Given my bordering-on-crazy travel schedule this month (and based on the huge response to our last giveaway here on 1WD), I’m opting for another giveaway to assuage your genetic psychological need to respond to the new and different.

This week, I’m teaming up with Dead Bolt Wine to offer a $100 gift card to StubHub.com (cash value: $100… duh…), so that (if you win) you can get your Summer concert fix on!

Part of Dead Bolt’s well-positioned marketing focus is the idea of pushing the envelope in iconoclastic ways, which is a bit of a recurring theme in the features here on 1WD. Dead Bolt have also been heavy into the independent music scene this year – another topic quite close to my ticker. So for this giveaway, here’s how it’s gonna go down:

• Leave a comment on this post and let us know who in the wine world you most admire for going against the grain (there’s an oak-aging/anti-oak-aging joke in there somewhere).
• In one week, on June 25, 201 at 8PM ET, I will randomly select a winner from the commenters, who will receive the $100 gift card to StubHub.com.

To get you in the Summer concert going mood, I’m including an embarrassingly staged photo of me from my band’s recent WSTW FM radio appearance, and a clip from that show in which we performed a wine-related tune live on the air (for more on that song, titled Wine Kissing Days, check out the video premier from 2011). You might like it, in which case you’ll be primed for both wine drinking and Summer concerts, or hate it, in which case if you win you’ll be able to go see some other act that’s actually good!

In any case, at least it gives you some background music while you’re writing your comment…

Wine Kissing Days: The Steve Liberace Band

Cheers – and good luck!

• 11 Bruno Giacosa Dolcetto D'Alba (Dolcetto D'Alba): Speaking in thick Italian accent, explaining how berry jam's supposed to be made. $25 B >>find this wine<<
• 11 Bruno Giacosa Roero Arneis (Roero): In short, the rocks rock with totally rocking rockstar rockability. Not sure for how long tho. $27 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 11 Domaines Schlumberger Pinot Blanc Les Princes Abbes (Alsace): Well, how about them apples? All of the richness & none of the fat! $17 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 11 Klipfel Riesling Cuvee Particuliere (Alsace): For some, the past is a particularly fruity but strange – & very astringent – place. $14 B- >>find this wine<<
• 10 Emeritus William Wesley Pinot Noir (Sonoma Coast): Capable of winning an arm wrestling match, but would rather give you a backrub. $65 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 12 Miraval Rose (Cotes de Provence): Like Brangelina, there's a serious streak under its entertaining, easy-on-the-senses flamboyance $23 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 09 Monteverro Tinata (Maremma): Mostly claws, sinew & roars now, time ought to get it rolling over, purring & looking for a tummy rub $95 A- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Monteverro Terra di Monteverro (Maremma): Putting the super in Super Tuscan, & a Super Tuscan into your hoity toity supper action. $75 A- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Monteverro Toscana (Maremma): Grit, grip, & a ton of dried herbs that won't quit; patience might be rewarded with smoother edges. $90 A- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Monteverro Chardonnay (Maremma): Big, brash, but also beautiful; a lot of volume, no doubt, but not without its compelling dialog. $85 A- >>find this wine<<

Last month, I was one of the International judges in the 2013 Wines of Portugal Challenge, an annual event that was recently opened up to include wine-type-folks from outside of Portugal in the judging pool.

The results of that competition have just been published, and as their guest (okay, okay, and to make up a bit for hammering them about our butt-numbing trip to the Dão), I thought I’d share the results of the competition with you. Only, it will be 1WD style, so prepare for the opinionated and somewhat freakish.

I’m happy to report that the competition was both fun and well-run, apart from having to reuse stemware (and the tendency of some of my amiable panel-mates to fall into native Portuguese when discussing the results of each wine, which meant that in some cases I only understood that they were arguing – or agreeing – about a wine’s relative merits). I’m not so happy to report that the Portuguese still seem hell-bent on pushing Touriga Nacional as their flagship red wine grape, despite the fairly well-accepted notions that a) the TN wines, while potentially excellent and long-lived, are acquired tastes and are largely inferior to their blended counterparts, and b) Dão and Douro are a lot easier to pronounce for most English-speakers. Just sayin’.

Since many of you have no visibility into how these competitions work, I should share that no two wine competitions are run identically (at least not in my growing experience with them), and in this case our panel consisted of a couple of international judges (duh), and mostly folks from the Portuguese wine industry (Port, Madeira, etc.), headed up by a Portuguese winemaker as our panel chief (charged with keeping us all in line).

We tasted all of the wines blind, and then inputted our opinions electronically into a PC via drop-down boxes for various categories of evaluation (one of which, confusingly, was typicity, even though we tasted blind and weren’t told what we were evaluating). The drop-down choices translated in the system as numeric scores, which then translated into a medal (gold, silver, bronze, or no award).

I hated this system…

Don’t get me wrong, it worked; it was efficient, ran pretty smoothly, and provided the benefit of instantly tabulating and graphing the results. I hated it because I hate assigning numerical scores to wines. But I also hated it because, as most of you will probably have guessed by now, we ended up sort of jerry-rigging the category choices until the system pumped out the medal we thought the wine deserved. So the numbers didn’t actually help us much in the debates, which in these cases are never about scores and are always about what medal the wine deserves street having been tagged against its peers.

I’d rather just input what medal I’ve got in mind, on a fuzzier scale (low Silver, high Bronze, etc.), so that everyone else in the panel can see exactly where I stand, and we can quickly discuss any large discrepancies. But hey, this wasn’t the 2013 1WD Challenge, so I sucked it up and dealt with it.

Even though the pours were totally blind, it became apparent pretty quickly at one point that we were evaluating Douro reds, Alvarinho whites, etc. And in a couple of cases (shared below), those blind tastings put me well into a happy place.

Rather than re-publish all of the competition results verbatim, I thought I’d instead share what turned out to be my top three wines of the competition, as reported by the program with the drop-down-boxes-turned-funky-numbers. That “score” is included for each of my top three, purely for sh*ts-and-giggles purposes, and should NOT be taken as numerical ratings by me, because a) they came from a computer (where numbers belong!) and b) numerical ratings generally suck donkey bong and I do not use them (yes, I still mean it):

3) 2012 Quinta de Gomariz Alvarinho (Minho)
Price: about $12
Result: Silver (my “score” – 90)

A nice bargain. On the day I arrived in Lisbon, we were treated to a master class tasting of Alvarinho wines, and this one was included. I can’t say that I picked it out blind, but I can say that this wine will please many a crowd, because it’s almost sweet (about seven grams residual sugar, from my notes), but you can hardly discern it from all of the pithy citrus, banana, grapefruit, sour lemon, grass, and all-around amicability. If it could speak, it would probably be asking “may I give you a backrub?” As a snob, you’ll want to hate on this because of the RS… but the silver medal probably proves that you just shouldn’t be so damned snobby, alright?

2) 2010 Quinta do Vallado Reserva Field Blend (Douro)
Price: about $60
Result: Gold (my “score” – 91)

Welcome to the foodies’ high-end Douro (incidentally, their Touriga Nacional, which I tasted separately at another masterclass during the visit, was equally foodie-friendly in its freshness). At first, the density of this wine wouldn’t make you think it had that foodie appeal in it, but there’s freshness and floral action here to lighten things up despite the intense scaffolding, and they give it just enough of an elegant edge to offset the overall intensity. Think rococo on steel framing.

1) 2011 Vinhos Maçanita Maçanita (Douro)
Price: $NA
Result: Gold (my “score” – 93)

Good luck finding this one in the states. If they don’t have wide representation here, hopefully a few sips of this intensely floral, fruity and powerful red in the right forward-thinking importer’s mouth ought to do the trick. It’s a Touriga Nacional and Tinta Roriz belnd, helmed by a young brother and sister team (António and Joaninha Maçanita) who appear to be hell-bent on conquering the Douro, and also appear to be doing everything right (so far, anyway).

Cheers!

The replay of our controversial chat with iconoclastic importer/author/word-magician/documentary-maker/Riesling-freak Terry Theise is below for your viewing pleasure. Terry expresses his love for the Hosemaster of Wine, gets political on Champagne, and sets on straight on why Riesling is, in fact, the world’s greatest wine grapes (see, people, I told you…). Also, I end up trying the Pitt-Jolie rosé (don’t judge me…). If you are even remotely geeky about wine, this episode is going to get your blood flowing, trust me. Enjoy!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Leading Between the Vines
• Reading Between the Wines
• Miraval Rosé (yes, that Miraval, the Brangelina wine that sold out in less than five hours)

Cheers!

Axel looks every inch like an air force pilot: well-mannered, calm, fit, nice hair, strong chin – the works (see pic in the list of judges from the competition). Like me, at forty-ish he’s semi-retired into the wine biz. I took to referring to him Axel as Herr Port (get it…? Mr. Port… Airport… former pilot… okay, you know what, go screw yourself!).

The reason I’m mentioning Herr Port today: in getting to know Axel and talking about his odd landing (ha!… sorry…) into the wine biz during my recent week in Portugal, is due to a realization on my part. Axel’s story is similar to many of those who have made up the list of finalists in the Best Single Subject Subject Wine Blog category of the wine blog awards through the last few years (though none of them are former Luftwaffe pilots, as far as I’m aware). It was the radiation that what all those just-mentioned souls have in common is actually the key thing when it comes to building authority on the topic of wine from the ground up. And it amazes me that so few people who say that they are interested in turning their self-published forays into wine coverage into something more serious are doing it.

These things are, for sure, more marathon (insert awesome `80s prog rock soundtrack here) than sprint, but if I were starting up in the wine world online tomorrow, and wanted to build an authoritative brand in as short amount of time as possible, here’s exactly how I’d go about it…

1. Specialize
2. Specialize
3. Specialize

Ok, there are a few more steps than that, but if at this point you’re thinking “hmmm… perhaps specialization is the key to this…” then congratulations, you’re paying attention! Here’s a bit more detail behind that thinking:

1) Generalist? Good luck with that.

Building an authoritative voice now is different than it was even five years ago. I’m lucky – I can be a generalist, and indulge nearly any wine topic that I want, because I started early enough. Wine blogging was still a bit of a twinkle in the Internet’s eye when 1WineDude was founded in 2007 (-ish). If you want to be a generalist now, that’s great but know that you are in competition with me, Vinography, DrVino.com… there just isn’t a lot of land grab available in that market. You need a different market if you want to get a piece of prime real estate (and get noticed).

2) Location, location, location.

Back in 2011, I sat on a panel with search guru Doug Cook and wine blogger / Internet design and SEO maven Alder Yarrow at Pro Wine Writers Symposium discussing the importance of search and how to maximize the chances of having your wine writing noticed on-line. If you haven’t watched the video of that session and gone through Doug’s slide deck, you should do it now and then come back to this post. But since we both know that you won’t do that, I’ll try to sum up the importance of that session’s message in one of Doug’s slides:

Google “wine” and the odds that your new website comes up early in search results is basically nil. Search for something very specific, though… and that’s where magic can start to happen, people. That’s the Long Tail of Doug’s (incredibly insightful) slide deck.

If you want authority, you need to think in terms of prime location online. That includes good search engine results, and (insanely) content useful to the people who find you via search. Want some prime location? You will need to get very, very specific. Extending the metaphor way too far, you have to find the little gems that were overlooked in the earlier land-grabs.

Yes, that means getting your subject area to a point that’s even more specific than the relatively niche topic of “Wine.”

3) Do your homework. Also, there’s a sh*t-ton of homework.

If I were to start building an authoritative wine brand via the Internet tomorrow, I’d focus exclusively on something like The Wines of Hungary, and target a specific market (like U.S. consumers mainly on the big cities in the coastal areas) where I know there might be geeky interest. And before ever putting finger to keyboard I’d be tasting the wines of the region (hopefully I’d already have done that, of course, in picking a topic about which I was wildly passionate), getting certifications, taking classes on the region, reading, studying, and talking to established wine peeps in the field both off- and on-line.

Then, finally, I’d write a bunch of content, asking people that I respect to both review it and offer feedback first, refining it, and slowly publishing it while also networking via social media contacts and groups who were into Hungarian wines. Finally, the site would be launched, content and networked influencer connections at the ready (if it even was an independent site or blog – there’s no reason it couldn’t exist as a page on Facebook, or Tumblr, or LInkedIn, or… you get the picture).

Sound like a big pain in the ass? That’s because it is. Congrats, you’re still paying attention!

What I’ve just laid out is a huge pain in the ass.

But we’re not talking about blogging what you drank last night, which comes from the passion of wanting to share with a (usually small) community. We are talking about building authority. And there is an enormous difference between the two.

Can you still build authority the way that I did, which resembled the generalist view and passionate sharing much more than a highly-specified, well-planned, targeted endeavor with a clear goal and hopefully measures of success and checkpoints along the way? I suppose so, but it would be such a Sisyphusian climb that I’m not sure that I’d wish it on my worst enemies.

If you’re really hungry about the online wine space and want to make your mark as an authoritative brand, then I’ve got five words of summary for you:

Go specific, or go home.

Cheers!