Uhhmmmm… Whoa!

I’m not usually at a loss for words (and I suspect that the condition is temporary and will wear off in a few nanoseconds), but my reaction to 1WineDude.com winning Best Wine Blog in the Foodbuzz.com Blog Awards is… uhmm…. WOW! And THANK YOU.  Thank you to Foodbuzz, to all of the people who took the time out to nominate and vote for the blog, and to you for putting up with me for so long!  Fellow nominee, ‘friend of the Dude’ and all-around wine blogging powerhouse Dr. Vino was voted “blogger you would most want to be your personal sommelier” (the other wine-related awards category).

I was quite surprised when I found out that 1WineDude was even nominated (which I’d discovered after voting had already started, upon visiting the site to vote for a friend’s blog in another category).  In fact, I didn’t even know that there was a Best Wine Blog category in the awards at first.  I was both amazed and humbled to have been nominated at all, and the competition was stiffer than the wooden staves that go into vats of el-cheapo American Chardonnay.  So I’m also amazed and humbled to have won.

I’m not gonna get all ‘Dick Cheney re-elected’ on you and say it’s a ‘clear mandate from the people’ in support of taking wine seriously but not taking yourself too seriously, and I don’t want to make more out of the honor than it should be, but winning this award did give me a few seconds of serious pause, because Foodbuzz.com seems to be a pretty big friggin’ deal right now (at least in the U.S.).

I was fortunate enough to have been contacted by Foodbuzz.com early in their development, as part of their Featured Publishers program, and I’ve watched them build a (very) large community of (very) talented foodies in a (very) short amount of time.  Their success is actually a bit staggering – Foodbuzz.com now gets millions of visits every month.  Their reach is, in a word, enormous (and it’s still growing).

Anyway, following is a snippet of the internal dialog going on in my head during that few seconds of serious pause (FSSP):

Me: Maybe 1WineDude.com really is making a difference in the world of wine and helping people to take an emboldened approach a potentially daunting topic? I suppose that stranger things have happened, right?

Me2: You mean like three wine critics and one Japanese cartoon driving a massive amount of wine spending dollars worldwide. Also, why are you using words like ‘emboldened’ and ‘daunting’ when you’re talking to yourself? No one should use 15th century words when they’re talking to themselves.

Me: Good points.  Jerk.

During the FSSP, I did contemplate taking a more serious approach on the virtual pages of the blog, now that I can officially call 1WineDude “award winning.”  Fortunately, that didn’t last very long.

I have one regret about of this this – I wasn’t able to make the Foodbuzz Blogger Festival, which by all accounts appears to have been a huge success (both Randall Grahm and fellow nominee Alder Yarrow had good things to say about the event while it was unfolding via twitter).  I plan on doing everything that I can to make the trip for next year’s event.

Congrats to all of the winners – it’s definitely worth checking out the other Foodbuzz Blog Award winners, especially if you’re a foodie-at-heart; there’s some really impressive blogging happening there.

Cheers!