I’m not in the habit of posting announcements about the creation of wine blogs. I get between two and five e-mails per week about a new wine blog starting up. I put links to them on my sidebar and that’s it. There are just too many of them to mention each one. But yesterday the world of wine blogs changed. It’s hard not to make a big deal out of it because it really is a pretty big deal.

The New York Times just launched a wine blog.

Following in the footsteps of Frank Bruni’s recently started blog, Eric Asimov is now the proprietor of The Pour. While Eric is not the first mainstream journalist to start a wine blog (that honor goes to Mark Fisher of the Dayton Daily News) having the New York Times enter the space means something. I’m not sure what, just yet, but it’s a big deal.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before this happened. In the next 6 months we will see at least two or three other wine blogs launched by newspapers, I predict, and even one or two from the glossy wine magazines. We’ve clearly passed a tipping point.

What does this mean for Vinography and the hundreds of other wine blogs out there? I’m not entirely sure, but I do know that it raises the bar for content. While many blogs are personal affairs and nothing more, many more are actually exercises in writing for an audience. Their authors want readership. They post regularly and professionally in an attempt to establish themselves as legitimate destinations for wine lovers on the Internet. Well those folks, Vinography included, now have some increasingly serious competition for eyeballs.

And that is not a bad thing.

I’m thrilled to welcome Eric to the world of wine blogging and I hope that my fellow bloggers will all see it both as a legitimization of the form, as well as a kick in the seat of the pants. Wine blogging just went mainstream.