A few days ago I published a somewhat controversial post giving you three reasons why you shouldn’t become a wine blogger.

Now, I’m about to give you three reasons why you should wine blog. [Editor's note: is 'wine blog' a verb now?]

My intention is not to flip-flop a position. I’m just trying to give you both sides of the bogger coin. And this is definitely the shinier, more polished, ‘much-more-coolly-embossed with some awesome emblem’ side of that coin. [Editor's note: is 'coolly' an adverb? My god, man, we're off to a shaky start here!!]

Anyway, let’s get down to business; here’s my Top Three Reasons Why YOU Should Be a Wine Blogger…:

1) You need to be original from day one.
No, you’re not going crazy. Yes, this is the #3 reason I listed previously for why you shouldn’t be a wine blogger. No, it’s not easy to offer an original voice in the wine blogging community. Or is it…? The positive flipside of this coin is that you have a no-to-low cost opportunity to have your voice heard on a topic that you are passionate about – and in time, people will listen to that voice. The line between professional/expert opinions and the voice of the on-line masses is blurring. There’s never been a better time to be a part of any topic for which you have a passion.

2) Two’s company, Three’s a crowd, and 600 is a Wine Blogging Community.
This one might look familar to you also [Editor's note: Sensing a theme here? ]. According to some sources, social media has overtaken porn in on-line popularity. We musicians in the rythym section often say “if you’re not part of the groove, you’re part of the problem.” Well, if you’re not part of social media, you’re really not part of the Internet. Not only is it a great time to be a part of the wine blogging community, it’s ridiculously easy to do so. Hop on over to OpenWineConsortium.org, join (for free), friend me up, and start blogging. Total cost: $0.00. Total time: about 6 minutes.

3) Democratize the Wine World.
It’s not often that you get to be a part of history. And history is being made in the world of wine, on the web, right now as you read this. It might sound a bit overly dramatic [Editor's note: OK, a lot], but can you think of a better term to describe a movement that gathers people together (albeit virtually) from all over the globe and tries to put the power back into the hands of the people? That is what is going down in the Wine 2.0 movement; the view of what is considered quality wine is shifting from the hands of a few influential critics, and into the masses. Don’t miss out – we just might be onto something special here.

There you have it. Enough positivity to rescue from the depression of my previous post. Come on in – the water’s (or is it the vino’s?) fine…

Cheers!

(images: gapingvoid.com, suzylamplugh.org, biziki.com, preston.gov.uk )

Now this is interesting.

As reported by several sources today (most of them just copy/paste jobs from a press release; check out one example here), CorkSavvy.com (yet another on-line service that allows you to track and review your wines) has launched an interesting feature today.

This feature allows you to snap a camera-phone picture of that bottle of vino you’re having (say, with dinner tonight) and submit it (along with your freshest-of-fresh tasting notes) directly to your CorkSavvy account.

I’m a big, big fan of keeping a wine journal. I think it’s one of the best (if not the best) ways to up your wine IQ, increase your wine vocabulary, and learn what you do (and don’t!) like about wine. Using a wine journal is one of the cornerstone advice pieces that I give in my Tasting Guide.

Could CorkSavvy.com be onto the “Wine 2.0” version of the trusty ol’ wine journal? Time will tell. If any of you give this service a try, be sure to give me a shout about it!

Cheers!

(images: amazon.com)

We’re all short on cash in these times of recess -er, I mean, economic challenge. So the Dude has compiled a list of his 10 favorite wine resources on the web. All of them FREE. Each one will cost you exactly $0.00 to use. Bumpkis. Nada. Goose-eggs.

You can thank me later, by clicking the “Make a Donation” button on the Left and sending me some cash. Oh… uhm… wait a second… never mind…

Anyway, chances are that even if you’re an experienced wine geek, you probably are not using some of these gems. I’ve found them to be extremely useful, or helpful in a pinch, and in some cases downright indispensable. Hopefully you’ll find them valuable as well (look at it this way – you’re almost guaranteed to at least get what you paid for `em!)…

1. Wine Vocabulary: At a loss for words trying to find the right term to describe that wine you’re tasting? Not anymore. With this handy aroma/tasting card from Vinography, you’ll minimize the guessing and maximize the terminology in your tasting notes. And you are keeping tasting notes, right?
2. Wine Terminology: Don’t understand a term on the back of that bottle? Not anymore. WineLoversPage.com contains a ridiculous amount of information, and their Wine Lexicon is especially handy, easy to navigate dictionary-style, and contains click-able pronunciations for those of us who have a hard time with French (i.e., everyone but the French).
3. Wine Labels: Confounded by tricky wine labels on those Old World wines? Not anymore. Another gem on the WineLoversPage.com website can sort that one out for you – a Wine Label Decoder, which can help you unlock the “secret code” and interpret just what the hell those German, French, and Italian wine labels are trying to tell you.
4. Wine & Cooking: Wondering why yeast is the primary contributor of flavor to wine? No? Crap you’re messing up my shtick for this article…! Anyway, maybe you will start to wonder about it after you check out GlobalGourmet.com’s awesome Wine & Cooking reference.
5. Wine Vintages: Doesn’t it piss you off when you’re at the wine shop, and you’re trying to determine if that low sale price has anything to do with a nasty vintage? Not anymore. You can get a handy vintage chart to-go by pointing your mobile browser to Berry Bros. & Rudd’s Mobile Vintage Chart.
6. Wine & Health: Wondering if putting back those wines is putting years on your life ahead of your time? Wonder no more – the Professional Friends of Wine have compiled a wealth of wine health information in their Wine Health 101 Section.
7. Wine Nutrition: Wondering about the nutritional content of that wine you’re drinking? No? Well, these are health-conscious times, my friend, so you’d better get on the ball! CalorieKing.com can help you out with their nutritional-label-style details on popular wine types.
8. Italian Wine: Confused by Italian Wines? You guessed it – not anymore. ItalianMade.com has an expansive and informative section on Italian wines, complete with regional maps, varietal information, and wine & food pairings.
9. Grape Varieties: Getting tired of feeling like a dunce because you don’t know the difference between Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio? Alright, alright, it’s a trick question; but any budding wine geek who has even a passing interest in wine grapes should bookmark this great grape reference from CellarNotes.net.
10. Best Bang for the No-Buck: Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the folks at Wine Spectator do know their stuff, and they have put together one of the handiest one-stop-shop areas on the Internet for wine knowledge. In the case of their Wine Spectator School Library, that shop charges $0.00 USD, and comes complete with a glossary, regional wine maps, tasting materials, wine tasting advice. It’s a fantastic place to start for the budding wine geek.

Cheers!

(images: freefoto.com, ox.ac.uk, thelanguagemenu.com)

(images: epicurious.blogs.com, i.ivillage.com, chungkiddo.blogspot.com)

In a recent post on her blog, the venerable Dr. Debs wrote about a recent survey commissioned by Constellation Wine Brands (a big, big conglomerate that own dozens of wineries, including Mondavi). The study concluded that more and more wine consumers are overly confused when it comes to what wine they should buy – enough so that Constellation cited increasing consumption by “Overwhelmed” wine consumers as their (Constellation’s, that is!) biggest opportunity.

This finding isn’t surprising. There are over 7,000 wine brands available to consumers in the U.S. That’s a sh*t-load of wine choices, and even the most over-educated wine geeks among us can get overwhelmed (especially if we’re trying to understand German wine labels). In fact, it’s one of the main reasons that I got “seriously” into wine in the first place – I sat the WSET Intermediate Certificate exam so I’d be better able to buy wine at my local store!

Dr. Debs (quite rightly) points out that there’s already an easily-accessible vehicle to help the Overwhelmed wine consumers out there:

So is there a way to help the Overwhelmed, send them armed and ready into Wine Warehouse to face the Sauvignon Blanc aisle, and point them in the direction of wine enthusiasm rather than wine frustration? Yes. It’s called the Internet…

It’s likely that companies like Constellation have uber-smart Marketing-types, but it’s unlikely that those Marketing-types are going to help clear up anything for us Overwhelmed wine consumers unless it has the added benefit of further lining their pockets with more of the shiny gold stuff. Sure, you can use points to help make buying decisions, but who the heck talks in points about, well, anything (other than cholesterol numbers, I mean)?

(Imagine this conversation: “Hey – did you see Rothlisberger pass all over the Bengals last night? He totally deserves a 111.4 QB passer rating.” “No way, man – he’s not a tenth of a point over 99.7. Puh-leeeeeze!” Not gonna happen. Plus, people can’t speak in hyperlinks – though that would be cool….).

While it’s true that the Internet is an amazing resource for Overwhelmed wine consumers, it can itself be a bit, well, daunting. I don’t know about you, but I liken whittling through the vast array of info. on the Internet to find anything useful to trying to reach into a narrow rats’ nest to pick up a nugget of gold.

And sometimes the rats’ next is full of hungry, nasty rodents. With razor-sharp teeth. And surly dispositions.

It doesn’t help that by taking one or two days off from your on-line life, it feels more like an eternity when you return only to find that you’ve missed 375 twitter updates, 900 blog posts, 250 news stories, 30 “friend requests” and god-knows-how-many e-mail messages. And I’m an IT geek – I can only imagine how the “Internet? Is that the one with the e-mail?” crowd feels.

How can you make sense of it all? My advice is to follow the same Zen-centric approach to handling wine info. on the Internet as you would handle any stream of information overload. Here are three tips that have served me (and my sanity) well in my on-line wine life…

1) Minimize & de-clutter your blog Inbox.
Humans are just not set up to suck in multiple streams of information and retain it all. We’re more built for trying to quickly decide whether or not something is gonna eat us and deciding when we should run like hell, etc. There are oodles of articles on-line that offer great advice on how to approach absorbing information (see this great post at Lifehack.org for an example). But the first trick is to limit the information coming at you.

To do this, you need to get a bit ruthless about the wine blogs and the wine websites that you follow. This won’t be easy – there are quite a bit of good ones out there. You need to find the ones that work best for you, and follow those. This doesn’t mean that you can’t read a great post on a blog that you don’t normally follow – it just means that you need to set a cap on the amount of websites that you do follow on a regular basis, and be very selective about the ones that make the cut to get a piece of your increasingly-precious time.

This of course can help you for any topics that you follow on-line (not just wine). For other tips on time and information management, I recommend getting the ZenHabits.net eBook.

2) Bring the Mountain to Mohammad.
Once you’ve got a firm cap on the number of wine blogs and websites that you follow, then you can stop following them!

What I mean is, get yourself a good RSS reader, and make those updates come to you. I’m a total Netvibes convert. IT geekiness aside, Netvibes allows you to customize and gadgetize the hell out of your on-line life. I’m not sure if I could get by without it at this point (click on the inset pic for a screenshot example of my Netvibes home page). I log in, and can quickly check for interesting blog posts in my day job / music / wine “lives” – minimizing the time I have to spend looking for that information, because it comes to me.

If your tastes are a bit more Spartan, at the other end of the spectrum is the pared-down-to-basics Google Reader. Just be careful, as it’s also easy to go overboard with these RSS tools (for an example of this itself can get overwhelming, check out friendfeed.com). Stick to the program!

3) Trust yourself.
This piece of advice is the most wine-specific. Nothing that anyone writes on-line should influence your own personal preferences and tastes. Your experience trumps all. Trust it, and trust yourself.

If anything, we in the wine blogging community should be educating you, entertaining you, and (most importantly) opening your mind to wine possibilities that you may not have otherwise known about. We should not be trying to convince you that what you like isn’t “correct” or “proper.”

(Warning: Shameless plug): For more about learning how to determine what you do (and don’t) like in the wine that you drink, check out my eBook.

Cheers (and happy surfing)!