Our three day vacation in Rome was filled with walking, meeting new people, exploring new sites and prayer. We have a 40-something year-old niece that has a rare form of Leukemia. We stopped at every church we passed including St. Peter’s and prayed for her. We received the first positive news today since she was diagnosed last year.

Today our vacation comes to an end and we start working in ernest. We’ll meet and join the other people participating in our FAM trip to wineries and sites in Umbria and Campania. We’ll also attend and present at the International Wine Tourism Conference in Perugia. Some of our friends and family like to point out that whenever we travel we are on vacation. They don’t see drinking wine, visiting wineries and seeing sites as work. What they don’t understand is that our mindset is on getting a story so we are tuned into the who, what, where, when, how and why. We’re not like that when we are on vacation, however we never turn off the possibility of a blog entry.

Another task of wine travel writers is writing, editing, photography, photo editing and publishing. Now it sounds more like work than vacation. Articles and blog posts just don’t appear out of nowhere. We need our notes from a visit and photos to build a story. We’ll be writing blogs and articles about this FAM trip and conference until the end of February when we attend another conference in Las Vegas.

Writing about wine has its perks. I have a saying, “On our bad days we just swallow.” There is always a challenge to write about each wine as though it is the first wine you taste for the day. I’ve discovered that fresh pineapple can reboot your brain if you start to taste wines and they all seem the same.

So it’s off to work. Real work that includes note taking, photography, listening, asking questions, writing, editing etc.

Cheers,
Terry