Tag: blogging

Celebrating One Year of Living Napa Cabulous

Happy Birthday to me! Well, to my blog, Living Napa Cabulous. While I had been tweeting about wine for years prior, I decided to launch the blog a year ago to expand my wine reviews and travel tips beyond 140 characters. I’ve learned and experienced a lot over the past year, many of these memories thanks, in part, to this venture.

If there’s one big lesson I’ve learned, it’s that blogging takes more time than I initially thought! Juggling two blogs, a (new) full time job that requires travel, charity work, a fairly balanced sleep schedule, gym time and any form of social life is challenging. Though I lost some steam in the frequency of my posting, I still keep up frequently on Twitter and post here when I have something really remarkable to share.  

Another lesson I learned is that the blogging community is both warm and competitive at the same time. Through blogging, I have met some Living Napa Cabuloustruly amazing people, including the wine-loving, Green Bay Packer Backers I live-tweet through each game with on Sundays. I also met fellow wine lovers here in Chicago who have since become some of our best friends – including the great minds and palates behind www.BarlinWine.com and the new Tasting Scout app, as well as others who I’ve met through local events.  Just this past weekend, we got together with our Barlin Wine friends, which often means we get to introduce each other to wines the other may not have tried or would otherwise be thrilled to taste. Our regular night out line-up included the difficult-to-get Larkmead 2009 Cabernet Franc, Wren Hop Vineyards Siren’s Lure 2009 Pinot Noir and Merryvale 2008 Profile, in addition to some tasty port from Prager Port Works. (For the record, the Wren Hop was my favorite of the night, which says a lot since I’m not ordinarily a Pinot lover.) Continue reading Celebrating One Year of Living Napa Cabulous

The Evolution of Wine Recommendations

I’ve mentioned that by day, I work in word-of-mouth and social media marketing at Zocalo Group in Chicago. We specialize in making our clients the most talked about,  recommended and chosen brands in their categories. The idea behind this ties closely to my interests with wine, knowing that scores tend to be the ultimate form of a recommendation. I recently wrote a blog post about how wine recommendations are evolving, as well as the role wine bloggers play for the emerging Millennial market.

Here’s an excerpt from my post:

“Through [blogging], I’ve observed a fascinating, ongoing (and sometimes polarizing) discussion over the way wine is talked about, recommended and chosen. For the past 40 years, wine critic and founder of The Wine Advocate, Robert Parker, has helped to shape and define what success looks like for Napa Valley wineries. But, let’s face it, every individual has their own taste preferences and an entire industry has revolved around appealing to one person’s palate.

Today, there is a proliferation of bloggers sharing about wine, each in their own way… However, do wineries even care when we give a positive recommendation, since they can’t create more of their small-production wines to sell? A fellow blogger, who did not disclose he was such, recently told me he was talking about Yelp with a winery host during a tasting in Napa. Her closing comment was that, “there’s only one thing worse than a Yelper – and that’s a wine blogger.” What?! Could this be why IntoWine.com’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the U.S. Wine Industry has featured only one blogger/online personality in the top 20? We have to consider that the Baby Boomers who brought much of the buying power (and were swayed by scores like Parker’s) have begun to be replaced by younger, socially-driven drinkers and Millennials, who are seeking high-quality wines at a much, much lower price point.

My advice to bloggers, critics of bloggers and to wineries would be to embrace the evolving landscape. Socially-minded drinkers are only going to grow and our sites are likely the places they’ll go for recommendations. Why should any one person, score or method limit the way we think about wine?”

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Image courtesy of DrinkNectar.com.