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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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.

Please note that we will have a sign-up page in the coming month that will let you choose from the trips available.

Amorim is the world’s largest natural cork company, selling three billion closures every year to thousands of wineries in all continents. That may sound mammoth, but with 468 million Euros in annual sales, we are a tiny speck when compared to what some plastic and aluminum companies can sell. As such, we try to make sure the closure debate continues to move away from the one-sided, almighty “I can deliver perfection in this world” initial phase to a fact-based approach, bringing the debate to more rational levels and leveling the playing field.

Amorim has been a supporter of the conference since the very first edition of the EWBC and have never doubted that Ryan, Gabriella and the whole team behind that original Rioja event, were right in identifying the blogosphere as a key medium going forward. As mentioned before, we need to level the playing field when discussing wine closures, and the blogosphere is the great equalizer.

We are opening the Amorim doors to opinion makers that have often discussed wine closures but, in many cases, have not had the chance to collect first-hand, critical information about cork and cork forests. We will visit cork forests where Amorim sources its raw material from, follow the material through different closure production steps, including visiting the world’s largest wine stopper manufacturing plant, and finally, talk to the people that make this entire process happen. In addition, we’ll taste some delicacies from those cork forests while sipping some local wine. So we are taking the whole gang onto a bus for an encompassing and informative visit, while having the first closure debate on wheels. We want that debate to be no-holds barred; consequently, bring all of your questions, concerns and confusions!

9h00 – Pick up at VIP Grand Lisboa Hotel

10h00 – Visit Lagoalva (Cork Forest and Estate)
Its long history as a wine producer can be seen from the fact that in 1888 it was present at the Portuguese Industrial Exhibition with 600 wine casks.

The estate, which formerly belonged to the 2nd Duke of Palmela, has passed to his descendants and is now the property of Sociedade Agrícola da Quinta da Lagoalva de Cima, S.A. The 4th Duke of Palmela introduced horses and bulls to the estate in 1909. The estate’s Lusitano horses were bred from brood mares of the National Stud (Coudelaria Nacional), later improved with the use of stallions from the stud owned by Manuel Tavares Veiga.

12h30 – Lunch at Lagoalva with a Tejo D.O.C. region’s wine tasting
The Portuguese Government has announced the new D.O.C. region of wine production. Tejo is the a new region according to the Portuguese Ministry of Agriculture. The new region is a requalification of the former  Ribatejo region (now  Tejo).  The new Tejo region will offer wines called Vinho Regional Tejo. And, it will offer six sub-regions Almeirim, Cartaxo, Chamusca, Coruche, Santarém and Tomar. Tejo has 20,000 metric acres of wines growth, offering about  10 million certified bottles a year.

14h00 – Visit to AI Coruche
In this unit, as large as several football fields, huge quantities of harvested cork planks are stored for seasoning, right before cork initiates its production processing. At this recently-inaugurated plant, you will be able to see first-hand some of the quality measures designed and implemented by Amorim to produce a high quality product as demanded by the market.

15h15 – Return to hotel

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