ONE GIANT STEP FOR A WINO, ONE GIGANTIC LEAP FOR DEP’S NATION

Hey y’all, and welcome to the 21st Century.  Tomorrow, we hold first DEPS Twitter Tasting, featuring the wines of Airfield Estates, and in setting up our first Twitter Tasting, we wanted to accomplish a few things:

1.  We wanted to open up a new arena for tasting wines with our customers, expanding into the ever-changing arena of social media.
2. We wanted to spend time on a particular winery that wasn’t getting all the love it deserves in the eyes of the mainstream annals of the wine press.
3. We wanted to link up customers with the winery in a way that was quick, easy and economically feasible for all.
4. We wanted to become more interactive with our customers, in such a way as we cannot always do in a conventional setting.

Tomorrow’s tasting we are featuring 4 wines from Airfield Estates:  the 2009 Unoaked Chardonnay, the 2008 Bombshell Red, the 2008 Lightning and the 2008 Mustang.  Initially, we had set these 4 wines up as a kit for the customers who wished to participate to buy and take home.  We encouraged our customers to invite some friends over, have some type of get-together (party, dinner, etc.) and share their tasting experiences with the rest of us participating primarily online.

The concept had its pluses and minuses, so we choose to incorporate a kind of “tweet-up” extension, featuring me (that would be K2) running a standard in-store tasting, all while loosely mediating the Twitter, Facebook and maybe even chatroom conversations simultaneously, with all the madness captured on a live video feed.  You can link to that page here.

The kit idea was supplicated for simply picking up one or two of any of the Airfield wines we currently carry, and joining the conversation solo, with your significant other, best friend or whoever, along with the winery’s participants and everyone at the DEP’s store in Fort Thomas.

It’s a brave new world we are entering into, and anything goes, but here are a couple of things to help get you started.

From HQ, we will be tasting these wines in order:

1. Airfield Estates Unoaked Chardonnay 2009
2. Airfield Estates Lightning 2008
3. Airfield Estates Bombshell Red 2008
4. Airfield Estates Mustang 2008

We will be posting tasting notes from each one, commenting on other’s impressions, and asking and fielding questions from the winery as we go along.  You will need to include #depswine in your Twitter posts (though you may also use #Airfield as well).

We also hope to get some insight from the winery regarding their Yakima Valley appellation, the evolution of the winery and the origin of the winery’s name, upcoming releases, and anything else pertaining to Airfield Estates and Washington State wines in general.

Please join us tomorrow, whether in person or online, and be a part of our family history as we move forward into the future.