I checked out for four weeks and I missed a lot of stuff. Rather than subject you to posts one after another that you may have no interest in, or have already seen, especially if you keep up with the world of wine, I’ll compile them here for my benefit and for anyone else who may have missed these items.
Shortly after I left, the 2005 James Beard Journalism Award Winners were announced. Wine related winners include:
Internet writing: Jennifer Rosen for “When Corks Attack ” They Do It With TCA” on Vinchotzi.com 2/8/04
Magazine Column: Lettie Teague for her column Wine Matters, and specifically the columns “Educating Peter”, “Educating Peter: Geography Class”, and “Educating Peter: The Rules of Pairing” 9/04, 10/04, 11/04.
Magazine Writing: Natalie MacLean for “Waiter, There’s a Flaw in My Wine” in Ottawa City Magazine 12/04
Internet Newsletter: Pinot Report by Gregory S. Walter
Newspaper Writing: Allie Johnson for “Wine Makes Us Wet” in The Pitch, Kansas City, MO 9/30/04
Congratulations to all the winners.
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Vinography was mentioned in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper briefly among a few other blogs.
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Andy over at Spittoon picked up a story about (dubious if you ask me) new technology to turn corked wine into perfectly good wine. If only they had given it some 1950’s home appliance name like “TCA-be-gone.”
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And just in case it’s not economically feasible for you to open that $1200 bottle of Screaming Eagle to figure out whether it’s corked, there’s now a wine scanner that will basically give your bottle an MRI and pronounce what kind of shape it’s in. The catch is that the machine costs $50,000. Whether someone will create a scanning service with it remains to be seen.
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Shafer winery in Napa became the first winery in the USA to be exclusively solar powered.
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An announced partnership between Amazon.Com and Wine.Com was billed as revolutionizing the wine sales business in the same way that Amazon.Com revolutionized the book sales business. Yet Amazon is only simply redirecting people to Wine.Com — it’s just one big traffic referral program.
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Wine Blogging Wednesday #9: Think Pink was held in May, and participants ended up reviewing 39 rose wines, many of which looked fantastic. Look out for the 10th installment of this virtual tasting event on June 8th.
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Of course, I also missed Hospice Du Rhone, THE wine event for Rhone varietals in the US. Keica over at This Heaven Gives Me Migraine has a fairly detailed report of her experience.
