As 2012 draws to a close, we continue the overlooked-due-to-hangover tradition of wrapping up the most popular 1WD articles of the year.

This list serves two purposes: a chance to highlight a “best of” from the 1WD content over the past year, and a nod to the engagement of folks like YOU, which makes a site like this worth revisiting. Also, it allows me to take a sort break from creating new content here (ok, three purposes!), which you might not like but I’d argue is required (well-deserved is debatable).

We’re sticking with ten once again this year, which sadly is more victories than my Steelers were able to conjure up this season.

Also, the shift away from comments and towards social sharing continued this year, and so I’ve decided to highlight the 1WD posts that you deemed most worth sharing with others throughout the past year. I’ve a done a (very) rough calculation of that across Twitter, the Book of Face, and the unwanted step child of social networks, Google+. The result below (after the jump) is, I think, pretty much in order of ascending social sharedness, but is not necessarily indicative of the most-commented posts (the focus of previous year-end 1WD wrap-ups) nor the most viewed (those numbers would pale in comparison to my Playboy.com gig anyway, which is much, much, much more a reflection of the insane amount of people visiting the PB site than it is a statement on my writing abilities).

Anyway… on with the show!…

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This coming February, I’ll be representing Team USA in the 2013 Argentina Wine Awards. No, I won’t be performing on the parallel bars – I’ll be the sole U.S. judge on an international panel that includes writers, sommeliers, and other geeky wine folk from China, Brazil, Australia, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Mexico, Canada, Switzerland and the UK (who somehow managed to get two representatives), all of whom will convene in Argentina to taste through something like 750 wines over the course of a few days.

To the tape:

“Designed to benchmark and reward the quality and advancement of the Argentine wine industry, the Argentina Wine Awards have established themselves as the most important event in the local calendar as well as being increasingly followed with interest by those in the wider world of wine. Over 740 wine samples participated in the 2012 edition.”

I’m stoked – and not a little intimidated (representing the country? no pressure!) – to get back down to Argentina, a place I haven’t visited in nearly two years (and where I ate well, drank well, and was unbelievable sick… there will be a Z-pack in the travel bag this time).

The reason I‘m telling you all of this? I need your help!…

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[ Editor’s note: following is a guest post from the 1WD intern: the young, unpaid Shelby Vittek. While Shelby may be young, she’s got better creds than a lot of would-be wine media folks out there: she’s been writing about wine for the millennial set for the better part of a year, is already working on her first book (a guide to wine for college students), and has been published in the Washington Post's travel section.  Her current writing gig is for the newly re-launched TableMatters.com. To give Shelby a break from having to catalog the small ocean of samples in my basement, we’re going to let her flex her writing muscles with guest posts centering on how young wine buyers view the wine world. We often talk about the Millennial wine buying generation here on 1WD, but this is a chance for you to get the scoop on Millennial wine habits directly from the source. You can follow Shelby on twitter at @BigBoldReds. Let us know what you think (but keep things civil, you opinionated b*stards!). Enjoy! ]

My usual cutoff price for a bottle of wine is ten dollars.

Yes, you read that correctly: $10 or less.

My problem isn’t that I don’t enjoy drinking higher-end wines, ones that are older or more intriguing – it’s just that frankly, I can’t afford them.

I’m part of the younger generation of wine-curious Millennials – the ones who have entered into the world of legal wine-buying and consumption age in the past few years. We are supposedly the generation of wine drinkers believed to be the almighty saviors of the wine industry. But finding an interesting, relatively delicious bottle of wine that doesn’t give me anxiety when I think about making rent at the end of the month is a never-ending challenge.

While I don’t anticipate these wines will blow me away the same way an older Barolo or an aged Riesling does, I want to be able to take pleasure in a glass alone after work (or rather, hours of organizing the mass amounts of wine samples in Joe’s basement). I want to share a bottle with friends without being embarrassed or horrified by the quality of my selection. (I have been deemed the know-it-all-wine-friend, after all.) And when I go home to visit my mother, I want to bring a bottle with me that impresses both her and her more sophisticated palate, without my budget-savvy ways being given away.

You may be shaking your head, or rolling your eyes at how frugal I am with my wine purchases. Maybe you think I’m crazy for expecting a ten-dollar bill to be traded for a beautifully perfumed wine that also delivers rich flavors. But I assure you, I am not insane, and I am definitely not alone. Many other younger Millennials are in the same boat as I am…

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If you’re a wine producer and calling, say, your refreshing but probably overpriced (c’mon, let’s be honest) $35 Sauvignon Blanc an “entry level” wine, you might be missing the trick with both the older (now in the 30s) and younger (just reaching legal drinking age) Millennial generation.

That conclusion isn’t based on reams of hard data (believe me, I tried to find those reams, and no one has them… yet…), and so I will go ahead and do you the favor of substantially undermining my own argument here before I even start. But… there are some signs in the wine marketplace worth mentioning, signs that might be of concern to those vintners who offer “lower-priced” wines over $25 labeled as “entry level,” secondary products without as much focus as their high-end stuff. And they are signs that suggest that the target markets don’t consider those wines as much “entry level” (a term they most likely associate with “affordable”) as they do “splurge.”

Consider these tidbits:

• The second wave of Millennials (the older of which are now of legal wine-buying age) are more conservative in their spending and saving habits than their older siblings, and certainly more than Boomers and Gen Xers. This is because they’ve either seen people they know in those older generations get screwed by the current U.S. economy, or they themselves are getting screwed by that economy while trying to find jobs fresh out of university. And when Millennials do buy things, they buy for different reasons than previous generations.
• Millennials generally rank poorly on financial literacy, which means when (that’s when, not if) they hit some economic hard times, they’re probably going to tighten the belt. But that belt gets tightened on things they deem to have poor experience value – so while they still might splurge on a wine for a special occasion, generally their everyday wine purchases are probably going to trend to lower price-points when they’re not splurging and money is tight.

Which means that your “entry level” wine is actually splurge material for most Millennials, and yet is probably marketed as an adjunct to your “real” wines (the more expensive ones) that most of them can’t afford even if they’re splurging. Hellooooo, mixed messages!…

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