February 23 2007
… A couple of quick hits … my wife’s interview with Dr. Ruth, my podcast with Tim at Winecast, working through the demise of Wine X, what they’re drinking at the Oscars … and ‘A Good Year.’
The winners for the American Wine Blog Awards were announced yesterday. First, a hearty thanks go to Tom Wark at Fermentation for his stellar work in organization and execution of the awards project. He deserves kudos and as I’ve noted before, his blog was inspiring to me in terms of how to do a wine blog that didn’t focus on reviews. Thanks go, as well, to all those that voted and those that voted for Good Grape as winner in the Best Wine Blog Graphics category! Thanks are in order and go to to Peter Flaschner at The Blog Studio for his design. He really has a gift for interpreting my aesthetic desires and making things even better than I envisioned.
Congrats to winners in the other categories—Pinot Blogger, Dr. Vino, Vinography, Winelibrary.tv and Vinfolio. It’s good company.
Given the awards and the new lookyloos, and after the Wine X situation this week, I kind of feel compelled to let rip an epic post full of insight about wine, demographics and the shifting tides of information consumption in the U.S. Alas, I may, but it won’t be this post.
A new blog on the scene, www.grapethinking.com, did give me pause, though, with comments on my site about how people take in content—noting, basically, “Who reads magazines anymore?” Tim at Winecast.net echoed similar sentiments as well.
Maybe I’m in a bubble because I disagree that ink on paper is going the way of the 8-track. I LOVE MAGAZINES and read, don’t laugh, at least 30 a month. Seriously. I don’t even count the Playboy because despite the old jokes about reading Playboy for the articles, I don’t really read Playboy, but I do look at it. And, if you think I’m bluffing on the magazine count send me an email and I send you my reading list. Our mail lady should receive a medal of honor. Plus, my wife works in publishing and I was a journalism major, so we’re book people, too. They’ll have to wrestle the newspaper out of my wretched ink stained fingers.
So, obviously, I’m on the other side of the equation.
In other news, Tim at Winecast.net has posted the February edition of our monthly Unfiltered podcast. Focusing on bringing together a diverse group of people from the wine industry and the wine blogosphere, the podcast is a fun little conversation about current events and things that may be of interest to those in and around the industry and folks that follow dimensions about the grape deeper than the glass. This month’s episode features Jason Korman from Stormhoek winery, Alan from Cellar Rat, and Dr. Vino, the newly crowned Best Wine Blog winner.
If a wine podcast isn’t enough for you, be sure you check out the podcast my wife did for her company, Wiley Publishing, and the “For Dummies” line of books. She did two interviews with Dr. Ruth Westheimer—one on how to spice up your sex life and the other about what men and woman each wish the other knew about sex. It’s a very, very fun listen.
And, finally, in the event that you were wondering, for the fourth year in a row, the Oscar dinner (Governors Ball) for attendees to the premiere movie awards program will eat Wolfgang Puck’s fare while drinking wines from Sterling Vineyards. In what has to be one of the primo placements for the wine business, Sterling creates a few barrels each of a Gold Standard Reserve Chardonnay and a Red Carpet Reserve Cabernet and they give large format bottles to officially sanctioned Oscar parties for charitable purposes and pour the rest at the official dinner.
I won’t make any predictions on the winners for the Oscars, but I will predict that it’ll be on my television, my wife’s version of the Super Bowl, and I’ll probably be reading a magazine and drinking a glass of something … I can also guarantee you that A Good Year, this year’s great wine hope for a movie, wasn’t nominated and won’t win anything. But, you can own it on DVD on Tuesday 2/27. The web site for the DVD release is pretty polished and they have an interactive feature that allows a user to build a vineyard that is worth five minutes of poking around. Check out the site and the build a vineyard feature here.
digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit |
Posted in, Good Grape Daily: Pomace & Lees. Permalink | Comments (2) | Print |
Enter your email address for a monthly summary of posts, additional news and information available only to email subscribers. Your email is never rented, nor sold to anybody else!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Design by The Blog Studio
