Another Napa Valley Blogger
In my haste to bemoan the fact that there are too few blogs maintained by wineries (I tend to be a hasty bemoaner) I neglected to mention another Napa Valley winemaker who has taken to the blogwaves to share his experience.
Randy Sloan and Sasha Match of Match Vineyards maintain a vintners journal as they start out on their wine industry endeavor. As you might expect, the Journal is a bit of an insider’s ( a new insider’s) look into the process of starting up a winery in Napa, getting your name out there and selling the wine. As for selling the wine, it’s hard to imagine that quality will be an issue. Though I’ve never tasted the wines I noticed they have Cary Gott on board as the winemaker and Jim Barbour as their vineyard manager…two of the best in their field.
The entire website for Match Vineyards is quite well done. And, it includes something interesting. The "Downloads" page has a number of items you’d expect to see: labels, order form, wine fact sheet. Now, I’ve written hundreds of Fact Sheets in my day and put them up on websites. But one thing I’ve never put on a client website is a Lab Report. You send your wine to a lab to get an accurate reading of things like pH, acidities, alcohol, etc. It’s included on the Match Vineyards download page. Kinda interesting.
Finally, Match Vineyards seems clearly to be the kind of wired winery that pays attention to those on the Net who first noticed them. In a kind and smart move, the Randy and Sasha gave preference to those people registered over at VinoCellar.com, an online wine forum, where they have been active participants. This kind of nod of the hat to online wine addicts has been done before…but not often. It’s a nice idea.
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