Essential Tips for a Great Trip to Wine Country

This is a guest post from Todd Broderick, a fellow Boston-based wine enthusiast.

It’s October and it is snowing in Boston. . .oh, how I long for a visit to the beautiful hills of wine country.

Over the past several years I have been fortunate enough to make several trips out to wine country from Boston with my wife and friends. We usually stay in Sonoma for 3 or 4 days and make our way over to Napa, up to Healdsburg and Dry Creek and several other stops throughout the region. I find that I love traveling there virtually any time of year, but if you have never been, the fall is a beautiful time to go. Depending on the weather that year, you’ll catch the end of harvest or you will be in the midst of crush, either way both valleys are awash with activity. Even for those that don’t have an obsession with wine; it is still a pretty cool sight to see the magic happen from grape to bottle!

I could write about both Sonoma and Napa for days, but I’ll keep this brief for the benefit of all, and focus on Northern Sonoma. When traveling to wine country, you can’t lose, even if you choose to spend your time on what I call the “auto-mile of wineries” known as route 29, running though Napa. However, the advice I have given friends is to take the less traveled path and make your way through Sonoma. You will be enamored with the sense of place and the spirit of the people and you will leave with a definite plan to return. This is not meant to be comprehensive, by any means, I am simply making an effort to provide one possible starting point for your travels. If you ask friends who have been, to recommend their favorites, you will get just as many differing opinions back as inquiries made. I tried to base the advice below on my experiences over multiple visits. I feel like this takes out some of the emotional ties to a place based on who you were with, the weather that day, the extra large pour from the tasting room host, etc.

While all of Sonoma is beautiful, if you head north into the Healdsburg and Geyserville you will be rewarded with beautiful landscapes and phenomenal wineries.

But before we get to where you might want to start, I’ve got a few general tips to make your trip a little more pleasurable:

• Call ahead. Think about the wineries you might like to stop by and give them a call. Many have open tasting rooms, but if you are not sure, give a ring and see. Most of the people I have encountered have been great and many are willing to set up a specific tasting and/or tour, which can make the visit a lot more interesting. You may get the winemaker or owner on the phone, which has resulted in some of our best visits.
• Start with a plan! If you aim for 3 to 4 wineries in a day you will give yourself plenty of time and not feel rushed or stressed. It also leaves you time to make random stops at places that look good along the way.
• Bring some cheese! Always stop for a good lunch and dinner, the quality of the food is as amazing as the wine. But you should definitely start your day with some snacks for later. Find a cheese shop or deli and grab a hunk of cheese, a loaf of bread or some crackers (some water can’t hurt either) when you head out in the morning, you’ll be thankful by noon that you did. Don’t forget to pick up a little knife to cut the meat and cheese. Aside from trying some of the best artisanal breads, cheeses and cured meat you will ever taste, it is worth keeping your stomach full and your palate refreshed with something other than Zinfandel. The cheese factory on the plaza in Sonoma and the Oakville Grocery in Healdsburg are two great spots for provisions.
• Bring a portable GPS! Especially if traveling with a spouse or someone that likes to navigate. Shell out the $200 if you don’t have one already, or the extra $10 in the rental car and program in your destinations. You will see some beautiful roads and not be distracted by a map!
  

This story is continued here:
5 can't-miss recommendations for wineries in northern Sonoma County.

I'd like to thank Todd for contributing this piece. He can be reached via E-mail at: todd.broderick@gmail.com

Question of the Day: Any other tips you'd like to share to make a trip to wine country more enjoyable?

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Blanchards West Roxbury, MA Grand Wine Experience

Blanchards Wine & Spirits in West Roxbury, MA is hosting their semi-annual Grand Wine Experience tonight, Wednesday October 21st, 2009 from 6PM- 9PM. This is a free tasting of more than 100 wines, each on sale at a 20% discount. Click HERE for more information.

I attended their similar event earlier this year and thought it was great. I wrote up my thoughts HERE. There's some really excellent people who work at Blanchards. As a result of their helpful nature, the wines they carry, and their competitive pricing, the shop has earned a large portion of my wine spend in the past year. I'd encourage you to check them out.

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Legal Sea Foods Vina Errazuriz Wine Dinner at The Prudential Center

Legal Sea Foods is offering a paired wine dinner featuring the wines of Vina Errazuriz at their Prudential Center (Boston) location Wednesday October 21st, 2009. The dinner costs $75. Click HERE for a menu and more information.

This event caught my attention because earlier this year I had a chance to taste through 8 Chilean wines as part of an online tasting conducted by Wines of Chile. The wine of the night, for me, was a 2007 Errazuriz Single Vineyard Carmenere at $26. I thought it was *fantastic*- definitely look forward to that wine in particular if you go.

If this date or location doesn't work for you, you might be interested in these other dinners featuring Chilean wines at other Legal Sea Foods locations (like Garden State Plaza, Tyson's Corner and Kendall Square).

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The WWP Celebrates 1 Year (or: What to Expect in Your First Year of Wine Blogging)

The image above is a picture of what this site looked like when it was born. A year ago today, I launched this site with an announcement on our family blog:

"I started The Wellesley Wine Press for a few reasons. First, I have a lot of information about wine running around in my head and increasingly it felt unbalanced to include all of that content on Casa Dwyer. Second, I wanted to try my hand at launching a website and making a tiny bit of money on small ads and product links. I don't have grand visions for making a fortune- my goal is to pay for the $8 domain registration within the first year."

I was amazed, flattered and humbled to receive 109 page loads from 72 unique visitors on the first day. Traffic died down quite a bit after that initial push (when mostly family and friends checked the site out once). Some days the site received as little as 4 visitors:

But I kept at it, and was encouraged to see gradual growth. It was exciting to see Google index a piece I'd written and people finding their way to the site as a result of a search. As we entered the holiday season, and I added more and more content (usually about 3 new posts a week) I was really starting to see some encouraging growth. It seemed that the more new content I posted, the more new search engine traffic I was receiving:

Things slowed down a bit at the beginning of the year (wine interest always peaks during the holidays) but after that there's been steady growth in traffic over the course of the year. On a monthly basis, here's what it looked like over the year:

The dip in traffic in August was due to there being only 8 new posts which was coincident with our discovering Mad Men. Gary V is right when he says "Stop watching Lost" if you want to be successful online. It takes work, and work takes time, and the time has to come from somewhere.

A typical day on the site is now around 200 page views. There are days when it spikes up, and days that are a little slower. What's interesting about watching traffic is that it's all relative to what you're used to. For some people, these numbers are so small they're a joke. For others, they're amazing. For me, it's still pretty amazing to think that there are enough people out there on the Internet who are interested in the subjects I'm writing about that they find their way to the site. My point: I think about every person who visits the site like they're a customer. I'm always thinking- is there anything I could do to be more useful to someone who's visiting the site?

I'm still flattered when someone sends me an E-mail to ask my opinion of a product I've reviewed. Or a winery sends me an E-mail asking if I'd like a sample of their wines. Or a PR firm sends me an E-mail asking if I'll mention an event they're promoting. I appreciate all of these things. But the most precious thing to me, in terms of this site, is people who subscribe to my site via E-mail or in their feed reader. I think about them every time I publish a piece. Is what I'm writing good enough to warrant triggering an E-mail to these people who have shown enough interest in what I'm doing that they subscribed to updates? If you've subscribed to the site over the past year: THANK YOU. It really means a lot to me.

Looking back on my goal of recovering the $8 I spent to buy the domain "wellesleywinepress.com"... A lot of people I talked to when I launched the site were surprised to hear that I was interested in monetizing a blog. While making money is not my primary goal with this site, the exercise of learning how a blog works and how money can be made online has been fascinating to me. Blogging is far from passive income. In fact, it's probably the lowest hourly wage I've received for anything productive I've done in my life. More on that later, but for now I wanted to share an annual report on income and expenses for those of you who might be interested in starting your own blog (whether it be about wine or not).

Total cash expenses for the year came to about $50. This included domain registration/renewal (I switched from Name Secure to Go Daddy because I found Name Secure difficult to work with) and business cards (I've used Overnight Prints). I use a number of free services to run and/or promote this site:

• Blogger (I still haven't found a need to switch to WordPress yet)
  
• StatCounter (everyone seems to like Google Analytics, but I'm a fan of StatCounter)
  
• FeedBurner
• IntenseDebate (I've been really pleased with IntenseDebate over Blogger's default commenting mechanism. The commenting interface is more meaningful than the blogging platform in terms of user experience in my opinion.)
  
• PostRank
  
• CellarTracker (Huge fan of CT and glad I made the switch last year- it'll enable me to pull some interesting year-end reports on where I buy wine.)
  
• Twitter/TweetDeck/TwitPic (huge fan of Twitter over Facebook fan pages for reaching a wider audience in a non-annoying way)
  
• YouTube (moved away from Viddler for the most part as YouTube improved and Viddler annoyed with their revenue program)
  
• PrintFriendly
  

Total cash income for the year totalled about $700. This included a combination of:

• Google AdSense Ads
• Amazon Associate Affiliate Links
• Direct Advertisers
  

I've been very pleased with the Amazon Associate program. It's very easy to use, and it seems like everyone enjoys shopping through Amazon online.

A quick aside on affiliate links... Around the time I started this site, I was in the market for a webcam. I didn't want to spend a lot of time researching the purchase, and as I started looking online I quickly found a website dedicated to webcam reviews: Cowboy Frank. I loved the hyper-focused no-nonsense easy-to-understand reviews he provided and it was a no-brainer to purchase a webcam through one of his Amazon Associate links. It was the least I could do! I hope my wine accessory reviews are similarly useful to people, and judging from the number of wine aerators that have been purchased through affiliate links on this site they have been. I'm genuinely pleased each time I see a purchase made through a link, and especially when people reach out with questions about wine accessories I've reviewed. I hope to continue this focus in the coming year.

I've dabbled with a number of other affiliate programs but they've not generated meaningful revenue. Although I've looked into a number of them, I haven't found a good wine affiliate program. I attribute this to a combination of the fragmented wine shipping laws from state to state in this country -and- the lack of a well-run wine affiliate program. I'm hopeful that Amazon will sell wine some day because I like their affiliate program and would love to be able to link to wines sold through an Amazon Wine store. Maybe some day.

In April of this year, I met Joe Roberts from 1WineDude at Wine Riot. I was talking with him about how hard it was to make money off ads on a wine blog. He pointed out that I might want to consider the retail value of wine I received as samples as a benefit of wine blogging. I hadn't received any samples at that point, but he suggested that samples would come if I kept blogging long enough. Indeed, he was right.

Shortly after that conversation, I started receiving wine samples. To date, I'd estimate the retail value of wines received as samples at about $1,500. I don't make wine reviews the main focus of this site but I do enjoy trying wines I wouldn't normally try if not for samples. My thanks to the wineries that have sent samples to date. I hope that my occasional wine review has been fair and thoughtful. I'm always afraid of boring readers with mundane descriptions of wines received as samples. Looking forward to next year, I'd like to bring more focus to tasting reports, and a large part of that is going to be establishing a more regular review cycle which enables me to compare a number of wines from the same category. More on that in a future post. For now, if you happen to be in the wine trade and would like to send samples please have a look at my sample policy HERE.

In addition to wine samples, I felt fortunate to be invited to a number of wine tasting events and dinners. Retail value of events attended was around $600. My favorite part of these events was gaining access to events normally reserved for those in the wine trade. Increasingly, as the year went on I felt like I was straddling the fence between "consumer" (which is indeed the unique perspective that I hope I bring to the wine conversation on this site) and "trade". More on that in a moment.

Back to income- direct advertisers are where it's at. Earlier in the year, I came across THIS ARTICLE in the Wall Street Journal about traffic levels on blogs and income. I use information in this article to determine pricing levels for direct ads placed on this blog. The reason blogs like this one are smart money for advertising is because they have the potential to target such a precise audience. For example, where else can you find so many Massachusetts wine consumers interested in 90-point wines at bargain pricing? Where else can you find authentic, unbiased discussion about wine accessories? If you're interested in advertising on the site, please contact me. I'd love to chat with you about how advertising on the site can make sense for both of us.

There were 3 people who were particularly influential/inspirational/helpful in getting this site started. I probably wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for these people:

• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Tim Ferriss
• Darren Rowse

The reason I want to thank them, and this ties back to a couple of points I left hanging previously, is that blogging isn't about making money. It's about giving you a reason to go deeper into a hobby that already interests you. That's been the reward I've discovered over the past year, and I'd encourage anyone who's passionate about a hobby or an interest to start blogging. It has accelerated the rate at which I've tasted new wines, learned new things, and connected with people in the wine trade I would have never connected with. I've been amazed at the generosity and kindness of so many people I've come across online and in person of the past year. It's really given me a chance to do things I never would have otherwise done.

There have been some amazing highlights (and lowlights) over the past year that I never wrote about. I got to meet with one of the most influential wine critics in the world in his tasting office. I was threatened with a lawsuit. I requested interviews that were granted and some that were ignored. I visited wine shops trying to convince store owners to work with me unsuccessfully, and wine businesses that I never heard of reached out to me. Wine businesses that are adverse to publicity still confuse me.

In the coming year, I'd like to push in a number of directions I hope you'll find interesting. I'd eventually like to take on one or two more contributors to get the site to the point where it's publishing new content every weekday. I've got a couple of people in mind, but it's hard finding people with similar sensibilities and an interest in devoting time to wine writing. If you'd be interested in contributing to the site (even on a single-post basis) please drop me an E-mail. I'd love to chat with you. I'm looking forward to continued growth and continuing to provide useful information to people. It's in my blood- I want to provide people with helpful information.

In closing, a sincere thank you to each of you who's visited the site, subscribed, linked to me on your site, re-tweeted something I've said, sent me a wine sample, advertised on the site, clicked on a link, bought a product through one of my links, made an introduction, invited me to an event, helped me write a piece, responded to an interview request, drank wine with me, participated in a product test, invited me to check out your wine shop, or otherwise made me feel part of the wine community.

And especially to my wife and kids for giving me the time to devote to the site. I really appreciate your support and enthusiasm for what I'm doing.

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