DrinkLocalWine.com‘s fourth annual conference got underway today. A few bloggers, including Joe Roberts of 1WineDude.com, David White of Terroirist, David Falchek, Dezel Quillen, and “Chief Wino” Andrew Stover hopped into a puddle jumper for a heart-in-mouth flight over the Rockies to Colorado wine country in Grand Junction. I know there will be stories when they get back, if only from the relief evident in their tweets when they arrived.
I stayed grounded in the Denver area, and spent two worthwhile hours with Jeff Siegel, aka The Wine Curmudgeon, and Michael Wangbickler of the DLW board of directors at Westminster Total Beverage just outside Denver. About 100 people showed up to taste four Colorado wines and hear us discuss the local wine movement and our Twitter Taste-Off scheduled for Saturday afternoon. Some of the people who stopped by said they were frequent visitors to wineries around Denver and Boulder, while others admitted they rarely if ever try the local vino. One elderly gentleman lectured us for several minutes on his favorite St. Emilion Grand Crus and groused that he would never buy a wine made in Colorado. Then he tasted them and decided to take home a bottle of Cabernet Franc.
Hey, as Jeff would say, “That’s what the drink local movement is all about. We just want you to taste it.”
