Chicago Tribune
by Kevin Pang
.... On average, there is at least one organized wine dinner every night in the Chicago area, according to LocalWineEvents.com.....
Wine Adventure Magazine
by Tom Dinardo
How many times have you found yourself looking for a really cool local wine event, wine education class, boutique wine shop or friendly wine club in your area? Or searched for wine events in destinations you plan on traveling to? After spending needless time searching inefficiently, you find very little or, worse, nothing more fun than visiting the local grocery store’s wine department. Or you could type www.LocalWineEvents.com into your browser and find it all at your fingertips. LocalWineEvents.com was created in 2000 by wine industry veteran Eric Orange. The idea for the website had occurred to Eric when he was working as a wholesale wine representative. “I would show up to do a wine dinner with the restaurant and no one would be there. This happened in every city I would travel to! Restaurants and wine purveyors did not know how to get the word out,” states Orange. Today the website receives over 9 million hits a month, and it ranks as one of the top search engine results for wine-related searches. Also featured are almost 2,000 web links to various wine, spirits, food and wine education websites. Over 55,000 events have been posted to date with new events being added daily. “There are exciting events going on all of the time,” says Orange. Users browse the site for free and no registration is required. LocalWineEvents.com offers a user-friendly city search feature in the state or country of your choice, making it easy to find out what’s going on in your part of the world. Once you have selected the specific city, you simply choose those events of interest or select the subject pages such as “Wine & Food Educators,” “BYOB Restaurants” or “Food, Wine and Lodging” located at the top of the city webpage. LocalWineEvents.com users may also sign up to receive “The Juice” newsletter and e-mails about local wine events happening in their area. Tom DiNardo is a wine writer and educator, licensed auctioneer, certified appraiser (GPPA), and sommelier candidate with the International Sommeliers Guild. © 2006 Tom DiNardo. All Rights Reserved. Email Tom: info@DiNardoandLordAuctioneers.com
Nations Restaurant News
by Gregg Cebrzynski
PHILADELPHIA (April 24) - A website that emerged six years ago to list wine tastings and dinners has grown to include hundreds of restaurants worldwide that are using the site as a free marketing medium. The website, www.localwineevents.com, has listed nearly 55,000 wine-related events since Eric V. Orange, who lives outside of Philadelphia, founded it in July 2000 after a 20-year career in the wine business. "I lost the passion for the business of wine but not for wine itself," he said. The idea for a central site where restaurants, wine vineyards and wholesalers could post their events came to him during his days as a wine representative. Orange would often go to a restaurant that was holding a wine dinner and find no one there, he said. He believed that the events weren't successful because word about them wasn't getting out. "It was in the back of my head that if consumers found [event listings] all in one place, it would be efficient for the whole industry," he said. A year after taking a computer course he launched the website. It lists wine events by city, state and country and triggers e-mails to consumers who show an interest in the events and to those who have asked to be updated about new events in their local markets. Restaurants were among the first to post events on the site, Orange said. "They recognized the benefit right away," he said. "It's free marketing." The Cove Restaurant in Sweetser, Ind., used the site to promote its first tasting last September. "It really worked out well," owner David Ailstock said. "We ended up getting people from several states." Sweetser, a town of 800, is located between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, Ind. But Ailstock said diners from Michigan and Ohio showed up for the event. The Cove, which Ailstock said serves "hamburgers by day and steak and seafood by night" seats 70 people, but 180 showed up for the wine tasting. "That was way over our expectations," he said. Vittorio de Roma, in Palatine, Ill., promoted a wine dinner last November on the website, and "I had to turn down quite a few people," owner Vittorio de Benedetto said. "I was planning to do 40 [dinners] but I did 70 or 75." The dinner featured five courses with wines to match each course, he said. The restaurant used to promote wine events with in-store marketing, but the website gives them more visibility, de Benedetto said. The website recently added a section for wine flights, Orange said, because "there are a lot of restaurants that do Thursday night wine flights." E-mail the author at: gcebrzyn@nrn.com
The Press Democrat
by Tim Tesconi
... Napa also outpaces Sonoma when it comes to annual wine events. Napa boasts 42 events, compared with 29 in Sonoma County, according to the Web site LocalWineEvents.com. Even Paso Robles has more, at 32, than Sonoma. ...
Aroundphilly.com
by Kristin Detterline
Philadelphia’s culinary reputation makes it a prime spot for wine events. The only problem is that, outside of a handful of wineries and the annual Philadelphia Wine Festival, there isn’t a “go-to” resource for finding them – until now. Just a little digging on the web turned up Local Wine Events, a city-by-city reference for wine dinners, classes and certification courses plus similar events for scotch and beer. A sampling of current local events (which is actually the tri-state area) through summer includes “Value Wines,” “Wine Tasting for Dummies” and “Sommelier for a Day.” Event details like time and price are included but you’ll have to contact the establishment on your own for reservations. (They ask that you mention Local Wine Events when you call). Traveling abroad? The part about it being “local” is slightly misleading; the site has wine event listings from Cape Town, South Africa to Hanoi, Vietnam.
Chicago Tribune
by By Robin Mather Jenkins, Chicago Tribune
On the Web: Wine lovers will want to bookmark localwineevents.com, a five-year-old company that posts wine events at cities all over the world (114 in Chicago when we checked on Feb. 24; just one in China). Founder Eric V. Orange worked for 20 years in the wine business and boasts more than nine million hits each month. The site is free and no registration is required.
Wall Street Journal
by Dorothy J. Gaiter And John Brecher
.... So, how do you find a wine class? It's impossible for us to recommend any specific classes, but it's clear that it's a buyer's market today if you're willing to do some homework. One place to start is LocalWineEvents.com. It's chock full of classes, listed state by state. Look closely to separate one-night tastings from multi-class courses. There is much to learn at one-shot tastings, but you might learn more in a short time in a course that meets several times because the comfort factor increases each week.....
Creative Loafing
by Taylor Eason
..... Most of the others produced by the Google (“wine”) search are so mired in snobbish winespeak that I gag. Explore with caution, as the attitude is contagious. Not located by the search, for whatever reason, are two other useful sites: appellationamerica.com and localwineevents.com…. Localwineevents.com is a national site that lists wine events in cities across America. The listing is free for the event organizers and free to you, as well. This way, you'll never be without the juice.
La Times
by Valli Herman
"Tastings are a powerful promotional tool for hotels, restaurants and other businesses. (Many are listed on LocalWineEvents.com)."
Winerywebsitereport.com
by Mike Duffy
If you own a winery, one way to get (free!) publicity for your events is via LocalWineEvents.com. I've even used it to raise awareness of a fund-raising event that my spouse is organizing for our daughter's school. I also believe that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is A Good Thing, as Ms. Stewart would say, and I'm pleased to tell you that the latest iteration of LocalWineEvents.com provides an RSS feed (i.e. automatic updates - all you need is an RSS reader like Bloglines) for each city and region that they cover. You can even add their list of events to your Web site, as a service to your visitors. Anyway, if you hold events at your winery, you could do worse that posting them on LocalWineEvents.com. to gain additional visibility (or take advantage of their ticket selling ability). Joe Bob says "Check it out!" (By the way, I have no affiliation with LocalWineEvents.com, other than having used it to post my own event, and being a recipient of their e-mail notifications for Sonoma County.)
