American Winery Blog

I recently attended WITS and had a lot of fun. I met a lot of really cool people (big ups to Jeff/Jason of ShipCompliant, Bart from O’Brien Estate, WITS organizers Smoke and Lesley, and many others…), got to connect with several of our winery partners there such as Jonathan from Francis Ford Coppola Presents, Patrick from Iridesse Wines, Laura from Zahtila Vineyards, and Kaz from Kaz Vineyards and Winery (more on him later), Bob from Chateau Leidigh and had a lot of fun and learning in the process. What more could you ask for?

This symposium has been running for four years now, and continues to grow each year with great speakers, sponsors and other beneficial offerings to wineries and vineyards. Definitely mark your calendar for it next year!

I could go on and on about the symposium and my experience there, the AmericanWinery.com found/CEO, Lloyd Benedict, has talked about it in a previous post, so I wanted to focus on a great, humorous, and table-turning encounter I had: being interviewed for Wine Biz Radio.

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Stacy at WITS 2008

I had the pleasure to fly down to Napa on Thursday July 10th for the Ship Compliant User’s Conference and stay through Wednesday July 16 for the fourth annual Wine Industry Technology Symposium and both events were off the hook. Jason and Jeff from Ship Compliant invited me down to attend the Direct to Consumer Shipping seminars and talks were given by the top dogs when it comes to shipping direct. ShipCompliant pulled together an all star crew including the “Godfather” of Direct Shipping Steve Gross from the Wine Institute, the legal powerhouse for wineries Tracy Genesen from Kirkland & Ellis LLP, the Free the Grapes mastermind Jeremy Benson, and the Kiwi with the cuffs Matthew Botting from the California ABC.

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