I’m crazy excited to tell you that I will soon be authoring a freelance wine column on Playboy.com.

So now you have some legitimacy behind the “I’m just going there for the articles, honey!” excuse (you’re welcome!).

The folks behind Playboy.com reached out to me many moons ago, and the whole thing has been even many more moons in the making, so I’m thrilled to be able to get started – and humbled and honored by the opportunity to work with such an amazing brand. I don’t know how long this gig will last, and the column doesn’t have an official name yet (please shout out your ideas in the comments – I’ve got a feeling those will be very entertaining!), but we have some great ideas for content, which naturally will be exploring the more sensual sides of wine.

Now, I’ve never featured beautiful nude women on 1WineDude.com (though I’ve come close!), but I suppose you could say that there’s a bit of “spiritual alignment” in my writing style and the serious-but-accessible-and-slightly-irreverent take on the subject of wine that Playboy.com was looking for. To me, it’s a bit like Forbes.com bringing on Jeff Lefevre’s smart, analytical writing style, or how the populist, grounded voice of Vinography’s Alder Yarrow fits in so well with JancisRobinson.com. So you can add one more name to the list of home-grown wine bloggers being tapped by long-standing on-line brands.

There are a few things you probably should know about this Playboy.com gig…

1) This is a freelance gig, with freelance gig pay, and I’m not an employee of Playboy. But that’s okay by me, because Playboy.com reaches several million eyeballs per month; of course, most of those eyeballs aren’t visiting to get wine recommendations, but that kind of audience volume is substantial, even if most of them are going there more for boobs than booze (I don’t know where puts me on the list of U.S. wine peeps in terms of potential reach… presumably pretty high, but I’ll let the PR people run those numbers and tell us, since they’re supposed to be doing that kind of stuff anyway :-).

2) I don’t yet know when the content will start running (and in fact, I’ve yet to create all of the content; so trust me, you will know when I know).

3) I have not met Hef (yet!). And I have not partied at The Mansion with Robert Downey, Jr. (…yet! Hey, a guy can hope, right?).

4) We’re talking Playboy.com here, and NOT Playboy the printed mag. And NO, I cannot get you free subscriptions to Playboy in either form (so you can stop typing that e-mail to me right now); though some of you in the biz may now be able to claim the subscription as a business expense (again, you’re welcome)…

5) Finally, and most importantly, I want to say… THANK YOU to YOU.

Yes, you.

I’m humbled, honored, and thrilled to have you along this crazy journey with me, and the ride is more rewarding and more fun for having you involved! I fully appreciate that many of you have been getting sick of hearing me say “big things are coming” and then delaying the announcements – all the more reason why I should be thanking you.

I don’t know if this adventure is going to end in sustainable income pooling, luxury yachts and diamond cufflinks for me, but I can promise you it is going to be quite an adventure. So please share the news as you deem fit!

And I’m looking forward to seeing many of you over at Playboy.com in the near future (for the articles of course!).

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Meet Playboy.com’s New Dot Com Wine Dude from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

I’m honored to have been included, because their other blog selections are all great so I find myself dragging down the curve of the list, so to speak.  But all those years of watching British sitcoms like Black Adder must have paid off, because apparently the Most Wanted folks also think I’m a Brit (I know… I don’t get it, either); to the tape:

“The Most Wanted 100 Essential Blogs: Christmas Edition is an online list of the most influential blogs in the UK (within their categories) of the past six months.  We have painstakingly scoured the web to find ten publishing leaders in each of the ten categories. The Most Wanted 100 Essential Blogs: Christmas Edition aims to be a definitive list, a go-to resource if you’re looking for some inspiration about what to do, make, give and consume over the Christmas season.”

Hmmm… sorry, old chap, but I’m quite thoroughly American, I’m afraid.  And it’s a bit early for Christmas, don’t you think? And don’t get me started on Christmas shopping – that shiz doesn’t start for me until December at the earliest.  Anyway, don’t tell them I’m not British, otherwise they might take me off the list.

Speaking of the list, here’s the full complement of Most Wanted’s awarded wine blogs below (in what I think is no particular order, though truth be told I’m not so sure) – and it’s the real meat of this post, because if you’re geeking out over wine then you really ought to be checking out these sites on a regular basis.

• Wine Anorak
• Good Grape
• The Gray Report
• De Long Wine Moment
• Wine Conversation
• 1WineDude
• Tim’s Blog
• Confessions of a Wino
• The Wine Sleuth
• Henry’s World of Booze

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at The Most Wanted’s 100 Essential Blogs: (Early?) Christmas Edition from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

The good news for wine lovers is that there’s a ton of wine-related content on the ‘global interwebs,’ much of it available for free (because content is a commodity now, people).  The bad news is, not all of that content is reading that would appeal to a wider audience (wider than the friends and family of many of those writing the content, that is) – that’s not at all meant as a dig at the vast majority of wine blogs that act as personal journals chronicling passionate consumers’ journeys into the amazing world of wine; it’s just the truth in terms of how much of that content is presented and targeted (trust me, not too many people would want to read my personal journals… but the point is that a small group of people close to me might).

The better news is that, for those looking for the most surfable waves among the vast oceans of on-line wine content, the judges for the 2010 Born Digital Wine Awards have done a great job of vetting some superb individual pieces of that content for you. You can thank them later (I recommend flowers, because those people get a ton of wine already).

The Born Digital Awards program is brainchild of Gabriella and Ryan Opaz along with Robert McIntosh, who together have started building up an impressive set of wine-related media ventures in Europe.  The idea was to build on the success of the Wine Blog Awards in highlighting outstanding wine-related websites, but with a Pulitzer-style twist: focusing on individual pieces of content (video and writing), and awarding actual cash to the winners.  I don’t know anything about the judging process itself beyond what’s already been published at borndigitalwineawards.com, but I do know that the list of judges contains some pretty amazing wine writing talent.

The finalists in each of the award categories were published last week, and the winners will be announced on May 18th at 5:30 PM ET, streamed live from the London International Wine Fair.  I’m humbled to be among the short-listed finalists (go ahead… make the height jokes… you jerks…), but that’s not why I’m talking about the awards here.  I’m talking about the awards because I wanted to post the entire list of links to the short-listed finalists below (after the jump) – there’s just some great f*cking content in the list, and if you’re into wine it’s a treasure-trove of cool-ass shiz to read.

WARNING: You may get tired of seeing Blake Gray’s and Alder Yarrow’s names in the list, as they’re each finalists for something like 900 of the categories (ok… two…).  In all seriousness, those guys are friends of mine (as are several of the other finalists, actually) and I’m happy to see their stellar writing included in the list (and even happier to be included in any list with those guys).

Now get reading (and watching)… and enjoy!…

Best Editorial Wine Writing

• Oliver Styles: Sherry Cartels and Bordeaux Negociants
• Erika Szymanski: Top Ten Microbes in Your Wine
• Tim Atkin: Towards a New Chile (Part 1)
• Blake Gray: The 10 Most Overrated Wines
• Jamie Goode: Wine Tasting: Subjective or Objective
• Alder Yarrow: The Philosophy of Wabi-Sabi and Wine

Best Investigative Wine Story

• Ken Payton: Hac(k)ing a Wine, The New Science of Cork Taint
• Per Karlsson: VinNet: Spännande ny nyhetssajt om vin? Eller olaglig marknadsföring?
• Richard Ross: Phylloxera – the English connection
• Alder Yarrow: The Coming Carnage in the California Wine Industry
• Blake Gray: Sustainable Wines and Whole Foods Market

Best Winery Self Produced Content

• Bernhard Fiedler: Alkohol-Zunahmi
• Randall Grahm: Love Among the Vines
• Kerith Overstreet: Hubris – It’s Not Just for Icarus Anymore
• Randall Grahm: On a Mission: The Germ of an Idea
• Brian Overstreet: Anatomy of a 91 Point Wine Score

Best Wine Tourism Feature

• Marc Hinton: Madrid to Ribera del Duero
• Wink Lorch: Wine Days Out in the French Alps
• Joe Roberts: Endangered Species: Santorini Wine Fights for Its Survival
• Ryan Reichert: A Long Walk Thorugh the Wines of Spain
• Tom Fiorina: Corsican Wines and Corsica, a twenty-year journey of discovery

Best Wine Themed Video

• Jay Selman: The Scent of Black
• The Qwoff Boys: Palm Trees & 100 Year Old Port
• Adrian Franklin: Opening a Bottle of Port with a Feather
• Zev Robinson: Life on the Douro
• The Qwoff Boys: Peter Lehmann Kitchen

Cheers, and best of luck to the finalists!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Born Digital, Buried In Content (The 2010 Born Digital Wine Awards) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

So today, we’re not ranking wines, but articles. I had fun pulling together the 2009 recap. of the most-commented posts on 1WineDude.com, so I thought I’d do the same for 2010, using the totally unscientific method of listing all of the posts form the Archives page and ordering what looked like the ones with the most comments.

The rationale of course being that these are the posts that you, the extraordinarily talented, modest, and altogether too-good-looking 1WD readers felt were most worth the effort of contributing your time, passion and opinions.

As was the case last year, controversy (and Robert Parker – honestly… I’m starting to wonder if you folks are obsessed with RMP… you can probably seek help for that, you know…) won out.  I consider the majority of the topics covered in the round-up below (two were giveaways, which weren’t controversial but did turn into interesting discussions on how we take tasting notes, and our preferred methods for cork extractions) to be at least somewhat controversial in the wine world.  And then there’s what seems to be the holy triumvirate of wine controversy: namely, BioDynamic winemaking, The Wine Trials author Robin Goldstein, and uber-critic Robert Parker…

One interesting trend I’ve noticed in the latter half of 2010 is that there are fewer comments and a lot more Twitter RTs and Facebook Likes for each post. I’m convinced that by the time we get to the 2011 round-up, comment count will not be a sufficient yardstick for the most interactive posts of the year, and I’ll have to do a lot more work to determine the list based on a combination of factors including comments across different social media platforms. If I did that for the 2010 list, we’d have a different number one (the Tim Hanni interview would be the leader by a long shot) and mostly a different list altogether.  And that, to me, speaks powerfully to all of the sand-shifting going on in the social media space – a bit difficult to handle at times, but way more interesting than everything staying stagnant!

Since this is naturally a time for reflection, I’ve been looking back on 2010 and I’m energized and encouraged – it was, by any reasonable measure, a great year for 1WineDude.com and that’s of course thanks mostly to you who read it and give it a life of its own, always taking the discussions in directions that I never could have imagined.  I’m not interested in standing still, though; I promised that things wouldn’t stay the same and I do plan on continuing the evolution of 1WD that has taken place in the latter half of 2010 – focusing more on wine itself and particularly on destinations/travels related to wine, of which you’ll see much more in the first half of 2011.  For those hankerin’ for discussion of wine blogging itself, I’ll touch on that as part of my ongoing “Going Pro” series (detailing the triumphs and travails of my foray into making 1WD fiscally viable), so you’ll still get a bit of that -  but it’s not going to be the main component of 1WD.

Anyway… the year-in-review is below, with the posts listed in descending order of comments received.  Thanks again to you, the 1WD readers, for making this blog what it is, and for being the acidity to my tannins, the pumpkin to my pie, and giving me the continued opportunity to be myself and have fun doing it!

Happy New Year – and here’s to another year of crazy-good dialog together!

10) Do You Take Wine Notes? (Giveaway! 33 Bottles of Wine Pocket Notebook Edition)

9) Happier Times = Less Wine? (Will A Better Economy Mean Fewer Wine Blogs?)

8) Biodynamic Wine, Mystified (Is BioDynamics A Bunch of Fertilizer?)

7) Debunking the Argument Against Wine and Social Media

6) “Fun and Messy and Wonderful” – An Interview With Buehler Vineyards’ Helen Buehler

5) How To Make Wine Evaluation Even Less Objective? Don’t Spit!

4) The Otter Badgers of Wine Reviews: Joining the Wine Rating Revolution

3) Your Screwing Preferences (Giveaway!)

2) Wine Satan or Wine Savior? An Interview With Wine Trials Author Robin Goldstein

1) “The First Serious Wine Blogger”: The 1WineDude Robert Parker Interview

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Not Quite Readers’ Choice: Top Ten Articles of 2010 from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Rather than hand out badges and ratings this long holiday weekend, I am taking a slightly different angle on the wine recommendations in honor of the most-dreaded of post-holiday excursions: shopping on Black Friday.

Today, you can head over to The Wine Crush Blog anytime after 9:30 AM CT and read my (acerbic) take on what wines to pair with your Black Friday shopping!

For those of you who are humorless (which in all likelihood are those of you who’ve stumbled onto this blog accidentally while searching for wine magazine subscriptions on Google), please note that today’s article on The Wine Crush Blog is not meant in any way to resemble any writing even remotely meant to be serious.

I hope you enjoy the edgy-but-humorous diversion as your body slowly purges itself of tryptophan!

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Black Friday Wine Picks (Wine Crush Blog) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!