Ancient Peaks Winery is riding high. Not only does it sit a bit higher in elevation, but the recent certification of its Margarita vineyard as Sustainable in Practice, or SIP, is another feather in an already festooned cap.

This is a storied vineyard in a storied place. Franciscan missionaries founded rancho Santa Margaraita, at the foot of the Santa Lucia Mountains and the top of the Cuesta Grade between San Luis Obispo and Atascadero, CA in 1774. The vineyard itself was planted by Tim Mondavi in the 1990’s and was purchased by Doug Filipponi and his partner Karl Wittstrom in 2005.

“It’s a mystical place,” said Filipponi of the Margarita vineyard. “The ancient peaks themselves are volcanic on one side, granite on the other and the run off is what built this place.”

Margarita vineyard spans 996 acres and spending time out among the vines can very easily mean being out for the whole day and then some. “I have a license plate frame on my truck that says, ‘my office,’” said Filipponi. “You can cover 40 miles if you do it right.”

Still, even in traveling the vineyard, Filipponi, Wittstrom and winemaker Mike Sinor have been consistently pairing down, looking for ways to do less with more and allow the vineyard to speak for itself. “It’s important to us to leave the ranch better than we found it,” he said.

SIP is a program certified by the Central Coast Vineyard Team. “There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye,” said Filipponi. “It’s not just about using less fertilizer and pesticides.”

Indeed, the sustainability certification is a big undertaking and its component parts are many. The Central Coast Vineyard Team has been working for some 16 years with farmers from Monterey County down to Santa Barbara County to help them create a more sustainable future. For more information about the process, see this link.

“It’s a pretty extensive set of certifications,” Filipponi said. “If you’re low on any one of them, you don’t get certified.”

While it is true that Ancient Peaks avoids synthetic pesticides and herbicides where possible, their commitment to sustainability goes much further. Wildlife corridors dot the vineyard allowing deer, amphibians and even the occasional black bear coming down from the Santa Lucia’s to continue natural migration patterns. Wittstrom tells the story of driving through the vineyard at night and the headlights coming around a bend to find a bear feeding on the ripening fruit.

“We put in bat boxes, too because their whole diet is insects,” said Filipponi. Ancient Peaks, in fact, hosts 34 bat boxes, 471 bluebird boxes, 29 owl boxes and 13 predatory bird perches. “We also water very little now and our frost protection uses one-third of the water we used to use,” said Filipponi. “There’s not a lot of waste.” Wetlands offsets exceed normal recommendations and centuries old oak trees have been left in tact and not disturbed. “We’re actually a certified haven for the red-legged frog as well,” said Filipponi.

The unique calcareous soils provide ideal growing conditions for Ancient Peaks’ wines. The taste profiles are deep and rich, full of minerals and with a depth in the finish that is round and smooth, never flat. Walking the vineyards here, one can actually see fossilized oyster shells and the loam is, in most cases, a light cream color just beneath the surface.

Spraying citrus oils to suppress mold and using a modified tractor that both sweeps and mows as well as prunes allowing fewer passes through the vineyard, Filipponi’s farming techniques continue to evolve into a pattern of “less is more” and allow him to keep to the promise he and Wittstrom made to leave the vineyard better than they found it.

-30-
by Mark Storer

Attention #VinQ fans: This Tuesday, we’ll be giving away prizes! Everyone who participates on Tuesday, February 9th between 5–6 PM PT will be entered into a drawing to win a fabulous prize.

THE PRIZE

We’ll be giving away four tickets to the Pinot Noir Summit ($125 value), compliments of Barbara Drady – you might know her as @wineevangelist on twitter! If you’re passionate about Pinot, this is one of those events you won’t want to miss. The event will take place Saturday, February 27, in San Rafael, CA.

HOW IT WORKS

On Tuesday, February 9th, log on to your twitter account. If you don’t have an account, make sure you register and follow enobytes prior to playing.

At 5PM PT, we’ll begin our #VinQ wine trivia game. If you haven’t played before, simply answer the multiple choice wine questions and (this is very important!) ADD the hashtag #VinQ. We will use the hashtag #VinQ to track your participation and register you into the drawing.

Each winner will win one ticket. If you win a ticket and cannot make the event, we would appreciate it if you let us know so we can release the ticket to another player.

ABOUT THE PINOT NOIR SUMMIT

On Saturday, February 27, 2010 consumers, press and trade will gather for the remarkable 8th Annual Passionate about Pinot Noir Summit at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael, California. An extraordinary array of palates will gather to assess “the best of the best,” representing Pinot’s from around the globe, from 50 different appellations including Canada, Chile, France, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand and U.S. wines from California, Oregon, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Washington State.

Who: Affairs of the Vine and the International Wine Review
What: The 8th Annual Pinot Noir Summit
When: Saturday, February 27, 2010, 12:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Where: Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, 200 N. San Pedro Road,  San Rafael, CA 94903

For more information, visit the Pinot Noir Summit.

If you managed to survive our last post on how to find and follow wine twitters,  your’re ready to dive into our next topic, #hashtags, so lets get down to business.

Today we’ll dig into using #hashtags efficiently so that you get the most out of what they have to offer.

THE BASICS

In simple terms, think of a hashtag as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter to organize your comments so that others can find them later. In other words, let’s say you have a file cabinet at your office and you want to name a folder “Zinfandel” and file it under “Z”. Simple enough, right?

Well on Twitter, a “hashtag” is sort of like a file cabinet on steroids – similar filing concept, but its digital. Adding the pound (#) sign before any word is like filing it away to find it later.

By now, you’ve probably noticed some posts that contain words with a ‘hash’ or ‘pound’ symbol (#).  Tweeters call these #hashtags, and they can show up anywhere in the tweet:

Well, that’s just great, but why should I care?

Using hashtags helps you build your audience and community. How can that be? Simple. When you use hashtags, other twitter users (who don’t necessarily follow you) will find you through the Twitter search mechanism and other third party tracking tools (we’ll get to that later).  Also, you’ll want to use these tools to discover new people to follow.

WHO USES HASTAGS?

Hashtags are favorite tools for identifying people, things, and events. Twitter winos might use them to tell their friends and followers about their favorite wines and events, whereas wine professionals might use them for educational purposes, promoting products and announcing events (and of course, building their relationships with followers).

Another good way to use them is for wine events and conferences.  Event organizers, bloggers and wine writers will use them to status what’s happening during an event. Alder over at Vinography used them to report on the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC) in Oregon. Here is an example of a tweet from him during the event: @vinography: Standing ovation in celebration of the life of David Lett #IPNC

It’s sort of reminds you of a live text feed of events as they happen.

HOW TO USE HASHTAGS

Suppose you are a Zinfandel fan and you want to tweet about it. Here is an example: Just tasted a delicious @sobonwine “Rocky Top” #zinfandel from Amador County. Highly recommend it!

When you tweet this message, the word #zinfandel turns into a clickable link so that you (and others) can find it later from the twitter search page:

…and the more a hashtag is used, the more likely the topic will appear in Twitter’s worldwide Trending Topics. Just recently, twitter launched a location-based trending topic called “Local Trends” but it’s just getting off the ground and only select cities are listed.

HOW NOT TO USE WINE HASHTAGS ON TWITTER

Is there really a wrong way to use #hashtags on twitter? As Palin would say, “You betcha“. Now the world won’t come crashing down if you misuse or abuse them, but my word of caution is not to get carried away with them. Its good to use one or two (three at the most) #hashtags per message, but any more than that and you might come off as a spammer to your audience.

Here is an example you should avoid: Just found a great #zinfandel #wine in #portland at #traderjoes for $10 bucks. What a #deal!

Remember, be selective using hashtags!

TRACKING HASHTAGS

The real value in following wine related hashtags is discovering new twitters to follow, hence building your brand and developing new relationships.

If you are looking for an easy way to track one hashtag at a time, use the twitter search page.

1. Go to Twitter Search.
2. Type “#” followed by a keyword.  Here is a search result for #wine.
3. Refresh the page periodically to see the latest results.

If you are looking for advanced ways to track hashtags, there are many third party tracking applications.  Many allow you to follow multiple keywords – Twitterfall is a good example.

So let’s say I want to track hashtags #sonoma, #zinfandel, #ZAP. You’ll simply add these keywords in the Twitterfall search term box, and Ta Da! you’ll get the results:

There are also tools that track #hashtag popularity. Let’s say you’d like to research stats on the hashtag #wine. Go to “What the Hashtag?”, which is a user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on twitter. Type “wine“  from the search box and the returned results will show up from the last 7 days, including # of tweets and top contributors:

From here you can see the list of the top ten contributors using the hashtag “wine”, e.g. @seriouslywine used the term 109 times over the last week on twitter.

In one week, the term “wine” was tweeted 4,157 times by 1,645 contributors, averaging 593.9 tweets per day. That’s a lot of tweeting going on!

This tool also has advanced stats such as how many of these tweets were retweeted (we’ll cover this in a follow-up post), how many mentioned the tweet and how many contained multiple hashtags.

This might be more information than you care to know, but if you need it, it’s there….So there you have it – a few basic ways to track trending #hashtags!

USEFUL WINE #HASHAGS

This isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, but it will give you an idea of what sort of hashtags are used and for what purpose:

Events
#EWBC – European Wine Bloggers Conference
#WBC – Wine Bloggers Conference
#ZAP – Zinfandel Advocates & Producers
#IPNC – International Pinot Noir Celebration
#WineForHaiti – Wine for Haiti
#SWF – Sun WineFest

Tastings
#ttl – Twitter Taste Live
#twebt – Twitter Event Blind Tasting
#thewinemakers – The WineMakers TV
#wineconclave
#calicabs

Public Relations
#Winepr

Twitter specific events & initiatives
#followfriday – AKA #FF
#winewednesday
#wineliteracy

Wine Trivia
#VinQ – Wine Trivia Twitter game

Unrelated to wine but used throughout the wine community:
#bacon
#foodporn

Varieties:
#cabernet
#chardonnay
#merlot
#pinot
#sauvignonblanc
#zinfandel

Geography-based:
#argentina #wine
#australia #wine
#champagne
#chateauneufdupape
#chile #wine
#FLXwine
#Friuli
#germany #wine
#Israel
#mendoza
#montrachet
#napa
#New Zealand #wine
#oregonwine
#Piedmont
#pomerol
#portugal #wine
#rheingau
#rhone
#sonoma
#southafrica #wine
#spain #wine
#stestephe
#Tuscany
#Washington #wine

This raps up our lesson for the day. Stay tuned for our next post: Using Twitter @Retweets, a.k.a. RT.

Until then, be sure to hit us up with hashtag comments:
•    How are YOU using Hashtags?
•    What shouldn’t they be used for?
•    What hashtags have you created?
•    Which tracking programs do YOU use?

So I hear you’ve recently set up a new Twitter account but you’re lost at what to do with it now, eh? Well let me tell you dear reader friend, you are not alone.

As I’ve written in a previous post, social media is transforming our media landscape and for some, it’s not so easy to grasp this newfound concept. If you’re like most of my readers, you’re probably asking questions like,  “How do I…” or “What does “RT” mean“, and “How do I find winos?“, or what the heck is a “#wine“? …and for my wine biz friends, you want to know “What’s the value“, and “What’s the ROI“?

Unfamiliar territory would bring anyone to the brink of bonkers and believe me I understand your pain — but in all honesty, it’s not so bad after you understand some of the basics.

Some of you in the wine industry biz probably want to cut to the chase and get right to the “value” aspects of Twitter but I’d like to convince you to chill through a few posts before we dive into that topic. Trust me the ride will be worth it.

Let’s get down to business. This is the first part of a follow-up series that will dig into the lingo of Twitter while addressing it’s usefulness in the world of wine. Today we’ll focus on, “How do I find wine Twitters and why should I care about my followers?”

THE BASICS

Having 2+ years Twittering under my belt and humbly reaching 5K followers, I’d like to share my experiences and recommendations on it’s usefulness for wine aficionado’s and professionals alike.

First, don’t bother with third-party auto-follow applications  (or for that matter, any application that automates anything on Twitter.) It’s not that these applications are bad (by any means), it’s just that if you want to build your brand the right way, the last thing you want to do is alienate followers.

Twitter is about building relationships, and you certainly won’t be doing yourself any favors by automating messages. Yes, it’s certainly more time consuming to tweet your messages by hand, but trust me, it will be well worth your efforts in the long run.

Second, don’t BUY your followers.  This will come to a surprise for some, but many marketing services sell followers — at a hefty price, of course. DON’T by into the hype. You won’t become a rock star overnight and marketers that guarantee $1,000 per month per 10,000 followers is a crock. Do you know why? Because most marketers couldn’t possibly collect the kind of personal data you need [e.g. is this new follower a potential buyer?] to produce the results you are looking for as far as wine sales go.  If you believe this, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. You’ll prosper a higher rate of success by finding your own followers.

Let me reiterate. I see Twitter as a mechanism to build relationships amongst those who share similar interests.  Based on my observations, I don’t see Twitter as a platform for moving product. Sure, there is nothing wrong about Twittering occasional specials, but most of my Twitter winos are using this application to build relationships with those that share similar interests. If you have a success story that debunks this reasoning, please share.

Third, promote your Twitter handle from your website. Your loyal consumers will follow you if you advertise it.

THOSE WHO FOLLOW

The first mistake is to think that you have no control over those who follow you — followers make informed decisions on who to follow based on how you present yourself, what you say, and how you INTERACT with your followers, so think about the image you want to portray. For obvious reasons, this affects industry tweeters more than consumers.

Building followers will take a conscience effort for industry tweeters. Be prepared to tweet with passion and build your brand by interacting with your followers. Your marketing person might be a good match for this job, but in reality, any team member that enjoys virtual interaction with your customers and shares your vision is a good fit.  If you’re not sure who would be the perfect contender, talk to your staff. Marketers, winemakers, hospitality, managers and owners all make good candidates.  You might even consider rotating tweeting responsibilities.

HOW TO FIND WINE TWITTERS

Whom should you follow? Seems like a bizarre question, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t you follow everyone that follows you? Not unless you want a windfall of spammers — that, and I can guarantee you won’t share interests with your followers. Do you really want to follow those who tweet every 5 seconds about tooth whitening products? I think not.

Now on to the good stuff — finding winos on Twitter. Let’s attack it from a couple of different angles. For a generic approach, I’ve found the Twitter search page easy to use for finding wine friends, consumers and wineries.  Browse through the list and find those that interest you. Roll over the first icon on the right hand side and click on a popup “follow XXX”.  Simply click on it and you’ll follow them.

You’ll also find a number of  “Top Wine Twitters” on wine blogs. Ken, from Alawine.com, built a cool little “Top Wine Tweeters“  page, which happens to be one of my favorite top wine Twitter lists and ranks each Twitter accordingly.  He bases his rankings on a respectable mix of quantities and ratios of followers and friends, updates, retweets and Twitter lists (with some exclusions for noise, off-topic and similar factors). One simple click and you’ll be following famous wine Twitters such as Jancis Robinson, Kevin Zraly, Wine Enthusiast, Natalie MacLean, Dr. Vino, and Vinography.

We happen to come in #7 on the list (dude, I feel like breaking out the Wayne’s world, “I’m Not Worthy” video).   Awesome Ken, and thanks for the kudos.

There’s another cool application you might find useful. Check out wefollow.com “Top Winos” page.  By default, the page shows the most influential wine Twitters and ranks them based on number of followers for each tweeter.

There is another cool feature that Twitter recently launched. It’s a ‘list” feature which allows users to create groupings of people for whatever reason (e.g. winos, wineries, distributors, wine writers, etc). Mashable compiled a great “How To” on the subject so head on over there for a good overview on what it is and how to use it.

…and to get you started, here are a number of recommended lists to follow:
Alawine Top 100 Wine Tweeters
Alawine Top 100 Wineries
Alawine Wine Social Media List
Elizabeth Dehoff’s Bloggers List
Enobytes #VinQ List
Nectar Wine Bloggers
Northwest Winos
Steve Paulo’s Wine List
The Wine Sleuth List
Wineaday List

This raps up our lesson for the day. Stay tuned for our next post: Using Twitter #Hashtags.

Until then, be sure to hit us up with comments on the following Q’s:
•    How do YOU find Twitter winos?
•    Do YOU use auto-follows?
•    What is the value of buying followers?
•    What is YOUR favorite Top Wine Twitter List?

If you are looking for ways to help Haiti victims, so many great wineries, restaurants and bloggers are pulling together to help the Haiti victims devastated by the 2010 earthquake tragedy which sparked widespread panic as it caused destruction throughout Port-au-Prince.

Here are just some of the great fundraisers happening around the world. Please consider participating or donating to one of these great charitable organizations.

Brother, can you spare a bottle? is teaming up with Palate Press: The online wine magazine to encourage the wine-loving world to contribute to a cause outside our own. Donate something special from your cellar for auction. Proceeds will help the Haiti victims devastated by the 2010 earthquake tragedy.

WLDG Haitian Relief Fundraiser: – Raffle of Bordeaux, an online forum raffle & fundraiser.

Wine 4 Haiti SF Charity Fundraiser – San Francisco, CA. January 18th. A public charity wine tasting to raise money for four foundations to directly help the Haiti earthquake relief effort: Sirona Cares Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, Partners In Health and the American Red Cross.

Eat for Haiti – San Francisco foodies and chefs unite to help earthquake victims. Various events run from January 14 through the 23rd.

Portland relief funds for Haiti – A list of Portland, OR restaurants contributing a portion of their sales to Haiti disaster relief.

Help for Haiti: A growing list of Los Angeles restaurants and food trucks contributing to the Haiti disaster relief.

Food Lovers Fundraiser for Haiti – London, UK, February 8, 2010. A fundraising dinner with all proceeds being donated to the ‘Disasters Emergency Committee’. Confirmed chefs for this charitable event include Vickram Purewal from Le Bouchon Breton and Herbert Berger.

How To Help Haiti In Chicago – A list of Chicago restaurants and bars contributing to the Haiti disaster relief.

Foodie Fund-Raising Efforts for Haiti – A list of fundraising efforts happening in the Bay area.

Do you know of other food and wine fundraisers going on in your community and around the world? Help us build a list of events supporting Haiti so that others know about them. Post a comment and get the word out.

December 2010 Wine Picks

2006 Chronicle Zinfandel “Bacigalupi” Vineyard, Sonoma, CA
2005 2006 Anam Cara Mark I Pinot Noir, OR
2005 Sausal Cabernet Sauvignon, Alexander Valley, CA
2007 Seven Terraces Sauvignon Blanc, NZ

Happy New Year from all of us at Enobytes. May 2010 bring you happiness, success, peace, hope & togetherness. Have a very safe, happy and prosperous New Year and welcome to 2010!

Photo credit: Anime History

In my wine column today on OregonLive.com,  I talk about a couple of recent articles that appeared in Gourmet and the Wine Spectator. Coincidently both of these publications decided to run stories in animation printed like a comic book. The WS comic titled, “Murder by Malbec” is a detective puzzle with all of its illustrated, animated (and I must say “corny”) content will probably not be the huge success its creators thought it would be. Check out my latest post on Wine Bytes to read where this is going…

Wine reviewers spend the better half of the day sipping and spitting and the other half stringing all those damn adjectives and adverbs together to come up with a spiffy, make you feel all fuzzy inside wine review that will make your head spin.

Well, enough is enough.

The new trend for 2010 is automated notes generators.

Huh? You heard me. Automated notes generators.

“Writing can be such a pain in the butt“, exclaims Enobytes wine reviewer, Pamela Heiligenthal. “…but with a tool like this,  I can whip out a review in a matter of seconds…and I swear this tool reads minds“. She went on to say, “…we’ve already done extensive testing and we’ve found this tool invaluable – I don’t think we’ll ever go back to writing reviews the ‘ol fashioned way“.

Marc Hinton, Enobytes contributor and reviewer went on to say, “…this will free up a lot of time for our wine reviewers to focus on more important things like community service. Well at least the court ordered kind. Yeah, its time to get that off our records and make our probation officer happy“.

Ok, I gotta come clean now, it’s a joke!  But if you want a good laugh and you enjoy making fun of stogy wine review write-ups, you should check out this cool tool called Silly Tasting Notes Generator.  Tech guru Greg Sumner created a Perl script to generate wacky random tasting notes by pulling adverbs, adjectives and flavors from an online wine source and then he strings them together to create hilarious reviews such as these:

Wicked and desperate Syrah. Kicks you with toothpaste, closed french onion soup and perceptable skittle. Drink now through 2011.

Unimpressive and middle-aged Voignier. Drops pixie stick, focused jack cheese and forward slim jims. Drink now through April.

Overaged but equally desperate Cabernet Franc. Forcefully bites you with saltine, extra-ripe hair-spray and perceptable cactus. Drink now through Friday.

Powerful but over-the-top Chenin Blanc. Attacks with string cheese, sassy poi and atomic traces of pork rind. Drink now through Christmas.

Can’t get enough? Head on over to the Tasting Notes Generator and take it for a spin.

…and if you’re still looking for more ways to waste your precious time, why don’t you join the #VinQ Enobytes gang on Twitter for a bit of wine trivia? We play every Tuesday at 5PM PST.  It’s a lot of fun for novices and experts alike.

In my wine column today on OregonLive.com, I talk about the pleasures of vacationing at the California Mendocino Coast where we ventured through Anderson Valley, visiting a few old favorites and some new wineries including Duckhorn’s Pinot outpost, Goldeneye, which offers great wines and a very nice tasting room located at Obester’s old location. As we drove north to head back to Oregon, we found a great restaurant (thanks urbanspoon iphone app!) which proved to be a damn good Italian treat. I knew I was at the right place when I started to focus on the smells filling the restaurant over the decor; fabulous homemade pastas, wood-fired pizzas and a reasonable wine list. Check out my latest post on Wine Bytes to read more.