May 23, 2006
It was, I believe, the great Gore Vidal who once wrote, "Every time a friend of mine succeeds a little part of me dies." It’s a pretty astute, and brave, commentary on the effects and power of envy. Some of us bloggers fancy ourselves decent writers. Some of us are mistaken, some close to the mark, other are underestimating their value completely if they think themselves only decent writers. A safe self assessment puts me somewhere between the first two…
May 23, 2006
Marketers, like myself, get a lot of the blame for taking the authenticity out of wine and lowering the beverage to just one more product to be foisted upon the public with exaggerated claims and pretty pictures. There’s a lot of truth to that kind of accusation. However, the winemakers and grape growers in Mendocino have rightly determined that more marketing is just what the doctor ordered. The growers and winemakers of Mendocino County, located about 70 miles north of…
May 22, 2006
DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THE FERMENTATION READER SURVEY ============================================================ It appears that both Maryland and Vermont have followed Washington State’s lead and passed laws that allow wineries outside the state to sell directly to retailers and restaurants in VT and MD. This is a huge step that confirms the states’ acknowledgment that wine wholesalers are not necessary tools for getting wine to market but rather one tool that CAN be used to get the wine to market. In the case…
May 22, 2006
DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THE FERMENTATION READER SURVEY ============================================================ Another wine blog aggregator has appeared: VinoBlogosphere. Like other aggregation sites, VinoBlogosphere has chosen a selection of the nearly 300 wine blogs and posts their most recent entries. This new site is presenting posts from only 15 different wine blogs. So far I’ve not come across a wine blog aggregation site that does of a better job of updating me on whats been said and whats being discussed in the wine…
May 22, 2006
DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THE FERMENTATION READER SURVEY ============================================================ Working at and for Winebid.com in the late 1990s was exciting on a number of different levels. It was the DotCom boom so you felt like you were changing the way the wine world worked buy creating an online market for rare wine. And it worked. Thousands of people bought and sold rare and not-so-rare wines at Winebid. The other part of the excitement had not so much to do with…