My personal view is that this event is in fact a great opportunity for sponsors to raise awarness on their brand and wines amongst such a community as wine bloggers and visibility over the internet as live blogging & twittering is a great way to have gain awarness with the twitter hashtag.

I think EWBC should clearly be marketing itself towards wine bloggers (but mainly reviewers not wineries) as a press trip and fix itself as a goal to have its hashtag number one on twitter and real-time search engines (which google & bing tend to become) - and of course wineeverybody.com we were there to promote - to gain huge audience and satisfy sponsors.

Concerning monetization I would say it wasn't an issue that could truly be solved in the debates as it would have needed to have speakers such as Gary Vaynerchuk, Robin Garr, Jancis Robinson or Robert Parker to lead the public.

We still miss I believe an event specifically adressing wine marketers worldwide to answer questions of our own interest in the wine marketing/communication/PR business.