The famous BYOB, which now always opens the DWCC
Bulgarian winemaker with her wine
(above and below)
***
Robert McIntosh, at the opening session,
supporting the fight against cancer
Welcome to Plodiv – have a good conference
Welcome from Stefan Stoyanov, the deputy-mayor of Plodiv
Keynote 1: Richard Hemming, recently minted MW,
shares his research into wine books
The conference opened with a very good presentation by Richard Hemming MW on his research into wine books, published over a 100-year period, which he submitted as his research for his MW. Although you might think the internet would have sounded a death knell for published wine books the opposite has been the case with a huge increase in self-published books. However the average length of a book has declined sharply. In 2004 only 5% of books had less than 100 pages; by 2013, 47% of books had less than 100 pages!
The increased number of self-published wine books are, Richard found, of variable quality. Some are of high quality, such as Wink Lorch's book on the Jura and Neal Martin's on Pomerol, but some are of dubious merit.
PM Sessions
Wineries, journalists and bloggers + how to be famous
Wineries, journalists and bloggers (1) + how to be famous (2)
I attended two good sessions in the afternoon with interesting presentations from Martin Wiederkehr, DG of La Cave de Genève, and Richard Siddle, ex-editor of harpers, in the first session. There followed a great presentation from Felicity Carter, editor-in-chief of Meininger's Wine Business, essentially on how to pitch stories and to make them interesting to editors. She stressed the need to think outside the wine box.
Felicity illustrated her talk with news stories, two of which she was unable to pursue as wine journalists just weren't interested in exploring them.
