Every year we have a wealth of photographers snapping away at the EWBC. This year we hope to do a session on photography like last years which was one of the most talked about sessions from 2011. We have our flickr group and we have some pretty cool pics in there, but we want to do more. 

Starting as soon as they start arriving, we are going to put up a photo gallery on the EWBC website. But to do this we need photos from you! Here's what we are thinking.

Each person can submit 10 or so of their favorite photos. The photos need to be your photos and not someone elses. 

We will publish a photo gallery on the EWBC site, and each photo will be linked to any link that you the creator wants to link too. Plus a title for each pic.

Thinking we'll try to do 3 galleries:

• People
• Events
• Wine and Food

Send me an email if your interested. I need a text doc with the titles, and links.

Then after I hear from you, I'll have you send me a zip file with http://ge.tt All the image details I'll explain after I hear from you. 

Please be patient, I'll do my best to get these up quick, but with 3 trips this month, I might not be that fast! 

Thanks for sharing!

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Ok on twitter I asked: What is the #1 thing stopping EU wineries(in 2012) from taking the web more serious? 

I have a long list of answers in my back pocket, but want some feedback. So I'll post it here where we can discuss more effectively. 

In truth I'm going to be using some of these answers to craft workshops I'm going to lead this year. So I hope we get some good debate! 

Ok...Go!

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Love the Source theme of the EWBC 2012 and as suggested in EWBC 2012 Theme: Getting to the Source recent evidence points to areas of Turkey being the original source of domestic vine cultivation and possibly winemaking.

This is a great opportunity to combine the 2011 theme of storytelling with the 2012 theme: The story of wine as we know it.

As some of you know I’m an archaeologist though not working in this part of the world but rather in northern hemisphere in Sweden. I aim to make 2012 a marrige between my two mistresses: wine & archaeology.

What we today call Turkey might have be the birth place for wine production, to be frank, that really isn’t the most interesting thing, there will always be someone looking for next “oldest find” – what is interesting that in this region some of the earliest steps toward wine production took place and we’ll have the opportunity to be a part of it – to taste the resulat so far.

If that's not enough it will also be held in an exiting place, the ancient city of Izmir that has a history that spans some 3,500 years.

For me this are formidable excuses to read up on the history or rather prehistory of wine and try to build that into the experience of the 2012 EWBC – now the history of wine is much more than just a possible birth-place – if there is one such thing – it’s the traditions connected to wine, it’s the methods used to make, keep, store, export and import and of course enjopy wine. It the wines themselves and the way from that first controlled fermentaion to the the multitudes of wines we have today, the transgression from amphora’s to bag-in-boxes, how and when we drink wines, the costumes sourrondig our drinking habits etc. etc. Wine is part of our past and our present and in som a link to past generations, an experience shared through the ages.

The really cool thing with wine is – we can really give the complete heritage experience it’s still here – available – we can smell it, feel it, taste it and share that in stories, blog-posts and tweets. Join me and take this opportunity to go a little deeper, under the skin so to speak, and dig into wine history as we await the future party in the city of Izmir 2012… then lets party like it was 2012 BC …and write about it and if you do, please send me a link!

A first post on this is published here!

Magnus Reuterdahl

Aqua Vitae vinblogg (in Swedish) & Testimony of a wine junkie (in English)

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From Wink Lorch

I'm looking into various ways of monetizing www.winetravelguides.com and one of the many things I'm studying are Affiliate Schemes. I'm hoping that maybe we could use this forum to share experiences and help all of us interested in monetizing. I do realize that the success of affiliate schemes is  inextricably linked to traffic on a website/blog and that's a whole other  discussion. Here are the two sides I'm looking at....

1) Affliliate Schemes that I can put on my website to earn me some cash if visitors click on them. I'm looking at individual, highly relevant schemes like Steve de Long's map and poster products and I'm also looking at much bigger schemes that don't compete with my own recommendations on the website, like Skyscanner and others for flight bookings/car rental etc. If anyone has any experience and can share it, that would be much appreciated. 

With this in mind, I'm attending an event next Tuesday 22nd November evening in London, and have been asked to spread the word around wine/food bloggers in or near London. This is a Travel Bloggers tweetup event and is sponsored by Affiliate Window with a programme as follows:

Attitude Travel: "The Best Job in the World: How to run a Travel Writing Business out of a
Backpack."

Expedia: "Why bloggers and travel writers are valuable" 

Digital Window: "How to use the Affiliate Window interface"

Ad Net Media Network: "How to monetize the content on your website"

If you want to go, just sign up through your Twitter Account at http://twtvite.com/dwtravelevent but they need to know very soon if you are coming!

2) Affiliate Schemes that I can use to sell my guides on other peoples' websites and blogs - this is what Steve does obviously and there are various ways of doing it. I'd be interested if anyone has any success stories with selling products this way and how you did it. But, I'd also be interested to know who thinks they might want to sell my PDF guides (and/or the annual membership) on their blogs and websites and whether you think there would be any uptake given your own visitor numbers and profiles. I'd probably offer 30-50% commission on sales depending on how much it costs me to set up and/or what commission I'd have to pay someone like e-junkies if I used them
to manage the scheme.

Hoping that this is an appropriate way to use this new forum!

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I love wines that I cannot describe. Readers who know me, know that I tend to prolong the tastings (and I apologize for what may sound exaggerated to some). I love the smells, and to spend a lot of time figuring out what is on the surface and depth of some wines.

But sometimes I can not describe some wines. There are two main reasons why this happens to me. First, when the wine has great quality, and it’s at a point of amazing  maturity. In this case, everything is well blended, we cannot distinguish the aromas, we just feel everything – flowers, fruits, woods, herbs, finally …- but  we cannot tell exactly where an aroma begins and another ends.

The second case is difficult for me to describe some wines because I have some kind of emotional connection to it, something like “from my childhood”. Let me try to explain: when I started to drink wine, or,  even better, when I began to taste wine (because I started drinking wine way before I started paying attention to what I was doing), that means my “wine tasting childhood”, what I drank the most were Spanish wines because I lived, studied and worked in Madrid. As a student, of course, I started drinking cheap wine.Then, with my fellows students from Escuela de Hosteleria, each of us would put in a little money so we could buy better wines. We tasted a lot of wines from Rioja, basically. And, yes, we can talk about different terroirs, grape percentages, producers and all the things that make a difference in the wine style. But, still, today, when I open a bottle of Rioja, it can be from a modern producer, an old school one, a cheap, or expensive, I don’t care: I smell Rioja. And I cannot explain those aromas.

All this to explain that tonight I am drinking Contino Reserva 2004 and I am being teleported to the years of 1996-2000 when I lived in that beautiful and generous country. And, what it seems to me is that those aromas are those of nights out with friends, in wine bars that were starting to get more in fashion, drinking different wines by the glass, trying to smell their differences (it was so hard at that time). I smell the bus travelling to Jerez, drinking wine in disposible cups. I smell the sunset in wintertime when gitanos would sell roasted chestnuts and the aromas of the charcoal would be on my clothes. I smell the paint and the wood shavings at the painting atelier where I used to work for extra money, carving wooden pannels for the artist guy to paint. I do not know, maybe the smell of nuts, perhaps the wood note, or the charcoal, or even all the blended wines by the glass from the bar … maybe I  just smell Madrid or maybe Spain.The wines aromas and the mouth feeling with its good acidity, firm tannins, but so fine, this vanilla aftertaste  with a hint of cold coffee …  maybe those are just the aromas and flavors of good memories of good things.

So the whole question, when tasting wine, and trying to be objective, can become a difficult one when some aromas don't go from our nose to our brain, they go to our heart. Sometimes, trying to describe wines objectively can be a hard task, if we are trying to give objective information to our readers, trying to tell them what are the wines aromas and not if you like them or not. I always thought that my job was to be objective, but now I can accept, in some cases, that my heart gets a little bit in my work. Probably, good writting can be a little bit of both. Thoughts?

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You know this monster, I know you do! He's the little gremlin who lives in the back of our minds whispering sweet nothings into our ear to tweet inane one-liners, post untitled photos and "like" with such frequency that your community wonders if you can form a full sentence. And no matter how hard you try, taking a breathe to ponder an idea before your finger goes trigger happy, he's hitting over the head yelling, "post, post post".

Granted, the Quantity Monster has his merits. When you're eager to build buzz for a conference or an event, this is your man, err monster. He's the guy who's going to get the community excited and help build emotion. But when all is said and done, and there are hundreds of untagged and untitled photos with zero context, tweets unrelated to any hashtag, and snippets of ideas posted on facebook without any expanded reflection, what then?

Maybe this is where Quality Monster comes to the table? With his furry mitts wrapped around his pipe, his larger than life monocle propped infront of his third eye, he calmly suggests that we take a breathe and ponder our idea before sharing it with the world. Rather than broadcasting his ideas on various microblogs with lightening speed, he'll analyze his thoughts, going so far as to talk with others first, or writing several drafts, before he presses "post". His photos are always carefully chosen, edited, titled, tagged and published in a set based on a theme. As for his tweets? Well, those are carefully crafted, of course, meticulously spelled and hashtag friendly. In short, he wants his information to be thoughtful and valuable to the community at large.

The question is, do we need both? Sure, Quantity and Quality Monster bring an invaluable box of tools that are incredibly useful in the world of social media, but where is the balance?

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An interesting new development on Facebook for sharing content and having discussions with readers who don't speak your language - Automatic translations

http://wineconversation.com/do-you-speak-my-language/

What do you think? Have you tried it, and will it be effective, or just damage your credibility with poor quality translations?

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"Should the BDWA accept qualifying submissions that are published behind paywalls, accessible only to paying subscribers, or should all content have to be open and free? Why?"

Please take the poll below and leave us your thoughts and comments in the comments area below. We'd love to hear what you think about this particular issue while we complete the planning for the BDWA which open for submissions on December 1st, 2011

(unfortunately we cannot embed polls, so please leave your vote on that page, but come back to give us your thoughts here)

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