A physical wine blogger’s conference is surely an oxymoron. Of its nature, blogging is a disorganized blend of anarchy, irreverence and spontaneity, so to consider bigging-up my carbon footprint for a three day trip to Vienna in October to hear a couple of American superhero keynote speakers (at a European conference?) from the old order (the marketing and sales director for Bloomsbury Publishing and Robert Parker’s hagiographer) is not going to happen. Although Elin McCoy’s question “is the era of gurus ending?” is a provocative one. Who knows, perhaps the Bloomsbury bigwig will advance Basílio Baltasar’s “long anticipated death of the publisher” debate.

Here in the remote south, the twilight of the gurus arrived early (we do not have daylight saving) with the succession of (usually UK) imports to competitions and on five star “educational” freebees, seriously underwhelming locals. But being polite, negative feedback was always restrained, until the internet came along and slashed publishing lead times and removed the ads sales department from the publishing equation.

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