I returned only a few days ago from Oregon's wine country where we completed our first-ever Wine Adventure. Zephyr's active wine tours will not run until 2008 but we decided to kick off the concept by inviting eight journalists to experience our Wine Adventure in Oregon.Getting journalists to join in on our tours has been a primary goal of Zephyr Adventures for a decade and we have been very successful with this over the years. However, it is not an easy task. The reality is journalists and editors receive WAY too many emails, are faced with many potential story ideas, are burdened with busy schedules, and are sometimes prohibited from taking free tours.
Therefore, we were extremely pleased with the results of our six-week effort to contact the travel and wine media. We ended up with eight excellent journalists (I'll leave them unnamed since they might want to remain anonymous until their story comes out) and, just as importantly, are in contact with dozens more who liked the Wine Adventures idea but couldn't join us in Oregon.
From my experience, I think journalists face press trips with some trepidation. Often press trips are crammed to over-capacity with visits to museums, chambers of commerce, and other places that just aren't that fun. We decided to do things differently and gave these eight writers the real Wine Adventure experience - five days filled with tasting, meeting local vintners, and doing fun activities such as hiking, canoeing, biking, and horseback riding on and near the vineyards.And the result was awesome. All ten of us (including my co-guide Reno and me) had a great time. I expect to see some great writeups of the tour in the near future but will foreshadow these by noting a few key points about this Oregon trip:
- Oregon's wine country is unique for its cooperation rather than competition. This impressed all of us. We rarely (in fact only once) heard a winemaker say something negative about another winery and often heard stories of cooperation and sharing as Oregon bucked the tide to become a reputable wine area.
- The inside access we had was impressive. We almost always met with the owner or winemaker at each vineyard and had plenty of time to ask inside questions. Although we were there during harvest and crush and each winery wanted to show off their operations, we tried to have each highlight something unique: barrel tasting, a vineyard walk, a unique grape varietal, etc.
- No one else is doing activities like we do. We set up a Vineyard Walk in the Eola Hills area of Oregon, walking through five separate landowner's holdings and tasting at three wineries. We canoed on the Willamette and stopped at a winery for lunch. We rode horses in and among the vineyards in the Dundee Hills area.
