special because they’re aimed to not only teach the audience, but offer hands on experience! Video editing? Photography? Writing workshop? Tasting workshop? Sabrage? Who knows!? You tell us!

Hence, this is a Call for Papers from those who would like the chance to take ownership of one of these sessions. Send us a brief overview of your ideas by email or on our Contact form. As you know, we focus on robust, thoughtful discussions, as well as opportunities to helping us become better skilled. Consequently, we will favor those papers that are not self promotional, but rather explore ideas and/or help to educate.

The deadline for all submissions is the 15th of July, and you must be registered as a participant to apply. If we have a large number of quality submissions, we’ll turn it over to you, the registered participants, to decide. You are free to present your paper as an individual, or even a small group of people, but remember, we will be awarding points for quality, originality, creativity and style … as well as content. Let’s try to think outside the box!

Any questions?

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Time: 16:00 – 16:45 pm

Roundtable:

• Esteban Cabezas – The Wine Academy Spain
• Marcio Ferriera – ViniPortugal
• Evelyne Resnick – Wine Brands

Theme: We will have just spent a day looking at where the world wine and online media have converged; how video is changing the way we communicate about wine; how wineries and wine bloggers can communicate better. So to end the day, we want to look at the future, and what tomorrow will  bring us? Will we become more open, or will the inverse occur, creating virtual walls around individual content?

Questions:

• What role will blogging have in the next 5 years of wine communication?
• What importance will we place on video as we move into the next generation of wine communication?
• Do Twitter and Facebook serve a purpose or are they just steps in the evolution of wine communication?
• How can Generics better embrace the benefits of Social Media? And when will we see them doing more?
• The Social Wine world is highly personlized and time consuming at times. Is this method sustainable, or will we see less authentic forms of it in the future?

We’re excited to have him back in Europe for the EWBC, and with Doug’s recent jump into Twitter search, we felt participants would appreciate to learn more about his recent adventures.

1. After last year’s EWBC we have become a huge fan of both you and your work with Able Grape. But as a  year has come and gone, we’d love to know what has changed at Ablegrape and what features people should know about?

First, thanks for the kind words! I’m glad you are finding Able Grape useful. The biggest changes in the last year have been behind the scenes – the relevance of results has gotten quite a bit better, and the database is far larger and more complete: at last count there were more than 41,000 websites in the index, and about 23 million pages of content.

2. We to congratulate you on your new position as head of search for Twitter! Great news! So what you can tell us about the future of Twitter search and how this position might affect your work at Able Grape?

Well, I can’t say too much publicly about Twitter Search except that we have a fantastic team and I’m really excited to be a part of it. I’m also excited about what we’re building – search is key to Twitter and we’re working on making it a much more compelling experience. Because I’m mostly focused on Twitter these days, Able Grape is a labor of love I maintain in my spare time. It will continue to be uniquely useful, and to grow and update, though perhaps not as quickly as before. The major improvements I’ve been planning will eventually happen, but for now I’ve put them on the back burner.

3. Seeing how Twitter has become an integral part of the online wine world, how do you think your work at Twitter might help those of us working with wine online?

I became a huge fan of Twitter long before working at the company, because I found it connected me very quickly and organically with people with shared interests, concerns, and points of view (and sometimes people with opposing points of view, which is also great). By building a better, more compelling search experience we’ll be helping you find information faster, connect more quickly with relevant people in the wine industry, and help interested people find you and your tweets.

4. Over the years, you have clearly learned a significant amount from your experience building Able Grape. What lessons from

Ablegrape do you think might apply to Twitter search?

This is going to sound kind of lame, but I’m using pretty much everything I’ve learned. Working at Inktomi and Yahoo! for a number of years taught me about building large-scale search engines, and building Able Grape was an entrepreneurial and creative endeavor, tackling something that seemed impossible at the start and just doing it. Twitter is a bit like that: on one hand, it’s one of the world’s largest search engines, on the other it’s a relatively small team, with a lot of passion and creativity, tackling some very hard and exciting problems that haven’t been solved elsewhere.

5. You have told us on several occasions that you loved last year’s conference, a compliment we don’t take lightly, but what makes this year’s conference intriguing or exciting for you?

Well, the thing I’m most looking forward to is seeing the great people I met last year, getting to know new people, spending time discussing the wine world, the online world, tasting, and who knows, perhaps even drinking a little wine together. I’m also excited that the conference is in Portugal. I’ve only briefly been to Portugal before (to Buçaco) and can’t wait to experience a bit of Lisbon.

6. We’ve tasted some pretty amazing gems from your private cellar, but what we don’t is your expereince with Portuguese wine, and what are you looking forward to taste at the conference this year?

Though some of the best wines I’ve ever had are Portuguese (I’m a HUGE fan of old Madeira), the spectrum of Portuguese wines I’ve had is rather narrow, mostly limited to the obvious Port and Madeira (though I did have some fascinating old wines at the Palace Hotel in Buçaco on my one other visit). I like unique, off-the-beaten path wines. Portugal has a wealth of characterful native grape varieties. I’m excited to try lesser-known, good, inexpensive table wines made from these – the kind of wines I like to drink every day. Very few of them make it to the States so I’m really looking forward to learning a lot more.

On Saturday night, October 31st Charles will present an hour long tasting on Portuguese wine. His aim is both educate on the myriad styles of Portuguese wine and its intricate relationship with Portuguese tourism.  As Portugal remains a very rustic and undiscovered haven for wine lovers, Charles will do his very best to enlighten us as to the myriad of possibilities that await us – and knowing Charles, we may even be graced with a portion of the tasting done in song and verse.

What follows are a few brief questions we posed to Charles regarding the potential of Portugal as a wine tourism destination! Enjoy!

The EWBC this year in Lisbon will have a considerable amount of “first time” Portugal visitors, many of whom have online voices. Therefore, what message should bloggers take away from Portugal as a potential wine tourism destination, and what sets it apart from other locations?

Portugal’s key point of interest to wine-lovers is the great array of native grapes, from which most Portuguese wines are made. These taste different from any others in the world. And, whereas the wines of, say, Italy (another country with great native grapes) are pretty well-distributed in other countries, Portuguese wines haven’t achieved this international distribution yet, so you have to come to Portugal to find them. And Portugal is also a very beautiful country, not just the coasts, but with mountains, rivers and lakes inland, too.

Why do you feel it’s taken so long for Portugal to be recognized as a quality wine tourism destination?

A bit more focussed activity from Tourism of Portugal and ViniPortugal has certainly helped. The new network of motorways built since entering the EU has also made it much easier to get to parts of inland Portugal that were well-nigh inaccessible before. And European funds also became available to finance better equipment at wineries. That happened at the same as a new generation of winemakers was coming out of wine school, getting international winemaking experience, and making even better wines. It all adds up to a ‘new’ wine country within easy reach of all of Europe.

You visit Portugal frequently, however, as Portugal is far from the largest wine producing country, are you revisiting because you are interested in the evolution of the wines, or is Portugal expanding what it can offer? Where do you see Portugal’s wines in 5 years time?

I’m continually amazed by the number of good new labels that come to the market each time I look at Portuguese wines. I try to keep up, but it’s tricky when I am also writing and talking about wines from other countries. I think we’re reaching a point of consolidation, rather than further expansion. But most of the ‘new’ producers are people who have been growing grapes for years, centuries, even. They’ve stopped supplying grapes to the local co-op, or selling their wine to larger companies, and trying to get added value by selling wines under their own labels. This will probably continue for a while, but in this economic climate, at a moment of international wine over-supply, I think there’ll be a slow-down. In 5 years I hope good Portuguese wines will have better international distribution, and more people know what unique flavours Portuguese grapes can give.

Your book is the “definitive” resource for a gourmand traveling in Portugal. What is the key point to remember when planning or taking a trip through the Portuguese wine country?

If you’re taking an ordinary-length holiday, I’d concentrate on one part of the country, rather than trying to cover the whole of Portugal in one gulp. If you take one of Portugal’s three main airports, in Porto, Lisbon and Faro, as starting points, you can cover the north, centre and south respectively. Plan as far ahead as possible, and make hotel bookings and appointments with wineries if you like to do things that way. If you can make bookings through websites, great. If not, remember that a lot of smaller Portuguese hotels and restaurants aren’t yet brilliant at answering emails. Phone is a better way to contact them, but you may well have to attempt speaking Portuguese!

Finally, what is the “long weekend” recommendation for a European traveler who finds a cheap plane ticket to Portugal? Where do you go?

What do you see, assuming this is their first visit? I’d start with Lisbon, a wonderful, historic city, with plenty of good food, bars, clubs and things to see. Lisbon will give you a snapshot of Portuguese culture. My next weekend would be in Porto, also historic, totally different from Lisbon, with boat-trips up the Douro and visits to port cellars in Vila Nova de Gaia.

Consequently, this year, we intend to change this dynamic. For the first time, and hopefully not the last, we are going to offer a small group of Friday workshops for wine producers who want to learn more about blogging, bloggers and social media. In this way, we hope to provide wine producers who are looking for new ways to brand themselves, with the basic tools they need to take the first steps.

This year’s sessions will be limited to 50 producers and will cost 150 euros per individual. For regional governments who want to offer discounts to their producers please contact us for details. We will be providing lunch and 3 sessions in which we discuss blogging and social tasting note sites/communities.

In addition, we will also be conducting an “action session” where you will be given a “quick start guide” on how to enter the online world effectively. Lunch is included in an informal setting to allow for dialog and reflection. Over the next few months, we’ll be fleshing out the workshops, giving you more specific information on what material will be covered. Of course, if you as a producer have any specific questions, or subjects that you would like covered, please don’t hesitate to voice your thoughts in the comments below.

Cheers,
Ryan Opaz

Presenters:

Ryan Opaz – Founder of www.Catavino.net and www.Wineblogger.info, Ryan has been traveling and writing about Spanish and Portuguese wines for 5 years. He has spoken at the London Wine Fair, Wine Pleasures Tourism Workshops, FITUR, and will be speaking at the WineFuture Conference in Rioja this November.
Andre Riberinho – Andre is a co-founder of online social wine service Adegga.com. He’s a software engineer with more than 10 years of experience on the Internet. He has spoken in such places as the London Wine Fair and the Reboot Conference and is an organizer of the 300-person SHiFT conference in Lisbon. As an entrepreneur Andre as also invented the AVIN, an ISBN-like unique code for wine that has been then developed by Adegga.

Workshops:

10:00 -10:30 – Web 2.0 – Self-publishing today
10:30 -11:30 – Wineries Blogging – Ryan Opaz www.catavino.net
11:30 -12:30 – Wine Bloggers – How to interact – Andre Riberinho www.adegga.com
12:30 -12:45 – Coffee Break
12:45 -13:30 – Building a blog and using it – Ryan and Andre

Cost: 150 euros/per person

Attendees: 50 participant limit

USB Gift for Participants:

• links to all presentations
• links to all websites mentioned
• free premium account on Adegga (1yr)
• Special Price for Workshop and EWBC registration: 300 euros (normal price:345)

This event is still looking for sponsors. If you are someone who wants to show support for online development in the wine world please consider helping us to make this the best workshop it can be. Send us an email at: contact@catavino.net or call us +34 656 433 063

All responses will be considered and hopefully commented on by others (threaded comments are great). We will then ask some of the more popular contributors to expand their ideas into a post, which will be published on this blog by mid to late summer. Of those expanded topics, only some of these will become the official roundtable discussions, while others may find a life of their own right here on this blog.

For now, just let us know what’s on your mind!

Here at the EWBC, we’re interested in addressing your needs. We want to ensure that the speakers we bring on board excite you, motivate you, and answer the questions that have burning in the back of your mind for quite some time in relation to “The Future of the Social Wine Brand”. Therefore, we’re opening the conversation to all of you, asking for your suggestions on speakers. (Flickr photo by laurenatclemson)

Mind you, our goal is to attract speakers from around the world. Regardless if they are in Scotland or South Africa, if they are someone who you feel would be a great candidate, we want to hear about it.

So who do you feel is the ideal speaker for this year’s EWBC 2009?