The Adegga Blog

You can now easily add a comment to any note another member has made.

Some of you have been asking us to add a way to communicate with other members more easily so we’ve been making a few changes in that direction. This is the first major one.

So what can you use the comments for ?

• Thank another user for having written that note. Who doesn’t like a nice compliment?
• Ask a question related to a specific wine or note.
• Add anything you find interesting and get the conversation going.

If markets are conversations, Adegga is now ready to support them. Let the conversation begin!

How many times you’ve read a member’s note on a wine and you just wish you could thank the author for writing such a great note! Now you can.

We’ve added a way for you to thank a member for writing a note and at the same time help the community decide on which notes are better.

Here’s a example of a note with the new Useful note button (you need to login to see it):

Every time you thank a member for this note you’re helping the community and very soon we’ll start putting the best notes on the (new) homepage!

With this feature we’ve also added a way to filter notes. You can now sort by more useful, recent or see your friends first.

Do you like it? Would you change something? Tell us in the comments box below.

I was very happy to see that a couple of Port producers supported the European Wine Bloggers Conference in Rioja. One attended the conference and two others sent a few port wines for us to taste, but all made sure Port was well represented.

Niepoort
Dirk Niepoort gave us the opportunity to take some of his best wines to the event. The Niepoort Vintage 2005 was a huge success and everyone loved it. Some people were even wondering (dreaming?) how good this wine will be in 10 years.

Taylor Fladgate
We had the opportunity to taste the Taylor’s Quinta De Vargellas Vintage 2005 from this well know Port producer.

I met some people who tried Portuguese wines at the ewbc for the first time and loved them. Some had already tried Port but not this Port, not quality Port. It was a revelation for many and I’m sure it will remain in their senses for quite some time.

I must say that sherry was also very well represented. Justin Roberts brought a few fine examples and was even sweet enough (pun intended) to bring sherry glasses for all of us. Thank you!

Writing notes will become so much faster be able to write notes much faster when this new mobile typing technology comes out.

Now if only it could also suggest aromas and adjectives…

You asked and we’ve done it. You can now keep track of your favourites wines!

To add a wine to your favourites just click on the heart icon bellow each wine.

Go on! Make a list of your favourite wines! Here’s my list of favourites.

We recently ordered a bunch of moo.com stickers based on our favicon and I have to say that they’ve been quite successful!

Some of them have been used in interesting places. Like, for example, these 2 mobile phones tagged with a sticker during the EWBC. We loved the idea and ended up giving away lots of stickers!

Some people have been sending pictures of our stickers used in different places. We’ll posting them here regularly.

Social media is a fairly new area for most people in the wine industry (what is social media?). So it’s great when we discover a couple of wineries that are trying to understand and embrace this new way reaching their customers.

There are some other very good examples of winery blogs but I’ll be listing those who decided to join us at the European Wine Bloggers Conference in Rioja.

Poggio Argentiera – follow on adegga
Gianpaolo and Justine Paglia run this Italian winery in the Morellino di Scansano DOCG and they both write a great blog full of articles, photos, videos and even maps about their winery. It’s a great example of how to use a blog to reach your customers.

La Gramiére – follow on adegga
Amy Lillard produces wine in the south of France (Castillon du Gard on the Cotes du Rhone appellation) where she’s growing vineyards organically and biodynamically. Amy writes a amazingly open blog about the day to day life of running a vineyard. She was a finalist at the American Wine Blog Awards.

Cortes de Cima – follow on adegga
José Eduardo Silva was one of the Portuguese that attended the conference representing a winery. Cortes de Cima in a innovative winery from Alentejo in Portugal. They have recently launched a new site that includes a blog and also photos and videos from their winery. Certainly an example in the wine online world in Portugal.

Weingut Clauer – follow on adegga
Thomas Lippert works for a German winery called Weingut Clauer but his personal wine blog is at winzerblog.de. An interesting example of a winery employee actually promoting winery blogging via his personal blog.

Quevedo – follow on adegga
Óscar Quevedo was at the EWBC representing this Portuguese winery. They have recently created a winery blog where the one of the main subjects is obviously Port!

Casa Vides – follow on adegga
Emilio Saez van Eerd is the new export director for Spanish wine producer La Casa de las Vides. He’s also writing a brand new winery blog.

Bodegas Tintoralba – follow on adegga
Javier Navarro is in charge of writing on the Tintoralba blog of this well known Spanish winery.


These are very interesting wine producers that are looking for different ways to engage with their costumers. Make sure you add these producers to your Adegga Watchlist so you can follow what they are up to.

For us, meeting with the wineries that decided to join the EWBC was a great experience. We have received lots of positive feedback and some of the wineries now have a Adegga Winery Account with which they can now reach their customers in a new and interesting way.

Our search engine for wine blogs is now indexing 450 wine blogs. We have been selecting and adding wine blogs daily from all languages and countries. Lately we’ve also added a couple of winery blogs.

The number of recently updated blogs is quickly growing so we’ve decided to start showing a list of all blogs posts published in the last 24 hours. And we update this list every hour.

We’ve also added a new search box to make it easier to search inside the 450 wine blogs.

If your blog is not currently being indexed (search for the title of one of your latest posts to check this) contact us or leave a comment below to let us know.

Here’s our selection of (commented) photos from the first European Wine Bloggers Conference we participated last week.

Amy Lillard tasting wine. Photo by Thomas Lippert

Iberian Uber-Wine Blogger Ryan Opaz. Photo by Robert McIntosh

Photo by Robert McIntosh

EWBC participants. Photo by Robert McIntosh

Bodegas Vivanco Vineyards. Photo by Ricard Giner

Marques de Riscal headquarters designed by Frank Gehry. Photo by André Cid Proença

EWBC Ratings Panel. Photo by André Cid Proença

Bodegas Vivanco barrel tasting. Photo by Alastair Bathgate

EWBC participants at Bodegas Vivanco. Group photo by Ryan Opaz

The origin of everything. Photo by Ryan Opaz

Ok, we had to include this one! (sorry for the dark teeth) Photo by Javier Navarro

Bottles, bottles and more bottles. Photo by Javier Navarro

Keynote Tasting dinner. Photo by Robert McIntosh

Keynote Tasting wines. We have published list of all tasted wines. Photo by Robert McIntosh

EWBC conference room. Photo by Robert McIntosh

And this resumes (very lightly the event). More photos on the EWBC Flickr Group.

We’ve back from the first ever European Wine Bloggers Conference that took place in Rioja. It was a terrific event where we met a bunch of people passionate about wine. We’ll be blogging about the event later but to make it easier to find information now here’s are a few interesting pointers about the wines tasted, the posts and the photos.

EWBC2008 Tasted Wines
We’ve tasted lots of amazing wines and to make it easier to find out what was tasted here’s (almost) complete list of wines tasted during the 3 days of the event. If you think a wine is missing from this list add it here and don’t forget to tag it with ewbc2008.

Photo by Robert McIntosh from The Wine Conversation

EWBC2008 Blogs posts
A lot of people are writing about what happened during the event. There are a few ways you can blog posts about the conference. On Adegga you can see all blog posts tagged with ewbc, ewbc2008 and ewbc 2008. A search on AbleGrape will also return a bunch of interesting related results.

EWBC2008 Photos & Videos
There’s a EWBC Flickr Group where everyone has been sharing their photos from the event. Lots of wine bottles, happy people and great vineyards in there. Edgar Mendoza e Eduardo Benito from VinuTV will be posting a bunch of videos from the event. Here’s Ryan opening the first wine tasting.

It was a great conference and I’m sure lots more posts, pictures and tasting notes will be posted about the event. We’ll upload our photos, tasting notes and thoughts next.