One highlight of the food and wine parings included boiled shrimp and cocktail sauce with Riouolo Prosecco Vento ($10). This off-dry sparkler was full of sweet apples and acid aplenty to go with the gulf shrimp. I really enjoyed this wine with the shrimp, but it would be a little sweet for me as an aperitif.

We also tried Riouolo’ Spago Rosso, Sheraz ($12.50). Sparkling red wines are somewhat of a curiosity. I have been served sparkling red wine in Germany, and it is made by several producers in Australia, but this is my first Italian. The wine is opaque and the froth a pleasant purple. In the mouth, this is a medium-full bodied, dry sparkler with dark fruit. The Spago Rosso was a hit with smoked sausage we had brought home from Smitty’s Barbeque in Lockhart, Texas.

We also had a bottle of ’07 Laurenz Singing Gruner Veltliner ($13). We liked the ’06 Singer from Laurenz and the ’07 was just as good. This vintage has a little more body than the previous, but is still a medium sized mouthful of fruit and light. We really enjoyed paring the Veltliner with a mushroom, onion, and goat cheese tart that was accompanied by a garden salad. The sweetness of the onions and the tangy goat cheese simply played with the wine — it was great.

Perhaps the most interesting pairing of the evening was a sweet potato gratin from Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill Cookbook and the 2006 Macon-Bussieres Le Monsard from Dominique Lafon ($25 on close out). The gratin was rich and sweet with a little heat that simply married the mineral acid of the Monsard.

We finished with chocolate covered strawberries and a bottle of Perrie-Jouet. Everything was simply wonderful, it was another great party without Hallmark.

Howell Mountain was one of my favorite areas, and the fine wines produced by Ridge and Dunn from that region were among my favorite wines. So when Craig Camp of the The Wine Camp Blog asked if WineEnabler.com wanted to try Cornerstone’s 2004 Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon, I was thrilled.

Cornerstone was founded in 1991 by a couple of doctors from Tennessee, Michael Dragutsky and David Sloas. From the start, the two sought to produce premium California Cabs, and they have been rather successful at doing just that. Their wines routinely score in the mid-90s in Wine Spectator, and Cornerstone’s winemaker, Celia Masyczek, was named Food and Wine’s winemaker of the year in 2008.

Cornerstone produces limited quantities of two wines, a Napa Valley Cabernet and their flagship Howell Mountain designated Cabernet. The 2004 Howell Mountain is a decidedly New World wine. When we tasted the 2004, the wine was dark and foreboding on the nose when first opened. With a little air time, the wine showed red and dark berries, black licorice, and earth. In the mouth, the wine continues to show power and grace. Fine-grained tannin support a full array of fruit that goes on forever. This wine has a great mouth feel and enough acid to pair with food other than a grilled ribeye.

For my palate, many American wines go too far. Trying to make powerful wine, wineries often fall into the trap of putting too much of everything in their wine, producing a strong wine lacking grace or finesse. Celia Masyczek avoids this trap. The 2004 Howell Mountain is a powerful, complex wine with nuance and character. If you are a California Cab lover, this wine is one for you.

This was my first large-scale wine tasting ever, and like Hardy said over at Dirty South Wine (one of our new blogging friends from the weekend), the most important rule learned is to “Spit, spit, spit”. I couldn’t agree more, and blessedly it only took me one hung-over morning, not two or three, to figure it out.

At the live-blogging speed tasting, we sat at one of fifteen or so tables in a large banquet hall. Every five minutes, a new wine pourer would come around, introduce his/her wine, pour it, and then those of us at the table would taste, talk, and blog. I must admit that prior to participating, this event didn’t really appeal to me or Neil. We like to think a little bit before we talk, so the speed-blogging element was an obvious conflict. But we participated anyway and just blogged our thoughts a little later during the conference. I’m glad we did, because the round-table discussion combined with the free-loving pours of wine were a perfect “beginning to the conference ice-breaker”.

After a tsunami-tasting of at least a hundred wines from New Zealand (mostly Sauvignon Blancs and Pinot Noirs), we had our first night’s dinner at our hotel, the Flamingo Resort (which we all loved and would revisit without a second thought). The keynote speaker was Wine Library TV’s online superstar Gary Vaynerchuk, whose talk was mostly filled with messages of “just do it” and “all success takes is hard work”.

The second night’s dinner was at Sebastiani Winery, which was very pleasant and offered a great buffet of food. (And the drunken bus ride back to the hotel was a true highlight of my trip.) The keynote address this night was by Alice Feiring. The tone of her talk was very different than Gary’s, and it focused on blogger integrity and finding a unique voice.

If Gary is a business-person, Alice is an artist. Both their talks were, in my opinion, excellent. I couldn’t imagine two better people to speak to us at the first Wine Bloggers Conference, and I applaud the event organizers for really going the distance on this one.

But really, this entire event was hands-down fantastic. We really feel reinvigorated about wine blogging, and we made great friends from all around the country – we particulary enjoyed meeting Hardy from Dirty South Wine, Erin from VinTwined, Xandria and Liza from the BrixChicks, and Denise from WineSleuth. Take care everyone, and we’ll see you next year, for sure!

On its surface, the Wine Bloggers Conference was a group of hobbyist and industrial folks getting together to drink wine and exchange ideas, but the whole is often larger than the sum of its parts. During the conference, I met many wonderful people and had a great time, but what impressed me the most were the love, knowledge, and respect the attendees showed for wine.

A new alternative to wine criticism

The depth of the knowledge and the acuity of the collective palate in the wine blogging community offers a new way for the wine world to share reviews and information that will compete with or replace traditional wine reporting. I do not expect Wine Spectator to stop the presses anytime soon, but I believe that their approach to providing wine reviews and wine information is going to be replaced eventually.

The collective base of information and reviews found on wine blogs, many of which were represented at the conference, is a kind of well-educated “Zagat” survey. Aggregating the knowledge of this community provides a clear and compelling alternative to main stream wine media.

Sites like CellarTracker and Snooth bring this information together and let the end user see what lots of people think about a particular wine, not just a few industry insiders. When you add to this wealth of information search services like AbleGrape, you begin to see the emergence of a different way for wine information to be presented to end users that gives bloggers an important role.

We don’t all need to be at the top to have a voice

The interesting thing about this movement is that it does not require all bloggers to reach the heights of Wine Library TV, Vinography, Fermentation, Alice Feiring, or Good Wine Under $20. Doing a little search engine optimization, exchanging some links and supporting each other as we continue to blog is all that is needed to give the entire wine blogging community the online presence it needs to reach the general wine public and have our collective voices heard.

Like all revolutions it is not easy to say where this will lead the wine blogging community, but I am sure looking forward to finding out.

You grab your iPhone or Blackberry, connect to a site, and enter your dinner choice. The mythical program then determines your location via the GPS function of your handheld device and hunts up the online version of the wine list or wine inventory at your current location. The program then cross applies your specific taste profile and your meal information and recommends the best wine.

What a great idea! However, there is nothing even close to this available yet on the internet. The programs we’ve experimented with fall into two categories. Programs that require the end user to have lots of knowledge about wine to use, or programs that return information that is of little value unless you know a lot about wine.

The need for an ontological map of wine

Programmers that are trying to construct our mythical sommelier application face several challenges. First, there is no generally accepted ontological mapping for wine, using the idea of the OWL Web Ontology Language.

The OWL Web Ontology Language is intended to provide a language that can be used to describe the classes and relations between them that are inherent in Web documents and applications.

Currently, wine searching relies almost strictly on keyword searches, weighted by the numbers of incoming/outgoing links, which leads to a problem of scale.

The World Wide Web as it is currently constituted resembles a poorly mapped geography… The sheer mass of this data is unmanageable without powerful tool support. In order to map this terrain more precisely, computational agents require machine-readable descriptions of the content and capabilities of Web accessible resources. These descriptions must be in addition to the human-readable versions of that information.

Even though the idea of an OWL Web Ontology Language has been around for some time, and wine is a standard example used to demonstrate the use of ontology in programming, no widely accepted (and employed) wine ontology has emerged.

No ontology leads to inflexible searches and results

The absence of a robust ontology for wine, as well as the reliance on results driven by keywords and link popularity, lead directly to a second problem. Sites or applications that present the results of aggregated wine information do not have a flexible way to search through or present the information to end users.

For example, CellarTracker.com has over 700,000 wine reviews. But to access the data, you must enter the name of a specific wine. This is fine if you are just comparing tasting notes. However, if you want to select a wine for dinner, the vast collection of reviews has little value. To pair food and wine, you must enter wine names individually and manually sort through the reviews, hoping the reviewer has recorded food pairings in their review.

Another aggregating site is Snooth.com. Programmatically, Snooth goes through online wine reviews from end users, wineries, winemakers, and retailers to produce as complete a listing as possible of information pertaining to the wine you have entered. Snooth will also use Wine.com and Wine-Searcher.com to locate the wine.

Unfortunately, this service also requires the user to know the name of a wine to use it. If the user wants a wine that meets certain criteria, he or she is limited to price and location. To use our food and wine pairing example again, you cannot ask for a wine that goes with barbecued ribs.

Perhaps Snooth will or is planning to move in this direction. But collecting data from previously written reviews can only get you so far. They are still limited to the basic keyword/link idea, and there will likely not be enough information for a search accurately to return food and wine pairing suggestions.

A programming call to action

As members of the online wine community, we think that this is a problem that can be solved, if we are willing to work together in the spirit of the open-source model. So WineEnabler.com is looking for interested wine bloggers to work together with on this problem. If you are interested in joining us in discussing the development of a standard, open-source wine ontology, let’s talk in the comments or email us at: