I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is No, 1WineDude has not become a German Wine Blog.  It just looks that way because October has (primarily) featured German wines and German wine happs.  This is due to TasteLive.com having dedicated the month to featuring selections picked by the organization Wines of Germany (I helped to set this up and might collect a modest “finder’s fee” for that – if I’m lucky).  Also, Wines of Germany keeps sending me pictures of the German hotties who were vying for the German Wine Queen title, and I’m just shallow enough that those caught my interest.

Anyway…

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be your co-host for the wrap-up German wine event at TasteLive.com on October 22, which is open to the public – that means that you can join us in tasting and tweeting about the following wines live from the comfort of your favorite drinking chair!  (TasteLive has partnered with Bacchus Wine and Spirits for those that can’t source the wines locally).

• Selbach-Oster, Riesling, Kabinett, Mosel, 2007/2008
• Leitz, Riesling, “Eins Zwei Dry,” Rheingau, 2008
• Dönnhoff, Riesling, Nahe, 2008
• Darting, Riesling, Durkheimer Nonnengarten, Kabinett, Pfalz, 2008

I’ve had the Selbach-Oster and the Leitz, and they’re both really tasty wines, which probably bodes well for the other selections.  Those of you who have been following along at home with the previous October events featuring German wines know that the selections have all be very good, so I’m really looking forward to the 22nd.

More detail is available on the TasteLive Blog.

Sign up over at TasteLive.com, get yourself the wines, and join us on the 22nd!

Cheers!

I have seen the future of wine criticism, wine dialog, and wine expertise.

Wanna see it?  Great – go look in the mirror. Because the future wine experts look an awful lot like you.  You look great, by the way – did you cut your bangs?

A little over a week ago, Slate.com ran a piece penned by Mike Steinberger in which Steinberger, among other things (like skillfully recapitulating the recent kerfluffle over code of ethics violations on the part of Robert Parker’s staff, and ending sentences with prepositions), offers a glimpse of what he sees as the future of wine writing and wine experts:

“Like other journalistic niches, wine writing is in crisis at the moment… We are moving from a monologue to a dialogue, and this reflects a fundamental truth about wine: It is a matter of taste, and taste differs from one person to the next. There’s still a need for expert opinion, but authority is going to have to be worn a lot more lightly going forward, and it isn’t going to command quite the deference that it used to.”

I know what you’re thinking: Did Joe actually use the word kerfluffle? Also, what’s the big deal about that?  This post isn’t about blogging, is it?

Don’t worry, this post is not about blogging.  It’s about you, and (albeit tangentially) about how Steinberger might have gotten it just a bit wrong.

You see, wine writing isn’t in a state of crisis, unless you get paid for it, in which case it’s in no more a state of crisis than any other form of paid journalism – welcome to 2009, folks.  If you’re a consumer of wine information, on the other hand, then wine writing is actually in a state of liberation.

I think Steinberger is right on the money when he says that tastes are ultimately personal, and that there will still be a need for expert opinion – he’s just missing the point of where that opinion is, which is of course with YOU. That’s because YOU are the new wine expert…

Read the rest of this stuff »

So… this weekend my E-mail Inbox was getting flooded with notifications from twitter, the micro-blogging platform that connects people by allowing them to broadcast short messages of 140 characters or less describing what they’re up to and… well… uhm… well it’s just the sort of thing that you sort of need to be using before you totally understand it.  Sort of.

Anyway, I figured that something was going on, because while I tend to get a few additional follows on twitter almost every day, this weekend the number of twitter notifications was hitting SPAM-like levels, and I was totally at a loss as to why, but in these situations you don’t question good fortune, you just hope enough people stick around after they figure out that they’ve mistaken you for a celebrity or whatever.

Turns out that a recent post by Dale Cruse, which listed me among 11 others as “Must Follow” winos on twitter, was picked up by uber-blogger Darren Rowse, the mastermind behind the truly awesome and inspiring ProBlogger.net.  Darren featured the post on TwiTip.com, which is one of the key twitter resources for anyone who “gets” the fact that twitter is not used exclusively by 14 year old girls and is actually a vibrant and powerful social media platform in its own right.  Darren also has about a quadzillion twitter followers.

So I was very happy to see that the influx of new followers had a logical explanation, and I’m deeply grateful to Dale and to Darren for the exposure.  Check out the entire post (and see the rest of the list, which features some awesome wine twitter folk) at http://www.twitip.com/12-must-follow-wine-people-on-twitter/.

For you new twitter followers out there – thanks! I’m pretty sure I won’t be changing any of the inane wine banter that I spew out via twitter on a regular basis, but I look forward to reading what you have to say, anyway!

Cheers!

(images: mysitemyway.com)