American Wine Bloggers’ Conference Heats Up

As a result of the success of the first North American Wine Bloggers’ Conference in October 2008, Open Wine Consortium and Zephyr Wine Adventures have again teamed up for the 2009 Wine Bloggers’ Conference, set for July 24-26. While last year’s conference featured wines and wineries primarily from Sonoma County, this year’s conference has been expanded to include Napa County vintners and wineries.

Flamingo Conference Resort and Spa in Santa Rosa will again play host to wine bloggers, new media innovators, and wine industry leaders.  The cost of the conference is $95 for citizen wine bloggers (those unaffiliated with a business or organization), $195 for industry wine bloggers (those whose blog is affiliated with a winery, retail store, or other business or organization), and $295 for non-blogger participants (industry, media relations professionals, friends and family, etc). If you are a member of Open Wine Consortium, you will receive a discount of $10.

A look at what you get for that:

• Discounted hotel rates (until rooms are gone) including free wireless
• Live Wine Blogging session where you will taste, rate, and blog about wines presented by owners and vintners themselves
• Sonoma Grand Tasting featuring up to 40 top Sonoma County wineries
• Napa Grand Tasting featuring up to 40 top Napa County wineries
• Two dinners and three lunches – with wine included
• Napa Rocks day with a progressive tour of three Napa wineries
• Conference content including breakout sessions, keynote speakers, an Unconference, etc

Not included in the conference price are your hotel, two breakfasts, and transportation to and from the conference.

Winecast Radio talked to Joel Vincent, from Open Wine Consortium and vintank.com about the changes in store for this year’s conference. You can listen to the show online. Just go to the Winecast show at radiotime then scroll down to Unfiltered 9: The Return, March 31st.

We received  some great computer bags, wine samples and other great items from our conference sponsors last year. The only complaint some of us had was there was no WBC apparel or other gear for us to purchase to commemorate the event.

Since the Flamingo is such a retro and kitschy hotel, we thought it might be fun to get some bowling shirts made up. And that’s where you come in. Readers will be invited to participate in a competition to design a logo for the shirts. The contest will be hosted by Another Wine Blog, with some other bloggers helping out with production and promotion. We’ll call for entries and provide details soon, so start thinking about your design.

In the meantime, if you’re a blogger or wine industry person, go over and sign up for the conference before it sells out.

Cheers!

~ Amy Corron Power,
aka WineWonkette