Wine Country Sunset
Great sunsets can be found anywhere, but this particular one happens to be from Sonoma County’s wine country. Just below the silhouettes of the trees, rows of grape vines lie in shadow. — Alder Yarrow

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Robert M. Parker Jr. stirred up a storm when he discovered Twitter and proceeded to diss about half the world’s wine geeks as “anti-flavor wine elites.” This bore an eerie resemblance to the work of a vinous Teabagger.

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Those of you who also follow my twitter feed (see the little tab on the left hand side of my home page) will know that I’m spending the week at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers. This is my fifth year attending the Symposium, and my fourth year as a speaker.

Tomorrow I lead a panel discussion featuring Steve Heimoff, Patrick Comiskey, Doug Cook, and Joe Roberts about the role of New Media in wine writing. But for the past two days I’ve been experiencing the symposium as a participant, which means hanging out with a lot of people who are actually good enough at writing about wine to get paid for it.

You can take a look at the Symposium web site if you’re curious as to the agenda for the conference. And I’ll be writing about it more here on Vinography (and tweeting live).

Get a bunch of wine writers together in one place (doesn’t happen hardly ever), lubricate them up with some wine, and you get all sorts of conversations. The finer points of pizza dough. Which berries are relevant to describing wine and which ones are just pretentious. Martial arts. Who do wine writers serve — readers, consumers, the wine industry? Are wine writers part of the wine industry or not? Are there things you shouldn’t ask winemakers about? Is the wine industry going to ever recover? The perception of acidity versus the actual acidity, and what happens to wine over time. The bad eggs in the blogging world that PR folks love to hate. Which Napa Cabernets have the best aging potential. Whether or not it has been proven definitively that high alcohol wines don’t age. Do the wine magazines have any integrity? What is SEO and why the hell should wine writers care? Is there a revolution going on here? Where are we all going and why are we in this handbasket?

More to come in cogent form when I can steal a few moments away to collect my thoughts. And when this wine glass in my hand is finally empty.

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