A few days ago, I noted that Twitter was getting into the wine business by creating its own wine and selling it for charity. The concept seemed odd to say the least: a company that trades in the virtual deciding for some reason to make its first physical product a wine.

As it turns out, there already exists a more sensible meeting of wine and the SoMa-based social media company, using wine made by real winemakers and letting Twitter do was it does best--facilitating communication among groups of people. It's an event called Twitter Taste Live and the concept is simple. A group of wines is decided upon in advance--interesting, unique wines, but ones that are available at wine shops. You go out and get the bottles, sign into the website with your Twitter ID, and at an appointed time, grab some friends and open the wines, drink them and tweet about them with the hundreds of people doing same around the country. I actually co-hosted one of these back in April with Napa-based wine importer Wilson Daniels--I promoted my book on Pinot Noir while we tasted several Pinots from the Wilson Daniels portfolio. We did it live at the Jug Shop, and it was great fun.

I alert you to this, as there's a new event starting tomorrow night at 8 PM eastern. The theme is the wines of Germany, and the featured producers are some of my all-time favorties: Selbach-Oster, Donnhöf, Leitz, and Darting. It's a good way to taste excellent wines,  but to get some context on them from both experts and other tasters. If you have a question about one of the wines--just tweet it and it will likely be answered. Tasting wine is a wonderful thing, but tasting with other people--whether they're in the room or not--is always more fun.