In August, during the 2008 European Wine Blogger’s Conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Tom Perry - someone I can now call a good friend. Tom is an American expat who has worked and lived in Spain for over 30 years and is incredibly well- versed on the Spanish wine economy, not to mention an incredibly interesting guy who will capture your attention for hours on end.

Not surprisingly, Tom is also heavily involved with the Great Wine Capitals project. From their website:
The Global Network of Great Wine Capitals,which embraces Melbourne, Bordeaux, San Francisco - Napa Valley, Porto, Cape Town, Bilbao-Rioja, Florence and Mendoza, works to encourage international winery tourism, as well as economic, academic and cultural exchanges between these famous capitals of wine.
To tell you the truth, I don’t have much experience with the Great Wine Capitals, and have only run into it a few times. Bit from what I can tell, it is a project that helps the capitals themselves to embrace enotourism.

According to Tom, my sense of the project was accurate in that the project is geared towards supporting wine capitals to better assist travelers. Additionally, there is a new website currently being constructed that will offer various tools for wine travelers. After Tom participated in the EWBC, he is convinced that social media and blogging should also become a part of the strategy for future incarnations of the Great Wine Capitals website. We can only hope that he succeeds in convincing the group as a whole.

Today, Catavino offers you a short interview conducted by email with Tom. Please take …

Since day one, I’ve wanted a map of the wine regions of Spain and Portugal. Seems like a simple request, and if I couldn’t have one of Iberia, at least you would think that there would be one of Spain and another of Portugal. You would think. You would also be wrong, sort of. Announcement

Interestingly, there are no good maps of the peninsula we call Iberia, or at least as it relates to wine. Wines of Spain, the bureaucratic agency in charge of promoting Spanish wine, does have an outdated map, but you can’t get a copy of it. I had a prominent tour guide friend of mine once ask to buy a few copies to give to her clients, all of which were on wine tours, and she was told it was not possible. Hence, I’m not sure why they made it. We had to steal a few copies from a regional government’s office, and while we use them occasionally, in truth, they are worthless.

That said, Portugal is no better, and I have yet to find a map that accurately sums up the many nuances in a very confusing set of regional wine laws. And considering that there is little consensus among differing governmental maps, it is clear that one concise and accurate map was desperately in need to be created.

Enter the DeLong wine company, creator of such treasures as the Wine Varietal Table. Having encountered way too many inaccurate regional wine maps around the world, Steve decided to fix the problem by making his own map. Smart guy! The best part for us is that …