I know it’s fine for blogs to go quiet for a week or two at a time, but after such a busy second half of November, I’ve been out of action for all of December so far.  Fear not, I haven’t died of alcohol poisoning, nor suffered an even worse fate of having to give up drinking.  Instead, I’ve been overwhelmed with the double whammy of having to move my office and then immediately spend a week in a course that has nothing to do with wine.

Fortunately, come Friday I will be exceptionally keen to get back to wine writing, and I have a few very interesting bottles in the queue.  So apologies for the quiet patch, but I’ll return within a week.

One year ago I put up the first post on this site.  While it went largely unnoticed, it was the focus I needed to get to work studying for my WSET Diploma Unit 3 exam.  Over the weeks that followed, I put together a study plan and practised writing tasting notes in the style that would be required on the exam itself.  While I would have been much better off if I had done that 52 weeks before the exam instead of six, it was a step up from the path I had been following.

I came out of the exam not certain if I had passed.  I felt comfortable with the tasting, but the theory questions were very hit or miss.  While I was very happy with some of the questions, I felt pretty awful about others.  But even before I knew if I had passed or not, I decided to keep writing, and was surprised to find that there were a few people reading.

I set about to put a bit of structure into my writing.  I started keeping track of grapes in a quest to taste 100 varietal wines.  I decided each post should address the grapes, region and producer of the wine in question, and have largely stuck to that.  I even set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account for the site, which saw an incremental increase in readership.

When I found I that I had passed my WSET Diploma, I wrote up a series of posts with tips for other students based on  my experience.  I also decided to ask permission from Jancis Robinson and the WSET to make available a set of links to the Oxford Companion to Wine mirroring Diploma course materials, which allowed me to study without having to flip back and forth between two printed books.  While it turned out to be slightly more work than I had anticipated, I’ve been very pleased with the result and I like to think it’s been useful to other students.

So a year on, I’ve written 240 posts.  That includes 169 wine reviews covering 18 different countries.  I’ve tasted 94 different grapes, 73 of them as varietals.  My most popular review when originally posted was the Marchand & Burch French Collection Bourgogne Pinot Noir 2009 where I ranted a bit about biodynamic practices.  For reasons that I can’t explain, my most read overall has been Villa Jolanda Prosecco – people search for the wine every day and end up here.

And while the notes I write here are still largely so I can keep track of what I’ve been drinking, the number of visitors has been ticking over slowly.  I’ve had 35,000 visitors from 160 countries, which I’m sure is less than most sites get in a day, but if each one of them gave me a penny I’d be able to buy a decent bottle of Champagne.

That’s a year, come and gone.  I’ve enjoyed the time and effort that’s gone into this site, so I have every intention of keeping at it.  I don’t have any firm plans for the next year, except of course to finish the quest for a century of varietal wines.  Once that is done, I’m sure I’ll think of something else to do next.  Thank you for reading.

Eat Drink Blog

This past weekend I attended the Eat Drink Blog Conference in Adelaide.  It was open to any Australia-based food or drink blogger, and I was pleased to be one of the 80 delegates.

The conference itself was first held in Melbourne in 2010, and then again last year in Sydney.  It’s free for delegates, made possible through the hard work of the organizing committee and the generosity of a wide range of sponsors.  Attendees flew in from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Perth, while we had presenters from as far away as the USA.

The vast majority of the bloggers were concerned with food.  I believe there was only one other blog represented that is exclusively about wine –  the Adelaide based For The Love of Champagne.  Attendees ranged in age from just over twenty to people who were likely in their 60s.  And almost as rare as wine bloggers were men – 70 of the 80 delegates and the entire organizing committee were women.

It was a fun and interesting conference.  The Saturday started with registration and a tour of the Adelaide Central Market.  Then the attendees were broken into three groups – one attended a writing workshop, while the other two were sent for a food and wine tours to McLaren Vale or Barossa.  After a quick break, we were reunited for a dinner where the winners of writing and photography competitions were announced, speeches were made, and people generally had a good time.

Sunday was spent in somewhat more serious sessions, with panel discussions, lectures and workshops.  Topics included engaging with your community, food styling, photography, website design, legal advice for bloggers, search engine optimization, and making the most of business opportunities.  Lunch was in the Central Market, and goodies were provided throughout the day.

So after a weekend full of food, wine and information, all provided free, the obvious first thing to do is to say thank you.  The organizing committee did a great job in the months leading up to the event, and everything ran very smoothly over the two days.  The first stop in Barossa was at Bibu, a cellar door and restaurant which features wines from small producers.  We were given the opportunity to taste wines from Diggers Bluff Wines and Soul Growers, poured by the Winemaker and CEO respectively.  From there we visited Hentley Farm for another tasting.  The wines were all excellent, and I look forward to writing about each producer at some date in the future.  At the dinner, wines from Chapel Hill, K1 by Geoff Hardy, and Zema Estate were greatly appreciated.  Kangaroo Island Spirits were involved, though sadly I think it was in the form of an ingredient in one of the dishes instead of martinis.  I’m likewise grateful for all the food, but I think the 78 attendees who write about food are better qualified in that department.

So while it was an interesting conference, I’m torn as to queuing up to attend next year.  Even though “drink” is featured prominently in the conference name, and we did meet with some winemakers, I’m not sure there’s a huge amount of value in lumping food and wine together in that format, certainly not with only two wine attendees.  Most of the wine blogs I read are much less interested in photography and design than food blogs, and there’s very little styling done relative to what people do with food.  I have yet to attend a wine blogging conference, but I think that might be a better match for my interests.

That said, I did learn quite a bit from the conference, and I especially enjoyed the other bloggers I met.  It was an amazingly well run event, and the other attendees were absolutely charming, so I’d be quite keen to catch up with many of them next year.  I might normally feel slightly guilty attending a conference largely for the social aspect, but given the nature of blogging, it’s perhaps not so inappropriate.  Also, I could certainly encourage some of the Australian wine bloggers I know to attend.  So we’ll just have to see how I feel about the whole thing when the next registration opens, but if enough of the people I met this time around attend, I may not be able to resist.

Behind the curtain

I’ve made some changes to the website over the last few weeks, and while they’re small, I just wanted to bring some of them to the attention of readers in case they notice any problems.

First I’ve changed the way the Grapes page works, in that it now updates automatically when I post a new wine review based on the custom taxonomies I put into place some months back.  A small change, but it’s no longer subject to me remembering to update it, nor to my alphabetization skills.

Second, I’ve changed a few things on the right sidebar, including restoring the calendar after figuring out how to have it show both posts and wine reviews instead of just posts.  I’ve also updated the lists of links to reflect sites that are invaluable as far as research that I do for each post, as well as some sites I respect and enjoy.

Third, I’ve had another pass through the WSET Diploma OCW Links pages and cleared up a few formatting bugs that made it look a bit rubbish on Safari.  I’ve also updated the template for that section to differentiate it from the rest of the site and to make it a bit more like the WSET Study Guides from which the lists of terms are taken.

Finally, I’ve updated the About pages to give a bit more information about the site, the wines that are featured and about me, your host.

There are certainly a  few more things I’d like to do with the site in terms of improvements, but those changes were the most important to me so at this point I’m ready to get back to more writing.

The post that follows this marks the 100th wine I’ve covered, and so what better time to have a quick look back at how it’s gone.

I passed the Wine and Spirit Education Trust Diploma Unit 3 Exam (the original aim of this blog), and with it the Diploma as a whole, meaning I’m an Associate Member of the Institute of Wine & Spirits, and can therefore use the letters AIWS after my name.  I then went on to do very poorly on the Court of Master Sommeliers exam, but somehow still managed to end up with a document that proclaims me a Certified Sommelier (probably an administrative error).  Finally, I’ve complete the  WSET Educator Training Programme and can now claim to be a WSET Certified Educator.  So over the last six months, I’ve gone from being a struggling student to a graduate and instructor, which makes me happy.

This blog has had something of a transformation as well.  When it launched, I was the only person reading.  That’s no longer the case, and while Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker haven’t been trying to hire me as a consultant, knowing that there’s some visibility into what I’m doing has encouraged me to step up my game somewhat.  I now try to cover the grapes, region and producer in each post, particularly if I haven’t written about one or more of them before, as well as writing a proper(ish) WSET SAT style tasting note for the wine in the glass.

Furthermore, I’ve made what I like to think of as improvements to the structure of the blog itself.  I’ve gone back and put in reasonable titles for each post about a wine, added a map for each, compiled them in a big map that shows the origins of all the wines I’ve tasted, and built up a listing of the grapes I’ve tried and each wine that used them.  I’ve also made decent progress in term of trying to hit a century of varietal wines, with the 50 grape mark just last week.  I’ve also recently implemented custom post types and custom taxonomies so you can quickly see all wines that are from the Adelaide Hills or are Varietal Pinot Noirs.  There’s more I’d like to do in that respect, and I may be the only person who uses the new functionality, but as a programmer I like to tinker and doing a bit of PHP hacking is rewarding in its own way.

So if there are three ways I can spend the time I put into the blog, the writing and the site itself are obviously getting the vast majority, which leaves very little time for promotion and trying to draw people to the site.  I did get around to setting up a linked Facebook account, and I do tweet when there are new articles, but that’s largely it.  I’m not so naive to think that if I just write good articles, people will flock to the site, but I guess I’m just not fussed.  This isn’t about having people read what I write – it’s about the writing itself.

I haven’t even gone so far as to tell most people with whom I’m friends that I’m doing this, though now that I’m about to hit my hundredth wine, I think I might change that.  No one wants to hear about a new blog that might never get updated after the fifth post, but after six months this has some momentum so I may let some friends know.

Finally, in terms of people knowing I write this blog, one of the reasons I have kept it quiet is that being anonymous affords some level of insulation between who I am online and who I am in real life.  However, I wouldn’t write anything here that I wouldn’t say offline, so if anyone thinks it’s important to know who I am, I’m happy to reply to communications with my real name and contact details.  It’s not a huge secret – there were only ten Diploma Graduates in Australia, only two of whom are based in Adelaide, and of those two, only one is male, so there you have it.

So that’s the looking back bit, and now it’s time for the looking forward and what I want to do.  The first step is really to have a look around.  I’ve been largely blogging in a vacuum, and there are a number of excellent wine blogs out there from which I could steal learn.  So I’m probably going to spend a chunk of time over the next week coming up with a list of things I want to do, along the lines of the To Do list I posted in February.

Beyond that, I am keen to hit 100 varietals, so I’ve been picking wines with an eye to that, which means you should see varietal Barbera, Viognier and Cabernet Franc in the near future.  The problem is that the closer I get to 100, the harder it is to locally source wines.  I think I should be able to get to 70 before I really start scratching, but I’ll probably be searching out rarities before too long.  Also, there are some producers who do a number of unusual varieties but I’m trying not to go back to the same producer twice in my first year.  So alas, I won’t be writing about the Tissot Poulsard because I’ve already covered their Savagnin.

Finally, I’m hoping that the blog will become somewhat more conversational over the next six months.  I get the odd comment, often from the producer I’m reviewing, but I’d really like it if there were more regular contributors.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate the few people who do comment – I absolutely do – but rather I’d like them to have some company other than just myself.

To anyone who made it all the way through this self-indulgent blog post about blogging, I salute you, and return you to your regularly scheduled wine coverage.

Over the next week I’ll be rolling out a new format for this blog.  While there aren’t enough readers who visit more than once that anyone will notice, it’s the first step in making some aspects of the site more organized.  If you see something broken, I’d appreciate a note about it.

For those interested in the technical details, I use WordPress to produce this blog and I’m switching from using ‘posts’ for all of my content to a custom content type for wine reviews.  This allows me to attach data to each post through a custom taxonomy in a way that’s somewhat more meaningful than simple tags.  In the short term, the only difference you might notice is that at the top of each post will be some details about the wine, but this will allow me to generate pages that will let people more easily browse wines made from a particular variety, or from a certain region, or of a certain style of wine.  So instead of having to update the What I’m Drinking page each time I post about a new wine, it will eventually update automatically based on the details of the new post.

Update to an update – of course the first broken thing I noticed on the Moss Wood post was that comments were disabled.  I’ve managed to fix that, and I hope it’s fixed for posts moving forward.

And again – it seems converting standard posts to the custom content type means they don’t turn up in calendar archives, and probably not in a bunch of other places.  More digging required.

While I was getting ready for the Iberian tasting yesterday, I noticed there were more people reading the site than usual, that is, more than just me.  In particular, there seems to have been a bit of traffic looking at my write up of the Marchand & Burch French Collection Bourgogne Pinot Noir 2009 by way of Facebook.  Alas, no one left any comments, so I’m dying to know if it was posted by a big fan of M&B, someone who wants my head on a pike because I dared to say what I really think about Biodynamic practices, or just someone who wanted to direct their friends to some top notch online content?  I really want to know if I need to watch my back for horn wielding cultists.  Thanks.