Somehow, the kind of wine writing I like to read underperforms in popularity contests and award competitions. Take this year’s Wine Blog Award winners for example; stuff that just never makes it onto my reading list. I don’t really care what wines Jaime Goode likes or doesn’t like, what Ken’s Wine Guides latest 100 tasting […]
Moved By Wine, Food, and People
I find myself perseverating over the intersection of wine, food, and humanity on internet-less JetBlue flight #411 from Boston to San Diego. It is not as lofty a mind game as it sounds. I’ve just been thinking about how thirty-six hours at the 2012 Wine Bloggers Conference in Portland, Oregon this weekend might play out; […]
Context for Wine Blogs and Wine Marketers
Yesterday Tom Wark raised a few relevancy questions about wine blog advertising and audience sizes when he published Pajamas and the Status of Wine Bloggers at his own, very fine, Fermentation blog. He floated issues from three specific points of view; advertisers’, publicists’, and wine bloggers’ themselves. Because the conversations about non traditional media formats and communities (bloggers, social […]
Wine Blogging and Parenting
WineZag was conceived three years ago this week. Happy Birthday to it! In a related side fact, my two amazing sons are now 21 and 18 years respectively. With identical veracity, I anticipate the blog’s birthdays as keenly as the boys’ red letter days. Plowing into WineZag’s fourth year of wine content creation, the connections between […]
Wine Blogging Wednesday #76 Wrap Up: Barossa Boomerang
The wines and writers came out from Down Under for Wine Blogging Wednesday 76, celebrating the Barossa Boomerang; a recovery of Australian wine sales in North America. Ardent Australian juice fans, real time Barossa wine travelers, Aussie wine drinkers on multi-year hiatuses, curiosity seekers, and value chasers all weighed in. Great insights into the region were […]
Wine Blogs Missing Visual and Human Elements
It is hard disputing the “wine blog burnout” that Tom Wark pointed to last month when he wrote “the movement to use the blog publishing format by wine lovers [is] waning. I see fewer new wine blogs launched. The retreat will be slow, but the retreat will be with us.” Why are wine bloggers losing interest, why […]
Wine Blog Confessions
As the 2012 wine blogging season kicked off, three notable wine bloggers weighed in with wine blogosphere predictions, analysis, and reflections. In the last month, Steve Heimoff, Tom Wark, and Alder Yarrow posted their opinions on the evolution of the wine blogosphere, sustainable wine content creation, and/or why they blog. I regularly follow these guys because they […]
Eric Asimov Sorts Out Wine Enthusiasm and Journalism
An ever present cloud of self doubt began lifting only ten minutes into Eric Asimov’s 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference keynote talk on responsible journalism, democratization of wine, and differences in generational paths to wine knowledge and appreciation. I breathed easier as he weaved in and out of these centerpiece issues, connecting and comparing his personal development […]
Olivier B Cotes du Ventoux Winery Rescued By Bloggers
A wine story rightfully deserving its own screenplay has unfolded in the Cotes du Ventoux. Scripted by French wine bloggers leveraging the social web, then serially turbocharged by social media’s influence on traditional media, the Olivier B Winery has apparently been rescued from the edge of wine making extinction. Any film highlighting this southeastern Rhone wine producer’s story […]
New Wine Writers Missing in Action?
In May of 2009, WineZag was just one of many new wine blogs launching into the vast wine blogosphere. It was the year of Hardy Wallace and the Murphy-Goode “Goode Job” contest, where wine blogger credibility inched higher and traditional wine critics and journalists took note paying sometimes reluctant and other times embracing homage to […]