Coming Soon: 2008 AMERICAN WINE BLOG AWARDS

Posted by Tom Wark on Feb 11, 2008

The 2008 American Wine Blog Awards are just around the corner.

It was truly a pleasure to institute these awards last year as it gave the world a chance to recognize the best of the wine blogging world. I’ve always believed that formal recognition of quality leads to better and better quality.

I wanted to explain just a few minor changes to this year’s process.

First, it will be very similar to last years. As you’ve noticed, I’ve retained the name, "American Wine Blog Awards" despite a few calls to have it chanced. While I appreciate the reasons for the suggested removal of the term "American", it still makes sense to me. Call me stubborn.

Second, I’ve simply not figured out a way to judge the quality of wine blogs not written in English. So, we will continue to honor blogs produced anywhere in the world, but they must be in English.

We will be adding an 8th award category this year. You’ll see it when the nominations are up. It is a category I believes is worth considering because the type of blogging it includes is somewhat specialized, yet I think very important. At least it is in this blogger’s eyes.

Finally there is the issue of voting for the winners. As with last year, we will have four finalists that are determined by a panel of judges. Again, like last year, the public will vote for one blog in each category. However, this year we will also have a panel of judges that are also voting for one winner in each category. The public voting will be have a 70% weighting in determining the winner, while the panel of judges will have a 30% weight.

I simply wanted to inject a small element of objectivity to the final voting process and overcome any possible ballot stuffing. I didn’t see it happen last year, but I just wanted to take precautions.

So, there it is. The nomination process should begin in just a few days.