For this reason, we want to offer a new way to introduce yourself. If you have a product, project or service that you want highlighted, create a short video about it. Today is Wink Lorch from the Wine Travel Guides and João Rosé of Quinta do Infantado!

After the fact ...

Wow! That was … intense!

We are all just getting home after a most amazing, fun packed, information rich and simply breathtakingly exciting weekend of wine, discussion sessions, networking trips and tastings. What more could anyone wish for?

120 or so bloggers from all over the globe in one hotel, in the beautiful city of Lisbon, Portugal, and some stunning wines from around that country and beyond, is way beyond any dreams we might have had when we started this Wine Bloggers’ Conference adventure.

We will be writing all sorts of follow-up posts here and on our own blogs, linking to all the different perspectives that our many friends will have had on the event. However, for now let us say, as organisers, that the bloggers, both first-timers and seasoned veterans of past events, were brilliant. The sense of community was palpable, and the wines from Portugal and other participating countries, shone.

We will, in time, thank all our wonderful sponsors, the hotel, the restaurants, the people of Lisbon and Portugal, but for now, we all need to rest, recover and ponder – how can I express what I gained this weekend? The answers to that question will be many, and varied, and I guarantee they will be interesting.

Thank you all, and stay in touch! There are great plans afoot for the future!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Trip to Portugal: EWBC and Enoforum Wines ~ I’m Flying (wine-blog.org)
• II Annual European Wine Bloggers Conference Extraordinarily Brief Update (catavino.net)
• Bloggers Conference: what I’d say if I was there! (wineanorak.com)
• Planning A Trip To Lisbon? A Food and Wine Lover’s Perfect Day (catavino.net)

If you want to follow along with what is happening at the European Wine Bloggers Conference and cannot be here in person (or you are here and want to share your thoughts, pictures and videos with others), you can find it all here:

Live Blogging – sessions in multiple languages; English & Portuguese which will include links to images, videos and some tweets

Flickr Group – for a great range of photos (some serious but also fun)

Videos – these may take a little longer to go up, but check these out too. In time this will also have videos of each session

Finally, for those who are here, please remember to use the #EWBC tag in your tweets so others can follow along

We’re excited to have him back in Europe for the EWBC, and with Doug’s recent jump into Twitter search, we felt participants would appreciate to learn more about his recent adventures.

1. After last year’s EWBC we have become a huge fan of both you and your work with Able Grape. But as a  year has come and gone, we’d love to know what has changed at Ablegrape and what features people should know about?

First, thanks for the kind words! I’m glad you are finding Able Grape useful. The biggest changes in the last year have been behind the scenes – the relevance of results has gotten quite a bit better, and the database is far larger and more complete: at last count there were more than 41,000 websites in the index, and about 23 million pages of content.

2. We to congratulate you on your new position as head of search for Twitter! Great news! So what you can tell us about the future of Twitter search and how this position might affect your work at Able Grape?

Well, I can’t say too much publicly about Twitter Search except that we have a fantastic team and I’m really excited to be a part of it. I’m also excited about what we’re building – search is key to Twitter and we’re working on making it a much more compelling experience. Because I’m mostly focused on Twitter these days, Able Grape is a labor of love I maintain in my spare time. It will continue to be uniquely useful, and to grow and update, though perhaps not as quickly as before. The major improvements I’ve been planning will eventually happen, but for now I’ve put them on the back burner.

3. Seeing how Twitter has become an integral part of the online wine world, how do you think your work at Twitter might help those of us working with wine online?

I became a huge fan of Twitter long before working at the company, because I found it connected me very quickly and organically with people with shared interests, concerns, and points of view (and sometimes people with opposing points of view, which is also great). By building a better, more compelling search experience we’ll be helping you find information faster, connect more quickly with relevant people in the wine industry, and help interested people find you and your tweets.

4. Over the years, you have clearly learned a significant amount from your experience building Able Grape. What lessons from

Ablegrape do you think might apply to Twitter search?

This is going to sound kind of lame, but I’m using pretty much everything I’ve learned. Working at Inktomi and Yahoo! for a number of years taught me about building large-scale search engines, and building Able Grape was an entrepreneurial and creative endeavor, tackling something that seemed impossible at the start and just doing it. Twitter is a bit like that: on one hand, it’s one of the world’s largest search engines, on the other it’s a relatively small team, with a lot of passion and creativity, tackling some very hard and exciting problems that haven’t been solved elsewhere.

5. You have told us on several occasions that you loved last year’s conference, a compliment we don’t take lightly, but what makes this year’s conference intriguing or exciting for you?

Well, the thing I’m most looking forward to is seeing the great people I met last year, getting to know new people, spending time discussing the wine world, the online world, tasting, and who knows, perhaps even drinking a little wine together. I’m also excited that the conference is in Portugal. I’ve only briefly been to Portugal before (to Buçaco) and can’t wait to experience a bit of Lisbon.

6. We’ve tasted some pretty amazing gems from your private cellar, but what we don’t is your expereince with Portuguese wine, and what are you looking forward to taste at the conference this year?

Though some of the best wines I’ve ever had are Portuguese (I’m a HUGE fan of old Madeira), the spectrum of Portuguese wines I’ve had is rather narrow, mostly limited to the obvious Port and Madeira (though I did have some fascinating old wines at the Palace Hotel in Buçaco on my one other visit). I like unique, off-the-beaten path wines. Portugal has a wealth of characterful native grape varieties. I’m excited to try lesser-known, good, inexpensive table wines made from these – the kind of wines I like to drink every day. Very few of them make it to the States so I’m really looking forward to learning a lot more.

Vinoble is close to my heart. It was one of the first wine shows I attended when I moved to Spain; and personally, I feel it is one of the best wine fairs out there. Unusual in its narrow focus on dessert wines, Vinoble is a rare specimen that attracts those of us who thrive on rare and unique experiences. Where else can you taste Chateau d’yquem next to Canadian apple ice wine (seriously good stuff)? Held every other year in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, it is a wine show like no other. And one particular highlight is the opportunity for a country to gain the spotlight for one year. If you’re following the breadcrumbs, you’ve probably deducted who the 2010 featured country is…oh yes, it’s Portugal!

So when we were contacted by Vinoble, we were elated to have them sponsor a tasting, giving us a sneak peek at 2010′s treasures to be tasted . But we’ve decided to conduct this tasting a bit differently.

Portugal is renowned for its sweet wines, and while we look forward to showcasing all the great treasures that exist in both dry and sweet, we figured it’s a fantastic opportunity to kick off the 2009 EWBC by pouring some of the greatest sweet treats in Iberia. At 5:30 on Friday night, we’ll be opening historic ports, madeiras, sherries, and more, all in the hopes of satiating your sweet tooths! On top of this, it will be considered a kickoff event for Vinoble itself announcing Portugal’s status at this year’s event.

Vinoble is an International Exhibition of Noble[sweet] Wines that in 2010 will take place from the 30th of May to the 2nd of June. It is the only one dedicated to  fortified, dessert and natural sweet wines. It is held every two years in Jerez de la Frontera. These noble wines, complex, special, and always made with great affection and care, never had a global event to showcase themselves despite of being regarded as some of the best wines in the world.  Thus Vinoble was created to become the showcase of these sweet treasures.

Needless to say we are ecstatic to have them, and even more excited to announce that they will also be giving away a free trip to one lucky individual to attend Vinoble 2010. One lucky blogger will be flown to Jerez de la Frontera, put up in a hotel and welcomed to Vinoble, where they will be able to taste some of the finest sweet wines from around the world.

So for now, we welcome Vinoble to the EWBC and hope that you all bring your dessert palates to Portugal; trust me, you’re going to need them!

On Saturday night, October 31st Charles will present an hour long tasting on Portuguese wine. His aim is both educate on the myriad styles of Portuguese wine and its intricate relationship with Portuguese tourism.  As Portugal remains a very rustic and undiscovered haven for wine lovers, Charles will do his very best to enlighten us as to the myriad of possibilities that await us – and knowing Charles, we may even be graced with a portion of the tasting done in song and verse.

What follows are a few brief questions we posed to Charles regarding the potential of Portugal as a wine tourism destination! Enjoy!

The EWBC this year in Lisbon will have a considerable amount of “first time” Portugal visitors, many of whom have online voices. Therefore, what message should bloggers take away from Portugal as a potential wine tourism destination, and what sets it apart from other locations?

Portugal’s key point of interest to wine-lovers is the great array of native grapes, from which most Portuguese wines are made. These taste different from any others in the world. And, whereas the wines of, say, Italy (another country with great native grapes) are pretty well-distributed in other countries, Portuguese wines haven’t achieved this international distribution yet, so you have to come to Portugal to find them. And Portugal is also a very beautiful country, not just the coasts, but with mountains, rivers and lakes inland, too.

Why do you feel it’s taken so long for Portugal to be recognized as a quality wine tourism destination?

A bit more focussed activity from Tourism of Portugal and ViniPortugal has certainly helped. The new network of motorways built since entering the EU has also made it much easier to get to parts of inland Portugal that were well-nigh inaccessible before. And European funds also became available to finance better equipment at wineries. That happened at the same as a new generation of winemakers was coming out of wine school, getting international winemaking experience, and making even better wines. It all adds up to a ‘new’ wine country within easy reach of all of Europe.

You visit Portugal frequently, however, as Portugal is far from the largest wine producing country, are you revisiting because you are interested in the evolution of the wines, or is Portugal expanding what it can offer? Where do you see Portugal’s wines in 5 years time?

I’m continually amazed by the number of good new labels that come to the market each time I look at Portuguese wines. I try to keep up, but it’s tricky when I am also writing and talking about wines from other countries. I think we’re reaching a point of consolidation, rather than further expansion. But most of the ‘new’ producers are people who have been growing grapes for years, centuries, even. They’ve stopped supplying grapes to the local co-op, or selling their wine to larger companies, and trying to get added value by selling wines under their own labels. This will probably continue for a while, but in this economic climate, at a moment of international wine over-supply, I think there’ll be a slow-down. In 5 years I hope good Portuguese wines will have better international distribution, and more people know what unique flavours Portuguese grapes can give.

Your book is the “definitive” resource for a gourmand traveling in Portugal. What is the key point to remember when planning or taking a trip through the Portuguese wine country?

If you’re taking an ordinary-length holiday, I’d concentrate on one part of the country, rather than trying to cover the whole of Portugal in one gulp. If you take one of Portugal’s three main airports, in Porto, Lisbon and Faro, as starting points, you can cover the north, centre and south respectively. Plan as far ahead as possible, and make hotel bookings and appointments with wineries if you like to do things that way. If you can make bookings through websites, great. If not, remember that a lot of smaller Portuguese hotels and restaurants aren’t yet brilliant at answering emails. Phone is a better way to contact them, but you may well have to attempt speaking Portuguese!

Finally, what is the “long weekend” recommendation for a European traveler who finds a cheap plane ticket to Portugal? Where do you go?

What do you see, assuming this is their first visit? I’d start with Lisbon, a wonderful, historic city, with plenty of good food, bars, clubs and things to see. Lisbon will give you a snapshot of Portuguese culture. My next weekend would be in Porto, also historic, totally different from Lisbon, with boat-trips up the Douro and visits to port cellars in Vila Nova de Gaia.