The Wine Gang celebrate their 1 year anniversary this month.

If you are not familiar of The Wine Gang (TWG), it is 5 of the UK’s most influential wine writers and communicators – Tim Atkin, Olly Smith, Tom Cannavan, Joanna Simon & Anthony Rose, who collaborate to put together a monthly newsletter with hundreds of their most recent tasting notes and buying tips.

There is a lot of content about wine on the internet, but the content TWG are providing comes from their privileged access to top tastings as well as their undoubted skill as tasters and comunicators. It is not an easy time to create a paid-for newsletter business model on the internet where everything seems to be being given away free these days, but they have managed to make a success of their new venture, so reaching the 1 year milestone ought to be celebrated.

Encouraging more people to discover wine and to buy better, more rewarding wines, is a goal that Dinastia Vivanco is happy to celebrate, so it seemed a great opportunity to help to spread the Culture of Wine by offering to create a unique prize for TWG subscribers.

Any paid-for subscriber of TWG has a chance of winning a three day trip for two to Rioja to visit the region AND a special visit to Dinastia Vivanco as well.

The main event of the visit will be to spend a day, along with one of The Wine Gang, as guests of Dinastia Vivanco. You will visit the facilities in the company Rafael Vivanco who will give you a personal tour of the ‘tribute to wine’ the Vivanco family have built in the mediaeval town of Briones.

In the winery you’ll discover how Rioja is made, and taste the different ages, grapes and styles of Rioja wines, and maybe even discover white and rose Rioja for the first time. This tour will also include an exclusive opportunity to taste future releases straight from the barrels in the underground winery and cellar.

You will get to see hundreds of wine treasures in the Dinastia Vivanco Museum of the Culture of Wine including films, art, sculpture, archaeological artefacts, corkscrews, glassware; in short, anything and everything to do with wine’s development over many thousands of years.

Finally, you will be treated to some fabulous Riojan cuisine in the Museum’s restaurant that boasts panoramic views over the family’s vineyards and the Cantabrian mountain range.

Sound good? Check out The Wine Gang and subscribe now to have a chance to enter the competition.

If you win, you might even get to star in some future posts on this blog – what MORE could you ask for!?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Travel blogs and Rioja (thirstforrioja.co.uk)
• The Wine Gang – friend or foe? (wineconversation.com)
• Flashback from EWBC La Rioja 2008 (winebloggersconference.org)
• Twitter Taste Live the Español Edition – Hosted with Somni.org (catavino.net)

I have two copies of the book here already to give away, but I am going to hold off announcing the winners until I have a bit more news for everyone else as to how you can get hold of the book in the UK and US. Sorry!

I hope to work out a way to get this book to you in a timely and cost effective manner – and I have a couple of options.

More soon.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Wine Culture for Children (thirstforrioja.co.uk)
• Travel blogs and Rioja (thirstforrioja.co.uk)
• Social Media and Wine in Iberia, A Growing Phenomenon (catavino.net)

I will write something up more fully today, but in the interim, here is a video I made (very quickly and with no planning) last night. If you want to win a copy, you can send me a message on twitter (@thirstforrioja) or leave me a comment on this blog post. Please tell me why I should send the book to you.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Travel blogs and Rioja (thirstforrioja.co.uk)
• Social Media and Wine in Iberia, A Growing Phenomenon (catavino.net)
• Starling on the Ebro: A Children’s Book Set Among Rioja Vineyards Wins 2009 Gourmand Prize (blameitonrioja.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and I wish everyone a great Hogmanay

I thought I’d get at least one brief post in over the holidays.

I first need to congratulate Caroline, of Caroline’s Miscellany, for winning the case of 6 bottles of Dinastia Vivanco Crianza to help make a great vinous start to 2009. Caroline was the lucky winner who posted her thoughts on the recent tasting of wines with the London Bloggers, and I’m still grateful to everyone for all the great feedback on the wines. I hope to support more such tastings in 2009, so look out for more opportunities to taste the wines of Dinastia Vivanco.

Secondly, I have to report a certain sadness that the Rioja “bug” does not seem to have taken hold in Canada YET. The selection of Rioja’s available to buy here are very limited, both in Nova Scotia and in Ottawa. There is the ubiquitous Campo Viejo of course, but not much else. However, I was lucky enough to find a Marques de Riscal Reserva 2004 ($24.70) and a Muga Reserva 2004 ($24.95) in a specialist outpost of the LCBO (How romantic is that? The Liquor Control Board of Ontario) so I could share some Rioja wines with my family at Christmas.

I think I ought to make it a mission to attract more Canadian readers to this blog so that they can be better served with selections of interesting Rioja wines, and, you never now, maybe get Dinastia Vivanco listed so you can enjoy them too?

I hope that 2008 has been a good year for you and, despite the gloomy predictions everywhere, that 2009 is better yet.

The Dinastia Vivanco Online Documentation Centre Wins International ‘Best Of’ Wine Tourism Award for Art & Culture

What’s that I hear you ask! Well, not content with making wine, they are investing in all sorts of wonderful projects to encourage us to appreciate wine in all its aspects – after all, wine has been important in history, religion, film, literature and art too, and not just something to drink.

So they’ve been collecting all sorts of documents, including some absolutely AMAZING books that pre-date the year 1501 called “incunables“, and making these available online. In fact, they are even digitising these books (as Google has been doing elsewhere) so everyone might be able to access them.

So now I get to write about something totally different, and if this interests you, check out the wine documentation centre here.

And to top it off, the international ‘Best Of’ Wine Tourism Awards (run by the Network of Great Wine Capitals) just named it the most important project in wine Art & Culture of 2008. Pretty nifty!

So, if you are doing research or publishing anything and are looking for some resources, documents, books, pictures, audiovisual material and more, you might want to check out the Dinastia Vivanco Online Documentation Centre.

Wine blogging is getting more mainstream, with more wineries, journalists, marketers and wine consumers using it as a means to share information on wine and their experiences, but so far, in Europe at least, we’ve not managed to find ways to work together. This was the main driver behind getting bloggers together and you can read more about this here.

We (the organisers) were looking for a place to run the event, that fitted all these criteria:

• Somewhere to meet and discuss blogging matters
• Somewhere we could feed & entertain 20+ (eventually almost 50) delegates
• Somewhere with exciting wines that so many different bloggers would find appealing
• Located in a region that bloggers would find exciting

DISCUSSIONS:

The facilities at Dinastia Vivanco were, to me, the logical solution, and the Vivanco family wholeheartedly agreed to support this event.

I’ve never before had a chance to use the Conference room at the museum (this room is set up with AV, simultaneous translation, and everything – no wine on tap at each seat though!) but if you need to get 40+ in a room, you’ll need somewhere substantial and I think it worked well to give everyone a chance to participate. I must admit I quite enjoyed sitting on the stage even if my shirt was the main attraction! (this photo by Ryan Opaz)

ENTERTAINMENT & FOOD:

The lunch was great, even if it only took 1.5 hours, which by Spanish standards is a rush bordering on a human rights violation. Several of the bloggers asked me for a record of the wines and the food, so here was a run down on what we had (follow the links for information on the wines if you want more information).

For Starters:

JAMÓN IBÉRICO (the best kind of jamon)
COUS-COUS DE HORTALIZAS CON FOIE CARAMELIZADO (a dish of cous-cous with delicate fois gras on top, caramelized balasmic vinegar and chives- yum! Check our Ryan’s excellent photo)
VERDURITAS A LA PLANCHA (a welcome vegetal dish of asparagus, spring onions, tomato and LOTS of olive oil)
CROQUETAS DE JAMON (light and fluffy ham and potato croquettes)

To Drink:

Main Course, either:

CHULETILLAS ASADAS (lovely Rioja style lamb chops, cut thin and cooked over charcoal and vine cuttings)
MERLUZA A LA PLANCHA (hake, delicately grilled)

To Drink:

After lunch we went for a group photo (courtesy of Ryan and his excellent camera skills & a long lense), followed by a whirlwind tour of the museum. I say “whirlwind”, as a comfortable visit to the museum takes over 2 hours and I was trying to get everyone through in less than 1 hour. It is a shame I had to rush it as I heard over and over again how different people found separate elements of the museum fascinating to them. Cristina loved the wine aroma experience fascinating, Ricard loved the films, Thomas was explaining the ancient presses, Oscar loved the archaeology … I apologise again for my repeated use of the phrase “I’m sorry, but we really MUST move on!”

EXCITING WINES:

This was all so we could get to the winery to meet Rafael Vivanco and taste some highly unusual wines: single varietal wines from the Coleccion Vivanco range including the 2005 vintage Garnacha & Graciano as well as 2007 vintage barrel samples of Graciano, Garnacha, Tempranillo and even Mazuelo.

We bloggers rarely get to sample wines pre-release, and certainly not individual components of wines like these, and I trust this was another unique experience for participants to take away.

ATTRACTIVE REGION:

I will write up our visits to other wineries separately as there were great stories on Sunday, but I do believe that everyone who came to the conference went home with a different perspective on the wines, food, people, landscape, tourism and quality of life in the whole Rioja region. It is a region that we all know, bloggers and readers alike, but very few have visited, and I was very happy to hear how much my new friends had enjoyed it. Thank you also to La Rioja Turismo for working with us to spread this message and sponsoring the EWBC event.

All in all, I trust that we found the perfect place for our event.

Please visit the conference site to see how our discussion on blogging continues, and visit Vinus TV to see some of the interviews and proceedings, and maybe even follow a few new bloggers to see what they made of it. However, check back here in the next few days for a round up of 3 other wineries we visited.

[UPDATE: Thanks everyone! It worked. The sun is out and temperatures have gone up about 5 degrees]

If you are not involved in the publishing business, or even if you are but not in Food & Wine publishing, then you may not have heard of the Gourmand Awards [shockingly bad site I'm afraid, but they are publishers you know!].

Every year, the Gourmand World Cookbook Award organisation reviews the thousands of food & wine (& other alcohol too) books produced around the world every year. These are then divided into a bewildering array of categories – including, for example, ‘Best French Cookbook not published in France’, and evaluated.

The results are then announced at a lavish ceremony somewhere glamorous every year. In the last few years the awards have taken place in Barcelona & Kuala Lumpur and this year it was London.

The Dinastia Vivanco project has several aspects; the Winery (of course), the Museum, and the Foundation. The Foundation supports a range of projects which I’ll mention another time, but it has also published a small number of books about wine and wine culture. I will be looking at each of the books in future, including the latest entitled: El Cine del Vino (roughly translated as The Cinema of Wine – i.e. those films that have been inspired by wine, or where wine has been a central character, not just a prop).

Dinastia Vivanco wins! Hurrah! Except, by a twist of fate and an accidental double-click, it was only there for half a second and then moved to the final award. No award. No speech. No celebration.

Every one of the books published by the Dinastia Vivanco Foundation has had some recognition from the Gourmand Awards, and this year, as well as coming second in the Best Wine Book category, the whole publishing operation was recognised for its efforts with the award for Best Wine Publisher. This is a great honour for such a small, and young, operation. Santiago Vivanco who runs the Foundation as well as the Museum (in partnership with his brother Rafael Vivanco who runs the Winery) was very grateful for this recognition.

We did have a little hiccup however. Having sat through 3 hours of the awards ceremony, congratulating winners in every other category, we anxiously awaited the announcement of the Best Wine Publisher award which happened to be the second last of the whole event.

Having announced the Best Wine Book, the next slide came up with our name. Dinastia Vivanco wins! Hurrah! Except, by a twist of fate and an accidental double-click, it was only there for half a second and then moved to the final award. No award. No speech. No celebration. What happened?

Maybe they would come back to it? “Leave the best till last!” sort of thing? In fact, it was an error. Just as they were sending everyone away I ran up to the stage and pointed out the error. Oops! A tiny technical error, the only one of the night, and it was during our moment of glory.

All was well however as they immediately went back and announced the award and we got our few seconds being centre stage. More importantly, the Foundation got the recognition it deserves.

Now, the only problem is that the books are almost all exclusively in Spanish at the moment, so we need to find a US or UK publisher who would work with us to translate the books and distribute them to a wider audience. If you have any thoughts or ideas, do please let me know.

These are exciting times for the Dinastia Vivanco project, as its reputation spreads around the world not just as a great winery, but also for its mission to share and spread the Culture of Wine. More and more consumers are interested in the history and provenance of their wines and hopefully we can play our part in helping that discovery.

Full disclosure: I represent Dinastia Vivanco in the UK & Ireland