A hiker’s view of The Palisades, above the Napa Valley floor. Image source: yelp.com.

Table Rock is a flat rocky outcrop surmounting The Palisades, a craggy set of cliffs on the northeast edge of Napa Valley, prominently visible from downtown Calistoga. Walking the trail to Table Rock, high above the vineyards of the valley, you may hear the scream of a nearby raptor and, through binoculars, the sharp-eyed might just see a Peregrine Falcon perched on a rock below.

Despite what you see and hear, however, it is the Table Rock Trail itself that is among the most captivating in the California wine country. When joined with the Palisades Trail and the historic Oat Hill Mine Road, the Table Rock trail combines amazing 19th-century trail engineering with bizarre rock formations, a pygmy knobcone pine forest, and nonstop spectacular views. In the cooler months, when rain-washed skies are free of summer’s haze, one can smell the volcanic dust below one’s feet, then look up to behold a vista extending 100 miles.

If you’ve read this far – and, assuming you like to hike – I’ve got a proposition for you: how’d you like to hike to Table Rock with me? Furthermore, if you knew you had an option to, rather than a simple four-mile out-and-back walk, instead walk the complete ten-mile mildly-butt-kicking route from summit to valley floor, would you raise your hand to volunteer?

And, if you also knew you’d be hiking – above Napa Valley, mind you – with a handful of winemakers, would you shout “just lemme grab my boots”?

Then save the following date, fellow winehiker, for we shall meet to experience the glory that is The Palisades on Saturday, November 22nd, at 8:30 a.m. After the hike is over, we’ll drive a little ways down the Silverado Trail to nearby Cuvaison Winery, where we’ll bask in happy euphoria over a potluck lunch, great local wines, and – if we’re of a mind to – a round or two of bocce ball.

Thus far there are 9 people interested in joining me on this hike, including Dick and Kathy Keenan of Kick Ranch Vineyards, who originally approached me with the idea for this outing. I’m thinking of capping the group at a manageable 15 people, however, so if you’d like to sign up, don’t wait too long to do it! Merely leave a comment to this post that includes your email address, and also let me know if you’re interested in the moderately easy four-mile out-and-back option or the relatively strenuous ten-mile one-way option. I’ll get back to you with driving directions and additional details.

Thanks! I look forward to walking The Palisades with you.

~winehiker

Dick Keenan of Kick Ranch Vineyards and Carica Wines, in a follow-up from October’s Wine Bloggers Conference, sends along the following note:

[Friday, October 24th] turned out to be a perfect day for tasting some of the best Syrah, Petite Sirah, Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc from Kick Ranch, including our own Carica Sauvignon Blanc and Syrah (www.caricawines.com). I was delighted that you and other bloggers were able to begin your weekend by tasting wines from the incredibly talented group of winemakers that I have the pleasure of working with at Kick Ranch.

Wine Bloggers Conference kick-off tasting at Kick Ranch.

The pleasure was mine! I certainly found it unique that Friday to taste a couple dozen wines all sourced from the same vineyard. I intend to taste more!

And I recommend you do, too. Dick graciously shared a list of those talented Kick Ranch winemakers and their respective wineries; I’m hereby sharing that list with you.

Bedrock Wine Company
Morgan Twain-Peterson, winemaker

Carica Wines
Charlie Dollbaum, winemaker

Enkidu Wines
Phillip Staehle, winemaker

Erna Schein
Les Behrens & Lisa Drinkward, winemakers

Loxton Cellars
Chris Loxton, winemaker

Lynmar Winery
Hugh Chappelle, winemaker

Pax Wine Cellars
Tyler Thomas, winemaker

Renard Wines
Bayard Fox, winemaker

Rosenblum Cellars
Kent Rosenblum, winemaker

Sanglier Cellars
Glenn Alexander & Russell Bevan, winemakers

Silent Morning Cellars
Tim Lesko, winemaker

Shane Wines
Shane Finley, winemaker

Thanks a million, Dick!

Stay tuned for an invitation to join me and Dick Keenan, Dick’s wife Kathy, and other local outdoorsy winemakers for a hike along the Table Rock trail on Napa County’s Mount St. Helena later this month; that invitation will be in an upcoming post this week.

~winehiker

The Flamingo Resort & Spa was host to 175 wine bloggers at the October 24-26 Wine Bloggers Conference.

It’s amazing what can happen after you make the decision to start blogging. I’ve been at it just shy of three years, and I couldn’t have surmised three years ago where it might someday take me. Yet I’ve now enjoyed the rare good privilege in this past year to attend both last weekend’s First Annual North American Wine Bloggers Conference (WBC) and last October’s first Outdoor Blogger Ho-Down. That Ho-Down, organized by Tom Mangan, author of the Two-Heel Drive blog, assembled a handful of hikers, mountain climbers, flyfishers and other outdoor folks from various places around the North American continent. It was a rustic and simple event, as an outdoorsy types’ convention probably ought to be; the only real organizational aspect required prior to convening bein’ the menu, bein’ as how we hikin’ types tend to be healthy eaters. Naturally, I did all the cookin’. And, quite naturally, we hikers all savored a little wine tasting (OK, truth: a lot of wine drinking and singing Eagles songs around our campfire), but we definitely made hiking the lower slopes of Mount Shasta and an enticing section of the Pacific Crest Trail a major part of that highly memorable weekend.

It’s one year later, and I have experienced the other end of the winehiking spectrum. Last Friday at noon I strode into the lobby of Santa Rosa’s Flamingo Resort & Spa and found myself surprised to immediately recognize a myriad number of faces, most of which I’d only seen previously in 75×75-pixel avatars! Even more surprising was my fellow wine bloggers’ ability to recognize me, I remember thinking – being that my avatar doesn’t prominently present my face. Some, however, did ask me why my apparently-iconic leather Aussie hat wasn’t affixed to my head. True, I suppose, that I might have met more of my kindred spirits if I’d been wearing The Hat on Friday afternooon – being that more of them might have recognized me – but, well, I guess I didn’t figure on the weekend’s sunny weather streaming its welcome rays completely inside our fully-roofed conference hall, somehow.

Still, it was almost difficult to get the conference started – at least for me. It was simply über cool to chat for the first time, face-to-face, with a dozen of my fellow wine-blogging brothers and sisters, many of whom I had only met online or in some manner become consistently enamored of their online personalities over these past three years. And yet I knew, going in, that though our individual blogs had represented initial forays into the relationships we now enjoy, it has been the powerful community-building aspects of Twitter that has firmly cemented the foundation of our wine blogging community. The conference has only solidified that notion, and its outcome has proven it. Therefore I think it’s safe to say that our particular slice of the Twitterverse has been largely responsible for creating the brotherly/sisterly aura that very palpably graced our weekend. I, for one, was high on the pure headiness of finally connecting with good friends face to face, for good friends is simply what we know we have become. Then again, the effects of tasting over two hundred different wines together over the course of the weekend might also have had something to do with it.

Walking the vineyards at Murphy Goode

Despite the prodigious quantity of wine that I spat and swallowed over the course of the weekend, I harbor many heady and lingering memories of what was, to me, a very powerful gathering of wine industry influencers. For influencers we realize we actually are, we wine bloggers. I know this because I’ve seen – and my wine-blogging colleagues tend to agree – that the steady advance of wine bloggerdom has democratized the conversations that are occurring between winemakers and wine drinkers – increasingly bypassing the major media middle ground – and it is wine blogs that have largely leveled the playing field simply by virtue of current social networking technologies that have streamlined publishing timelines, increased the abilities of wine lovers to interact, and fired the ovens of pure immediate possibility that drives us vinoscribes.

Last weekend clearly amplified the notion of what a blog can do, especially when that blog is part of a vital and growing community. It’s simple math: the power of one blogger’s network influences the power of another’s. Those network influences are, simply, growing in parabolic parallel to the number of active wine blogs. Factor in the firmly established global trend toward increased wine consumption, and you have a juggernaut in waiting.

Or at least you did until this past weekend. Now it’s out of design and in process, a full-fledged rockin’-good rocket ship, and the word is out, people: wine blogs are being perceived in the greater world community as having a dominant, credible, and seasoned citizen voice – a voice that solidly represents a new world that will democratize the acquisition and enjoyment of wine.

If that weren’t true, our legion of 175 attendees would not have been globally profiled as the Number 2 Twitter Topic during Friday afternoon’s Live Blogging Session, right behind Senator Barack Obama. Neither would we have been courted as a group so remarkably by the Sonoma County winemaking and wine marketing community (and many beyond its borders) to whom we North American wine bloggers owe many, many thanks. Those Sonoma County wine folks – they just plain get it.

You know, of seemingly small decisions – such as starting a blog to support your business – big consequences do come. As I write these words, I’m reminded of all that I have gained from authoring a blog: voice, creativity, passion, friends, memories, technological skills, an accelerated social networking climate and an improved writing desire – these are but a few. Conversely, there are the multiple inhibitions I have since lost, as if they are simply no longer required and now lie scattered, smattered, shattered and broken in my wake like so many cheap bottles of Tokay lining that not-so-easily-forgettable, greasy and weed-filled snake-infested roadside ditch that parallels the road to one’s desires.

(OK, so I haven’t lost the touch for writing blue prose. Who indeed, at 80, can claim they are finally satiated with desire? Yes, it’s true: I’m only 51. But I plan to be 80 someday. And I’m going to keep traveling that road. Plus, it’s my blog! And it is the blog that is the vehicle – precisely the point of this WBC exercise.)

Overlooking the vineyards of Rodney Strong

Indeed, there are an amazing number of worthy WBC topics that I could jump into. But, being that many great posts about the conference have already been published this past week by my fellow influencers, I’ll instead share a little Link Love here – not that this will be my final word on WBC08.

I therefore present the following links to stories and accounts of the 2008 Wine Bloggers Conference that are very much worth reading, if for no other reason than to impart a grand perspective of what many of us feel was a very historic and paradigm-shifting wine-inspired occasion. Read on! There’s great stuff below worth clicking to from good people in my life – people who, in many wonderful ways, have become affixed to my head.

In case you’re not in the mood for further reading, however, you might simply enjoy a few pics from the weekend.

Kick Ranch Kickoff
from Hardy Wallace of Dirty South Wine, Grimace Says Sleep is for the WEAK! Wine Bloggers Conference Day 1

Speed Tasting/Live Blogging
from Michelle Lentz of My Wine Education, Wine Blogger Conference: Live Blogging Event
from Phillip James of Snooth, Wine Bloggers Conference tasting insanity…
from Rémy Charest of Wine Case, Blogging Live from Santa Rosa, CA
from Lenn Thompson of LENNDEVOURS, Live Blogging @ Wine Blogging Conference 2008
from John Witherspoon of Anything Wine, Live Blogging from the Wine Bloggers Conference 2008

Blind Tasting Challenge
from Chris Butts of The Kilted Blog, Blind Tasting

100 New Zealand wines
from Amy Corron Power of Another Wine Blog, Palate Shock

Gary Vaynerchuk and Alice Feiring: Crush it, and Stir the Pot!
from Tom Wark of Fermentation, The Battle For Wine and How I Learned to Love Alice Feiring
from Amy Atwood of My Daily Wine, Fire Starter
from Becky B of Smells Like Grape, Gary V. Upstaged at WBC?

The Vineyard Walks
from Ken Payton of Reign of Terroir, Hiking Rockaway Vineyard With Doug McIlroy
from Michelle Lentz of My Wine Education, Photos: Wine Bloggers Conference and Russian River Valley Hike
from Diane Letulle of Wine Lover’s Journal, WBC — Russian River Valley Hike
from Megan of WineClubbie, An Inside Look at Michel-Schlumberger
from Becky B of Smells Like Grape, Saralee’s Vineyard & the Russian River Valley
from Gwendolyn Alley of Art Predator, Biodynamic & mostly organic: Quivira
from Tim Lemke of Cheap Wine Ratings, Rodney Strong Charlotte’s Home Sauvignon Blanc

Discussion Panels Break Out
from Michael Wangbickler of Caveman Wines, Wine Bloggers Conference Breakout Sessions

Blogging from a Bus
from Gwendolyn Alley of Art Predator, WiFi on the bus: only in America

The Luxe Tasting
from Ken Hoggins of Ken’s Wine Guide, Reviewing Wine At The Wine Bloggers Conference – Day 2

The Unconference
from Michael Wangbickler of Caveman Wines, The Wine Blogger Unconference
from Alder Yarrow of Vinography, Is There Any Point to Negative Wine Reviews?
from John Witherspoon of Anything Wine, From the Wine Bloggers Conference – My thoughts on credibility

That’s a wrap
from Lisa de Bruin of California Life: Better Than Happy Hour, Wine Industry Shift
from Jeff Lefevere of Good Grape, Postscript Thoughts on the Wine Blogging Conference
from Tom Wark of Fermentation, 13 Things I learned at the Wine Bloggers Conference
from Jo Diaz of Wine Blog, Wine Bloggers Conference: The 10 Most Important Things I Learned
from Michael Wangbickler of Caveman Wines, Final Thoughts on WBC 2008

~winehiker