The wines of Alto Adige, in tweets

Tramin winery, looking out over tramin vineyards

Technology can be a double-edged sword. Always-on internet and social media allow us to network and broadcast as never before, but that immediacy can sometimes be problematic.

At last year's European Wine Bloggers Conference, the organisers went to great pains to ensure that we delegates had a near-constant wifi connection, enabling us to blog, tweet, like and share almost everything that happened at the conference in real time. Mostly this was genius, demonstrating an excellent return-on-investment to the very generous conference sponsors in Brescia and beyond. Occasionally when things went wrong (food arriving late or not at all, at the gala dinner), the torrent of carefully tagged and rather barbed tweets (being streamed onto a large screen for all to see) was, one suspects, somewhat embarrassing for the conference organisers.

Still, the high availability of wifi and its concomitant effects possibly reached their zenith on an all-day t…