Eau de Vie, "La veille poire" in a cigar packaging  via Twitter, but couldn't. This is from Distillerie Paul Devoille (Fougerolles, FR). I learned at their booth that this product can not be imported into the USA because the contents must be 5cl. Why?

Wine geeks will turn up their noses at this Mabrusco in a can, but it would obviously be a great answer to the question "What can I serve to Phil and Alice, neither of whom like wine?" It's a light 8% and is available in red, white or rosé. They are definitely interested in an importer, so talk to them: Giovanni Giacobazzi at Donelli  (Modena, IT)

I'm a sucker for Tequila. Always have been.

"Badges? We don' need no stinkin' badges..."

"100 points. I am totally blown away!"

Lots of people working hard on both sides of the counter at the Malbec de Cahors booth.

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Three vintages of Château d'Yquem at Monoprix Saturday 1982, 1997, 2002

I've only lived in Bordeaux for a few years, but I recall very clearly our first trip here in the late 1990's. I remember our first hotel room near the Cour de l'Intendance, how nice people were in general (coming from Paris, not that surprising). I remember a man smiling at me on the street and saying "Vous allez bien vite, Monsieur".  I remember too, how horrible it was to drive in Bordeaux during the tram construction, but now that that's over for the moment, it's a great asset. We don't own or need a car here. I also recall being here on September 11, 2001 and the way things unravelled in that context.

But before that first trip to Pessac to meet Jean-Bernard Delmas and his son Jean-Philippe who is now in charge, I met the then President Joan Dillon, Duchesse de Mouchy. (Her husband Philippe, an exceptional man,  recently passed away and I wrote a short note about him.) Much is made of "social networking" these days, but I met Joan on a Compuserve Forum! We then exchanged a few emails and eventually set up an appointment at the offices of Domaine Clarence Dillon. Founded on June 1, 1935. The company was named after the American financier Clarence Dillon, Joan's grandfather, who purchased Château Haut-Brion in 1935. La Duchesse is an amazing person who has faced numerous serious challenges in life and it has been one of my greatest pleasures to work with her these many years.Unlike the image you might get in your mind of someone like Joan, in those early days she literally installed and re-installed Windows 95 herself, many, many times! (As did we all, W95 was a crock.)

Joan's son, HRH Prince Robert of Luxemburg has now taken over and he has continued the family tradition of generosity and kindness. I've also enjoyed working many years with Robert who is in no way distant and on the contrary treats us as honored guests and friends, always showing that Dillon kindness and generosity.

Of course there's no way to mention real people of Bordeaux without getting to Jean-Bernard and Jean-Philippe Delmas. More about thes two important Bordeaux people is found on Wikipedia. The elder, J-B was literally born at Château Haut-Brion where his fother had worked before him. He grew up there as well to become of the most respected wine makers in the world. After being introduced to us in Pessac in his office, he made a wide gesture to include the entire property and said "Vous êtes chez vous." Over the years, both of the Delmas, more reserved than the American ownership and management, have still been a huge thrill to associate with.

Twice I was seated next to Jean-Bernard when he would comment on the spectacular wines we were tasting at lunches or dinners. Some of these were huge events and some were with only a few people. They were always passionately interesting and stimulating. We've had the pleasure of seeing J-B from time to time at Bordeaux events.

A long time ago I emailed Jean-Philippe to ask him how long to decant 2 bottles of Château Haut-Brion White they had sent to us for a dinner with journalists. He smiled (electronically) when he said "you don't decant white wine". Ok, I was younger then. You could say we've watched Jean-Philippe "grow up". He's certainly deservedly become a bright light in Bordeaux.

Our last meeting in Pessac was a more somber occasion, but the team there are still friends as well as close collaborators in our ongoing projects: Jean-Philippe Delmas, Alain Puginier and Bertrand Fondraz are some real people of Bordeaux I will not forget, even if the day comes when we are not working for them.

Several years ago we were contacted by Corinne Mentzelopoulos about fixing some things for their site, which was built by one of those agencies that had 12 cities on their business card, but then went under without warning. The site was very much in advance in the technology it used, but had some failings they wanted to fix, so we met several times to address the issues.

Again, I use the word privilege to describe working with Corinne and Paul Pontalier. Over long term projects, which this one turned out to be, you end up get closer to knowing the humans behind the wine and the property. It's a delight to talk about all kinds of things with these folks, and they're a lot more relaxed than when you see them at major events like primeurs tastings.The first meeting began with a tasting with Paul. It was like something out of a movie. Although we're not professionals in that aspect of the wine business, people Like Paul Pontalier or Jean-Bernard Delmas, who tasted with us at Haut-Brion on our first visit there in the late 90's, are patient and they observe how you look at and treat the wine. There's no need to pretend to know anything more about it. It's always wonderful to taste wine with the person responsible for making it, whether that's a small garage outfit or a Bordeaux First Growth. They're always happy, and I assume proud to show you, as a guest, how great the wine is in its class. Over the course of our work at Margaux, we got a deeper insight into the way Corinne and Paul work. They were generous in every way, but cautious about revealing the Château to the general public.

I told Paul a story that happened to me years back, where a wine maker had made some Petit Verdot, just because it's so hard to do. We tasted it at a dinner in Fresno, and it was... "rough". I couldn't presume to speak to Paul about wine, so I used "rough", the first descriptive word to come to my mind. We somehow repeated this word "rough", placed in the middle of a French sentence (c'était un peu rough...)  to each other over a few times over the next few months and it became a kind of joke between us.

While we were looking for a subcontractor to deal with the .NET aspects of that site, we met several potential partners in Paris. Their sales people had cold-called Château Margaux several times a year, trying to work with them, not imagining that it's extremely rare that a Bordeaux 1st growth will pay attention to a cold call. Not only have they been around for centuries, but a friend in the business here in town joked recently that it takes them about 25-50 years to make up their minds about some decisions. The hardest part of projects like this is explaining the idea that visitors like to explore a site, not be driven on a guided tour, which is what happens with many Flash sites. In the end, Château Margaux decided to follow our final bit of advice and convert the Flash site to HTML. No more menu bar that floats up, if and only if you guess you have to mouse over a word. I see a new feature now, one that allows you to trace the bottle to determine authenticity.

I've always been told that Bordeaux is a very closed and jealously guarded world, so each time we are invited into the back rooms, graciously served a meal or a glass of amazing wine and in some cases told "vous êtes chez vous", becoming part of the "family", I treasure the experience and realize how lucky I've been to meet so many interesting people in Bordeaux, just as I had in Los Angeles in what seems like a century ago.

Some recent research I've been doing on Twitter caused me to go back and think about my career in bars, which began a little over 40 years ago. Before that, I clearly recall what my parents and their friends drank in the 1940's and '50s: highballs, cocktails and beer. Wine, if drunk at all, was sweet and/or bubbly and mostly rolled out for the holidays. Not only my memories of famliy and friends, but also some LIFE Magazine holiday issues from the 1940's confirm this.

I started playing music in bars 5 and 6 night a week, first in the midwest, then in Southern California. In the Twin Cities, it was cocktails or beer ordered by the habitués. In California, it was a much different story. People almost always drank one of two things: beer by the pitcher or "spritzers", white wine mixed with Seven-Up. A few people would order things like Bourbon and water and the occasional Scotch. May a Gin Tonic here and there.

Looking at all the Twitter data, as well as what people are drinking around me when I'm in the USA, it seems we are definitely moving to wine of all kinds and lots of non-generic whiskeys and brandies. Beer is stronger than ever as beer lovers, those who move beyond drinking the same generic stuff in packs of 6, 12 or 24 cans or bottles,  have grown to love all kinds of small production character beers, just as wine lovers enjoy trying new, unknown wines. Interest in cocktails such as those we now see based on fine Cognac is growing strong, and online contests and recipes are multiplying. I'm in the process of creating aTwitter list of people who drink, create or serve cocktails.

There must be one, somewhere...

A web site serves a purpose. What is that purpose? What is the mission statement of your web site? If the purpose is to entertain, you're in the wrong business, don't read the rest of this, get a Youtube channel, a Facebook page and a Posterous, WordPress or Tumblr blog and try to engage people there with your creativity. If the purpose is to inform, and possibly sell your wines, that would be the mission statement for the site. In that case, the motor of the site is not your ego, it's a commercial endeavor with a strong focus on visitor satisfaction. If you can be entertaining and satisfy the visitor's goal in coming to the site, you're great. But if you have to choose, go for pleasing the visitor.

So if there is a good Flash web site for wine out there, what is its design philosophy?

Arrival

It doesn't decide for you how large your screen needs to be or how large the browser window needs to be. You have your screen set up the way you like it. Desktop applications can easily take over your screen, but they rarely do. Instead, they offer a configuration option that deals with where the screen should be and what size you prefer it to be. The web was designed to be flexible with pages that adapt to all screens. That includes mobiles if possible and might include screen readers for the blind in some cases.

It doesn't play music automatically. Let's get one thing straight right now. A show, a movie, a video, a fashion show needs music. Your wine web site doesn't need music, and almost no one wants to hear the music that you selected. Is your site so lacking in compelling content that it needs accompaniment? If you really must impose musical tastes, don't auto-start the music, offer it as an option. Of course, then, almost no one will play it. By the way, did you clear the rights to the music before slapping it up there?

Visit

Every single page is linkable directly so they can be shared and bookmarked for easy return. If your site has events, for example, there are places like Twitter and Facebook where people might like to tell their friends about the event. If they can't link directly to the event, many visitors, directed to a specific page of the site, will not go through the obstacle course of Flash navigation just to see the one item that brought them there.

It's easy to find what you're looking for and optionally explore the rest. For some reason, the fact that Flash (and other technologies like ajax) can make menu items move around, avoid the mouse and use effects like blurring and changing color is an amazing and wonderful thing - to geeks and designers. For the average visitor these effects are a pain in the ass, period. Hidden menus that roll in, slides the roll by until you stop them, excessive use of multi-level menus, these are all tools of the site designed to show what the designer knows how to do. There is usually content of two types on wine web sites: the necessities and the fluff. The necessities are things like contact, visit, product info, tasting notes, events and where to buy. The fluff is about family, philosophy, history and possibly local info about the place and terroir.

Make it easy to find and download the key information about your wines. There are many tools that make this easier. Evernote is one example of a place uyou can store documents and make them easy to find, search, read and download.

Philosophy

Rule number one: your site is for visitors, not you, not your designer, not your family, not for anyone you know. If your presence is entirely for an acquired or family or fan audience, Facebook is waiting for you with open arms, you don't need a web site.

Exageratedly horrible examples

I found this example of a Flash site that pretty much does every single bad thing mentioned above, and it's from a design firm: Idea Action Media

Many great examples of concepts to avoid can be found daily at Web Sites That Suck. Take a look at these:

Red Carpet Theater Productions

http://www.joneschijoff.com/

Zinc Bistro

AVIN was created in 2008 by the social tasting note site Adegga.com as a means to solve a database issue.

The AVIN solves the problem of duplicate information in databases by creating a single unique code for each and every wine.

The AVIN is a unique 13 digit number, which acts like an ISBN for books, but is used for tracking wine. The AVIN began as a project to help clean the data in the social tasting note site, Adegga.com. Every wine that is given an AVIN is first checked against the database to ensure that it doesn’t already exist. If the wine does exist, it will cull any mis-entered wines by merging them together and add permanent redirects, which allows the user entering the incorrect wine information to be redirected to the correctly entered wine.

Congratulations to Andre Ribeirinho – Founder of Adegga.com & recently named Wine Personality of the Year

I hope to see AVIN spread out throughout the world. Join AVIN on Facebook.com/avincode or Twitter.com/avincode

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Did you know you can still smell the wine barrels in the Chartrons district of Bordeaux? Here on the quais, it's more coffee and food from local shops and restaurants preparing the fare for lunch.

I had an embarassing moment the other night. I met Alan Kropf for the first time, live in my living room. I won't hold you in suspense, what embarassed me was his thanks for our early support for his efforts with Mutineer Magazine. Why would a kind "thank you" make me feel this way? Because it's like John Coltrane stopping by to thank me for liking his new "sheets of sound" thing. I realize Alan isn't the whole story behind Mutineer Magazine, there's a growing team of folks behind it and to them I say: "Thanks! Keep doing what you're doing!"  Writers, I love reading you. Photographers, I devour your images. Layout designers, I love every page of the rag mag, cover, stories, reviews...

Mutineer Magazine is what Mad Magazine was to you when you were a kid. It's what Playboy was when "you bought it for the jazz articles". It's what Omni Magazine was to sci-fi. It's what Wired Magazine should be now, but isn't and never was. Mutineer interviews are attention-capturing in this day of zapping and the subjects aren't just an endless list of winemakers. The article topics are a continuous stream of creative thinking. There's an endless series of cocktail and food recipes. Oh, there's an occasional tasting note, too, but even these have an original tone. Articles like "Hunt for the Cherry Phosphate" prove that MM isn't just young and trendy, since no one under 55 has probably even heard of a phosphate, which we went to the drug store to drink in another century. "Civilization and Its Discontents" reads like a story from my favorite era of science fiction, of Robert Silverburg, Joe Haldeman, or maybe Doctorow if we need to talk 21st century. These people are crazy - but in a good way.

If you have any interest in wine, beer, food, events, alcohol, movies, books that mean something, find yourself a copy of Mutineer Magazine, better yet, subscribe to it, go to one of their events if you can. You will be experiencing the the most entertaining, thought-provoking and innovate Literature (with a big L) on the subject. And if it isn't clear yet, I still think MM is the best thing to ever happen to alcohol, and I hope to see a lot more of it.

I was seated next to Jean-Bernard Delmas, who at that time had been the wine maker at Château Haut-Brion and Château La Mission Haut-Brion for several decades. I had a yellow shirt on, my only shirt whose sleeves were long enough to get past my jacket sleeves, showing the cuffs. I spilled some Château Haut-Brion on the yellow cuff and of course everyone at the table began making a joke of it. Jean-Bernard cocked his head, handed me a bottle and said,

"The only way to remove that stain is to pour some Château Laville Haut-Brion on it!" 

Which I did. And it did.