I spent Monday night drinking Argentine wine and Japanese sake with three young ladies. OK, before you get too envious, I was actually working, spending an evening at SF’s Bin 38 wine bar with three of the blogosphere’s well-followed local wine gals: Liza Swift (http://www.brixchicks.com), Thea Dwelle (http://lusciouslushes.com), and Victoria Gutierrez (http://www.readmedrinkme.blogspot.com).
This was my virgin voyage into what I call “the world of immediacy”, waxing poetic (and didactic) about many of the wines and sake that I represent as an importer while these three enthusiastic and quite knowledgeable amateur wine literati tweeted away about the tidbits they found instantly appealing. Some of the tweets were about the delicious drinks and some about my eloquent utterings (I can dream can’t I?).
Pretty strange stuff for a self-professed “middle-aged wine geek”. At first it was a little odd to be chatting up a small group where all three were looking down and pounding words out on their cell phones. But these three were able to keep up with the parade of wine and sake pours and also get their thoughts out both to me and to their followers. And I thought I could multi-task!
As I got a chance to review their logs the next day, it struck me that the length of a tweet doesn’t really allow you to get much deep thought or emotion going. It was pretty cool, however, that they could take a photo of a bottle of sake (like Tozai Living Jewel) that they liked, and send a tweet with a link to the photo—and right in the moment!
The other thing that tweets don’t do well is to fully express the personality of the bloggers who were there. For that I suspect you will need to go to their full-length blog sites. When I do tastings like this, it can quite often be for exquisitely bored retailers or restaurant folks, so it was refreshing to engage with a wine group I’d never encountered: young, super-enthusiastic about wine, knowledgeable but far from full-time residents of “geekdom”, and completely open to the experience. And they hung in there for over 2 hours of wine and sakespeak that included everything from stories about how I met winemakers to the basics of plant respiration.
Maybe there is hope for Generation Tweet and attention span after all.