Decanter.com
Apr 01, 2003 -- Wine lovers who want to find out what's happening vinously in their area can now log on to www.localwineevents.com, a website entirely devoted to wine events around the world. The site lists almost 17,000 events worldwide.
Philadelphia Weekly
Mar 01, 2003 -- I have such difficulty imagining my life pre-internet, and now I have one more reason not to: www.localwineevents.com, my new one-stop resource for all things oenophilistic, including wine dinners, tastings and expos by geographic area.
Wine Enthusiast Magazine
Mar 01, 2003 -- Localwineevents.com, an online go-to listing of wine tastings and gourmet-centric to-dos, has just announced that they''''ve added a new feature that will allow visitors to purchase event tickets online-including tickets to Wine Enthusiast''''s 2nd Annual Toast of the Town, scheduled for May 19, 2003 at New York''''s Lincoln Center.
Swirl Wine News
Mar 01, 2003 -- Eric Orange's www.localwineevents.com bills itself as the "largest wine and spirits calendar in the world," and indeed we'd be surprised if any other site comes close to the nearly 17,000 events listed since the site's inception three years ago. You can search for events by location or date, both in the U.S. and abroad (at press time, we even found one planned in the Czech Republic). The site's supported by ads, and is free for both users and those listing events.
Chicago Sun Times
by Celeste Busk
Feb 08, 2003 -- Those looking for more wine-related events might want to surf www.LocalWineEvents.com. The free service invited retailers, restaurants, vineyards and wholesalers to post information about their wine, beer, spirits and food-related events with links back to their own Web sites for more information. It will display a calendar of all events for your area. You also can sign up to receive free e-mail notices of events.
Oakland Tribune
Feb 05, 2003 -- Winemaker dinners, wine tastings, wine classes, wine festivals -- find them all on www.localwineevents.com The site lists hundreds of wine-related activities, organized by location, for cities all over the country and the world. Just click on the city you want, and you'll find a calendar with details about each event. You can even order tickets. The site provides many other services, including links to online wine merchants, wine vacations and newsletters.
The Wine News
Feb 01, 2003 -- Not only can you be notified of all the events in your area relating to wine by doing no more than checking your e-mail, you'll be able to buy tickets to those events on LocalWineEvents.com's secure site."
Chicago Tribune
by Renee Enna
Jan 29, 2003 -- Localwineevents.com offers a menu of Chicago-area tastings, dinners, lectures and other wine-related doings, as well as articles and essays on wine. The organizers of the respective events submit their own listings, so the site is only as good as the people contributing information. But a recent visit found an up-to-date lineup that was succinct and well edited. When available, it also includes links for visitors to obtain more information on events.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
by Deborah Scoblionkov
Dec 04, 2002 -- Click and sip: It's Friday night, and you're home alone. You'd love to relax and sip interesting wines with lively company. Rather than park yourself on a barstool at the local pub, check out www.localwineevents.com to learn about wine-related happenings in the Philadelphia region and more than 100 other locales, Tuscany to Tasmania. Log onto this central clearinghouse to access details of wine tastings, classes, auctions and wine-maker dinners worldwide. Friday night, you can "Swirl the World" with the Wine School of Philadelphia at Grass Roots Cafe in Manayunk (1-267-295-1023) or sign up for a wine-and-food tasting class ($89) at Viking Culinary Center (610-526-9020) in Bryn Mawr.
Dan Berger's Vintage Experiences
by Dan Berger
Jul 30, 2002 -- The Blue Mountains, two hours east of Sydney, offer some of the most gorgeous views in all of Australia, and the charming area is also home to quaint antique shops and handsome bed-and-breakfast spots. Assume you are a wine lover mapping out a sojourn to Sydney in October, with plans to visit the Blue Mountains on your trip. As a wine lover, you'd appreciate being able to taste some of Australia's finest wines, but since the Blue Mountains are hundreds of miles from the nearest wine region of Australia, you figure your chances of a fine wine experience are nil. Not so fast. The Sydney International Wine Competition's Judges' Farewell Dinner is scheduled for Friday evening, Oct. 11, at the Lilienfels Resort. And it is open to the public for a fee of only about $85 per person. I have been to these "degustation" dinners in the Blue Mountains and can verify that the multicourse meals are always sensational and offer tastes of many superb wines. Late this year, from November through the end of the year, those visiting Yosemite National Park will also have the chance to attend wine seminars and banquets, part of the classic Vintners Holidays at the Ahwahnee hotel. I am a moderator at two of this year's sessions, between Dec. 1 and Dec. 6. I have done these events for well over a decade and believe them to be among the most enjoyable wine events anywhere in the world each year. Finding such wine events, especially those that are remote from where wine lovers live, has been, in the past, rather difficult. You could always look in a wine magazine, but smaller events, or those in really remote locations like New Delhi, India, rarely are available to even the most committed wine lover. That is why the Internet offers wine organizations a chance to reach out to the world to gain publicity for their events. But the drawbacks with most search engines are obvious. For example, if you enter the words "wine events" in most of them, you'll get a wide-ranging set of unconnected "events," many of which are promotional in nature and cost far more than they ought to. One group that does wine-based dinners around the world is the International Wine & Food Society, in which regional chapters coordinate individual events. But entering the phrase "International Wine & Food Society" into search engines yields random events from places like Helsinki, London and Ontario, including some that are long since past. And wine information sites rarely have a very complete compilation of events. The web site for the Wine Institute in California, for example, http://www.wineinstitute.org, has only a handful of events. So I found it quite useful the other day when I was looking for a major wine event to come across a site that had literally hundreds of wine events around the world. The site, www.localwineevents.com, offers so many events that even the most dedicated wine lover will have a hard time choosing where to go. Eric Orange started the site exactly two years ago and today has more than 12,000 events listed on the site, including one in New Delhi! (The Delhi Wine Club staged a wine dinner last Thursday, July 25, a five-course Lebanese meal with wines from Tuscany, Burgundy, Spain, Chile, Australia and New Zealand. Details are on the web site.) At present, localwineevents is not charging for postings. At some point, Orange says, he may levy a small charge for posting commercial events but says, "Charities probably will be able to post for free. But where a wine maker dinner is being staged, where a restaurant is making a profit, I may charge some day." Advertising on the site now provides enough money to allow Orange to "pay the bills that the site costs," but he admits, "it has nowhere near repaid my time to develop the site." The site has no commercial sponsorship, but it does offer an option to subscribers of informing them of wine events in their areas. There is no charge for the service. As you would expect, Orange's site lists Napa/Sonoma as the place with the greatest number of wine events posted at present, with 48. Included are winery-sponsored and charity-backed events, cooking classes, a summer film festival sponsored by Gundlach-Bundschu, and even Kendall-Jackson's Tomato Festival on Sept. 7, at which more than 150 varieties of tomatoes may be sampled along with wine tasting, gourmet food sampling, an art show, seminars by renowned chefs, and live entertainment. WINE OF THE WEEK: 2000 Monterra Cabernet Sauvignon, Monterey County ($13) -- A stylish wine with bright cherry and herbal notes, and excellent balance, so it will age for a few years, and a bright fruit finish. Dan Berger resides in Sonoma County, Calif. Berger publishes a weekly newsletter on wine and can be reached at danberger@VintageExperiences.com.
