Cook. Eat. Drink. Live. and Spit & Twit in NYC
By Tambi Schweizer, Tasting Hall Manager
I just returned from NYC where I poured wine at two different events. The first one was Cook. Eat. Drink. Live. 24.7.365. and the second one was Spit & Twit. They were both located in amazing places.
The Cook. Eat. Drink. Live. venue was down in the Chelsea area in an amazing post and beam warehouse located on The Tunnel & La Venue at 608 West 28th Street @ 11th Avenue in New York City. They had a lot to offer at this amazing site. For the “Cook.” Section of the event they had over 35 restaurants sampling their products…my favorite was this great homemade macaroni and cheese, with the creamiest cheese sauce I have ever tasted. It just melted in your mouth! Down in the tunnel area was the “Eat. & Live.” section with almost 30 different gourmet food brands, including cheese samples, lots of amazing sauces and some fabulous brownies from “Hot Blondies Bakery”. I even traded some wine in return for a couple brownies that I was able to actually save to take home for a gourmet chocolate treat in upstate! I was located in the “Drink.” area that included a sophisticated collection of fine wine from all over New York State with wine for both the novice collector and expert oenophile. Thank you to The Grape Exchange for sponsoring this section. They did a great job of getting about 40 wineries together to pour wine for a great crowd. I spent two days educating the public about the Finger Lakes wines and in general where the Finger Lakes region is located. Heron Hill’s Semi-Dry Riesling and the Ingle Vineyard Pinot Noir were the hit of the show. Most people seemed to really be into finding wines to pair with the Thanksgiving meal that is happening next week. The Pinot Noir is very smoky and earthy which pairs well with the roasted veggies as a great side dish. The crispness of the Riesling is amazing with the sweet potatoes and the softness of the turkey. Overall I think the show was a great success, I was able to get the word out about Finger Lakes wine with many retailers seemingly interested in pricing up at least a few of our wines. Hopefully our outside sales manager, Christina Bowe’s phone is ringing off the hook. Look for her in the NYC area in the near future.
On Sunday I headed down to City Winery located on Varick Street in the Soho district of NYC. City Winery hosted a really cool consumer tasting event called Spit & Twit. This was the first of its kind event, incorporating the Twitter platform throughout the tasting. As the consumers came through and tasted all the wines there were then encouraged to spit them out in the provided dump buckets and then Twitter about each of the particular wines. It was a fascinating idea that I believe just need a little bit of “tweeking”. I found that there wasn’t a lot of spitting actually happening, but that’s to be expected…it was a fun afternoon to have a few glasses of wines and try new wines that many people had never tried before. I found that people really needed to have a few snacks and after a few winery tastings and actually twitter about the wines they were trying. I think they forgot to keep twittering as the event wore on. I did get a lot of really great contacts from the event and would love to keep supporting these types of events, as I think they could be really effective in the social media aspect of marketing. The photo is of Morgen McLaughlin (President of Finger Lakes Wine Country) and I courtesy of Metromix.
Overall, NYC was a blast. I was lucky enough to bring by boyfriend (I even put him to work), we had some great food, did a little bit of Christmas shopping and for the first time ever went to a dueling piano bar called Sweet Caroline’s (located on 322 W 45th St.). I love to visit the city for a few days, but am glad that I live here in the Finger Lakes region, as it is one of the most beautiful (…and quiet) spots in the world!