We had the pleasure of reprising the U.S. Drinks Conference for a trade delegation from Eastern Europe this week. The U.S. Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration invited us to present a distilled (or should I say fermented) version of the conference to winery representatives from Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia under the SABIT program. And if you can’t put your finger on just where Moldova is, this map may help.

Only a few of the delegates spoke English so we had two interpreters who do simultaneous translation. That’s a pretty intense task so they needed two to pass the baton every 10 minutes.

It was pretty hard to tell how well the audience were absorbing the arcana of the U.S.’s “Three Tier System”, but the feedback we got from Tanner Johnson who coordinated the event (and was behind the lens in this photo)was that it was well received.

Mike Ginley of Next Level and John Beaudette of MHW did their usually brilliant job of putting things in perspective and I covered allocating marketing resources and also an overview of social media marketing. It was fun trying to explain Twitter and Facebook to someone unfamiliar with them. But my intro slide talks about Social Media having replaced porn as the #1 activity on the web, and that if Facebook were a country it would be the fourth largest in the world. So they might not have gotten the concept of why anyone would “Tweet”, they did understand the scale of impact social media is having on consumers.

For any of my readers who will be going to Vino 2010 next week in NY, I’ll be on a panel discussion on marketing wine to millennials moderated by Anthony Dias Blue with fellow panelists Kevin Zraly, Alder Yarrow, Susannah York and Doug Cook.