I know this board is young yet, so this is perhaps an idea to sit on until membership grows.

As many of you know, the Squires board has had several guest appearances from winemakers. I would imagine that many people here have industry/winery contacts and might be able to influence similar participation on this board from a variety of guests.

How would that be??

ew-that is something we are working on.

It's in the works, Eric. Stay tuned.

jb

Hey Eric, we are working on it.

:-)

Hehe. Seriously though... that's a great idea... and if a lot of people come up with the same one, it's obviously good.

Soooo.... would YOU happen to know anyone who may be interested?

Brian Loring and Wes Hagen come immediately to mind...

I have met Wes. Great guy. I'll work on it, Eric.

jb

The guests are the main reason that I go to the Squires (Parker) Board once in awhile. I really enjoy people asking pointed questions to these experts.

I'm sure that there will be a lot of winemakers that want to get more exposure. A lot of forumites also have established relationships with some of these, so I'm sure it will not be too hard.

We may still be too young to get some of the bigger names yet, but we should aim high.

GATC,

Curious, what kind of format would you look for if we were able to get some winemakers involved with our site. Would you just want them to post something about their current vintage and be around for questions? WOuld you rather have us do an interview with questions we gather from users? Real-time Chat? Curious what you'd like to see.

Rev -

I'm not GATC, but what the heck, I'll chime in with an opinion. IMO, real time chat would not be the best way to go - too many folks would miss out because they happen to be unavailable during the window of opportunity. My first preference would be for a separate, temporary forum under wine conversations for the duration of the guest appearance. Once the time frame is over, the entire forum could be added to an archive forum where we could keep each of these housed for posterity.

ew-i will second that. having an archive is very important.

Thanks Eric. That is exactly what I would say. The Parker BB has it down pretty good. To reiterate and expand what Eric said, first you announce that a guest poster will be appearing (for some predetermined length of time (a few days or a week)). Then a section is set up just for the guest (I think this will be an improvement over the Parker BB) where all of us can ask questions and the guest poster would answer and we can all chime in. In the parker BB, the discussion is in the general wine section and the questions are prefaced with the name of the guest in capital letters (i.e. CAZES, THEISE, etc.) Then a separate archive section is setup when anyone can go to this.