Changes in Store for WBC15

We have asked WBC attendees to rate the conference every year since we started in 2008. And each year we review all the ratings, read all the comments, and create a plan for improving the conference based on your suggestions.

Here are a few changes you can look forward to in 2015:

• We will soon be asking our alumni to vote on potential content sessions so we simply can’t say what the content will be in 2015. It all depends on you. However, we will push for more nuts-and-bolts sessions on wine blogging so you can go home with solid information to either improve your blog or the way you interact with wine bloggers.
• We will have more local wines from smaller wineries. In fact, Live Wine Blogging – both the reds and whites – will be entirely wines from the Finger Lakes.
• There will be no speakers during the Saturday dinner.
• We will get out of the hotel multiple times in addition to the Friday wine country excursions. The Friday evening reception will be held at the beautiful Rockwell Museum of American Art and the Saturday evening reception will be held at the amazing Corning Museum of Glass. We will also likely be out of the hotel for both the Thursday evening opening reception and the Saturday dinner.
• We are making changes to the Wine Blog Awards and the awards presentation. Stay tuned!
• We extended the Friday wine country excursions by an additional hour and are ourselves involved in the planning of them this year. The buses will show up on time!
• There will be shuttles running from the local airport to the host hotel.

At the same time, there are some things we heard about in the surveys that won’t change:

• We will only have one excursion into wine country during the conference. If you want to visit more wineries, you should sign up for the pre-conference and/or post-conference excursions or simply extend your stay.
• We will not provide every meal during the conference. However, we will provide two dinners and two lunches – pretty good for the $95 Citizen Blogger ticket price!
• The schedule will still be tight and if you need downtime, you will need to create it on your own. Remember – everything is optional.
• You will still have to choose from among multiple breakout sessions, since this is how we get enough topics to please everyone.
• Not everyone will fit in the main hotel. Book early.

We are extremely excited about the local support the Finger Lakes region is providing and think you will be impressed as well!