Scenes from a Twitter Tasting
To embrace Twitter is to draw a line in the sand, a love it or hate it proposition, a bit like sticking your neck out in, say, 1986, and telling your buddies that you love Fleetwood Mac and think Lindsey Buckingham is a brilliant pop craftsman.
Despite its rather unfortunate name and its (from the first sounds of it) slightly hokey premise—a wine tasting/social networking event devoted to wine Twitterers (or is it Tweeters?), where tables are set up with wines corresponding to unique hashtags and participants are encouraged to ‘Tweet your impressions”—the first annual Spit & Twit at City Winery, held on a balmy Sunday earlier this month, was actually kind of an interesting concept and, yes, I will admit it, sorta fun.
Vibrant Rioja got itself involved, and I was asked to help pour and talk about the dozen or so Rioja wines we presented.
Now, the question begs itself: how does one taste, talk, network, and Tweet on one’s iPhone all at the same time?
Until a taste/Tweet utility belt or a voice-activated Twitter-platform is developed, the answer is, well, you make choices.
More to my original point: I was half-expecting a nerdy contingent of annoying techies taking up table space while they wrote snarky, non-wine related updates, all of which would appear on large monitors placed all over the main hall of the new South Village tasting and performance venue.
But I walked away very impressed. Not just at how public and private co-mingled—how real human connection and wine-passionate exchange could then lead to public buzz, which in turn could lead to more interest and excitement—but also at how attentive and incisive and opinionated these tasters were as a group.
In terms of buzz, before long it was clear that the CVNE Imperial Reserva 2001 (#ESRIOPST01 - $48) was a must-try, as was an astonishingly priced Montecillo Crianza 2005 (#ESRIOBMC05 - $13). How much of that buzz was generated by word of mouth or by looking up at the screens was sort of hard to tell.
As for the tasters’ high level of proficiency, I came up with a hypothesis. Maybe, just maybe, technologically savvy people share the affinity that exists between (thoughtful and nuanced) love of music and (thoughtful and nuanced) love of wine.
Are techies, like music lovers, better suited to appreciating and understanding wine at a much faster clip and with greater agility, than non-techies?
In other words, does aptitude for the details and nuances of advanced computing and networking comprehension somehow make someone a better taster?
I need a grant to test that.
And by the way, Lindsey Buckingham? He’s finally getting his props from serious music critics these days.