Wine Blogs That Ask Us to Wear New Shoes

Inside the wine blogging community, we find a good number of folks who try hard, who work to refine their style, who expose themselves as they work their way through the wine cannon and those who work hard and rise to the top. Then there are those wine bloggers who have succeeded in doing all these things, have gathered a dedicated audience, have gained a great deal of respect and who have chosen to use their self-built forum to expose more than just their view and reviews of wine, but instead have also provided a window into their personal and spiritual lives.

Jeremy Parzen, the publisher of Do Bianchi, is one of those people.

In his latest post on his blog that is generally devoted to the modern Italian wine industry, Jeremy describes an extraordinary scene. While on the road in Boulder, Colorado, he takes advantage of a local Temple to worship and watches as the entire congregation stands to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish: “It was one of the most powerful and moving moments of my spiritual life. And I can’t imagine that my fellow worshipers didn’t share the same sentiment as we all stood together.”

Over the years and seemingly more so over the past couple of years, Jeremy has inserted more descriptions of personal crusades and personal, non-wine, thoughts into his near-daily entries. If you follow a blogger, read everything they write, these kinds of occasional posts are very refreshing. They don’t only give us insight into the author’s mind but ask us to also change our shoes.

Jeremy has used Do Bianchi to sprinkle descriptions of his own civic and political activism, detailed threats to himself, alerted his readers to charitable funding efforts, and, today, led us into a Synagogue in Boulder, Colorado where an entire congregation welcomed a stranger then joined him in a very unusual moment of worship that comes in the wake of the entire American Jewish community dealing with an ugly reality about a slice of their country.

Back in 2009, three years after Jeremy started publishing Do Bianchi and when I was publishing my “Bloggerviews”, I asked Jeremy a series of questions. I went back and re-read that today. I invite you to do the same if only to introduce yourself to Jeremy if you don’t already read him or to get a sense of this accomplished blogger’s disposition. Moreover, start reading Jeremy Parzen’s Do Bianchi. It’s always an engaging read, an example of what really good wine blogging looks like and, like today, provides us with something else to think about that we should be thinking about.

Posted In: Personal, Wine Blogs

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One Response

  1. Jeremy Parzen - November 7, 2018

    Tom, thank you for this. It really means the world to me. Your blog has been such an inspiration for me and for my writing. This post couldn’t be more meaningful to me. Thank you so much. I honestly couldn’t be more honored. Humbly and humbled, your friend and fan, Jeremy


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