I’ve just returned from the American Wine Society‘s annual conference where I presented a session on Sicilian wines. As you may know, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit this amazing Italian region back in May. So, it was with great pleasure that I shared my experiences with seminar participants.

While I presented them with a lot of information about the region’s history, culture and commercial development, my main goal was to reinforce two main points:
-The Sicilian wine industry has made dramatic improvement in the quality of its wines;
and, perhaps more importantly,
-Sicilian wines are enjoyable to drink.

Beyond that, everything else they took away with them was gravy (mmm… gravy, thank goodness Thanksgiving is around the corner 😉 ).

In fact, since this was a group of wine enthusiasts, I wanted my session to seem more like a travelogue than a traditional lecture. Accordingly, I made sure to include many personal stories from my trip to capture the audience’s attention and imagination.

These same stories have been immortalized in an article I wrote earlier this year. If you haven’t already seen it, you can take a look here.

Of course, as an educator, I was also mindful to weave in facts about the region and its wines, having done considerable research on the new Sicilia DOC and Sicily’s indigenous grape varieties.

Aside from storytelling, I also implemented a new tool, Prezi, to introduce movement and perspective into my presentation. If you are not familiar with Prezi, it’s as if PowerPoint and Flash had a love child (okay – so I don’t know why these two software programs would have an affair, but just pretend they did).

This was my first foray into using this tool, so there is room for improvement, but I think it was a good first effort. What do you think? You can check out my actual presentation online.

What are your favorite ways for presenting about wine (or other topics)? Do you have any signature moves or methods to your madness? Tell me what works in the comments below!