ZINO Vino Liquid Assets Forum a Success!

I’m happily exhausted after a very full day of wine panels and wine tasting at the inaugural ZINO Vino Liquid Assets Forum which was held today at Bell Harbor Conference Center.  Thank you to ZINO Society member, Shelley Tomberg for helping to make this possible!  The panelists were impressive and had incredible expertise and knowledge to share with the attendees.

The most frustrating part of the day was that each panel had so much more they could have shared, but in each case the time ran out before we were ready to move on to the next topic.  We will be asking the attendees for advice for next year, but the best suggestion I have heard so far is to start the event earlier in the day and extend the length of time for each panel.

The Twitter stream was pretty amazing with dozens upon dozens of tweets occurring over the course of the day.  You can access it at #zinovino.

The ZINO Society team did an amazing job of bringing a brand-new event to fruition over a short period of time.  See photo above of set-up by the team.  Mary Holmes, ZINO Society Chief Marketing Officer (photo above at podium), gets credit for envisioning the opportunity and convincing the rest of the ZINO Society executive team to move forward and make it happen.

We owe a BIG thank you to everyone who was involved including all of our sponsors and all of the wineries that brought their new wines to pour as part of the Northwest Emerging Wines Awards tasting (N.E.W. Awards) at the end of the day.  A mammoth thank you to our Major Sponsors, Banner Bank, Columbia Hospitality, Stoel Rives and Washington State University.  See photo of two of the three Stoel Rives panelists, Chris Hermann and Jay Rafter above.

The panel pictured above is the Legends of the Fall panel which included Ted Baseler of Ste. Michelle Wine Estates,  Bob Betz of Betz Family Vineyards, Dick Boushey of Boushey Vineyards, Norm McKibben of Pepper Bridge Winery and Rick Small of Woodward Canyon Winery.  They are titans in the business of wine and the attendees hung on every word they shared!

See photos of most of the panelists and speakers who participated by clicking on this link.