Speed tasting with the bloggers

Last weekend I was briefly in historic Charlottesville, Virginia (in temperatures of 100 °F and high humidity), at the annual US Wine Bloggers' Conference, making a keynote speech and renewing my acquaintance with Virginia wines, about which I will be writing when I return to normal service (see A new summer regime at JR.com). Both organisation and welcome were outstanding. And of course any host who can field Monticello as a setting for a wine tasting, even in those weather conditions, has a considerable advantage.

On each afternoon of the conference one hour was given over to an intense form of wine selling and wine writing; a long, long way from the considered total immersion in wine drinking advocated by my fellow keynote speaker Eric Asimov of the New York Times.

See the short video below for a flavour of this debatable practice, and for half a conversation with the producer of one Virginia wine.