Now that Brian Loring is blogging over at the Wine Spectator, it has me wishing for other winemakers to jump into this blogging thing. Here are my picks for others who I’d like to see in the wine blogosphere:

Pax Mahle - Pax Cellars is among my favorite wineries but I’ve only tasted one of their wines. I know this sounds crazy but I don’t have the nerve to open any of the 2004 Pax wines now in my cellar. Pax Mahle makes the kind of terroir driven wines us wine geeks dream about mostly from cool climate Syrah grown throughout several California appellations. I’d like the story behind these wines and to get to know Pax a bit better.

Joel Peterson - I love Zinfandel and a good story and Joel knows both. As winemaker at Ravenswood he has gone from small producer to a pretty large brand making wines on two continents. I’d love to hear his story in either blog or podcast form.

Paul Draper - My favorite Zinfandels continue to come from Ridge and Paul has been at the helm of all of these wines. His short lived video podcast is among the best work in the genre and he only made one audio podcast. I’d like to hear or read more from him.

Duane Dappen - Duane is the winemaker at D-Cubed Cellars, my favorite Napa Valley Zinfandel specialist. From his uncompromising vineyard designated wines to his Napa blend, all deliver excellent value and I’m sure he’s got some great stories to tell.

Josh Bergstrom - Now this one is not such a stretch since Josh already writes an excellent harvest journal at this website. Yo, Josh, add an RSS feed and keep blogging year round

I’m hoping at least one of these guys picks up my challenge.

In honor of Great Grape Day over at Wine Sediments and somewhat inspired by a slightly snarky post at Good Grape, I picked up a bottle of Napa River Cab to try. For those not in the know, this is a new brand from Bronco Wine Co. sold exclusively at Trader Joe’s in the U.S. like the phenomenally successful Charles Shaw (a.k.a. “Two-buck Chuck”). This Cabernet Sauvignon, along with a Merlot and Chardonnay, retail for $4.99 a bottle. For this price, you really can’t expect a whole lot of varietal character or complexity and I can’t think of any other Napa Valley designated Cabernet being sold at this price (with the possible exception of the occasional fire sale).

I think of Napa River as a sort of vendetta wine since Bronco had to change the name of Napa Ridge after losing a protracted legal battle. Bronco founder Fred Franzia took the setback in stride and worked the bulk market to find enough Napa Valley AVA juice to blend into Napa River. A normal entrepreneur might have taken the same juice and sold it in the $10-12 a bottle range and done well, but Franzia is on the warpath with the Napa vintners who took him to court. Napa River is the result and, from this tasting, is good news for wine lovers on a budget.

Napa River, Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley 2003 ($5) - Dark ruby-purple in color with aromas of blackberry, currant and a tinge of bell pepper. Full and soft on the palate with blackberry and black pepper flavors finishing with a bit of concentrate sweetness and moderate tannins. Tastes like a $15-20 Napa Cab and a clear step up from Two-buck Chuck. Buy it by the case while it lasts.

12.5% ABV

Natural cork closure

Score: 84

One month after Beau from Basic Juice turned Wine Blogging Wednesday on it’s head, The Kitchen Chick proposes a more traditional theme of Ice Wine for WBW 27. A great idea that will have me looking for examples from my home state of Minnesota. If I’m unsuccessful rounding up any local juice, perhaps I’ll have to go back to the source in Germany. Either way, it should be fun.

Join us on November 8th!

…iTunes feed

After working with the man behind the curtain of the iTunes store, I have consolidated my feed to a single offering, the former “enhanced aac feed“. There you will find 39 podcasts that are perfect for listening on your iPod or right in iTunes on your Mac or PC. The mp3 feed has disappeared on iTunes and those who had subscribed to this feed will be automagically redirected to my full mp3 feed (just “Update Podcast” in iTunes to see the magic). If you are using another podcatcher, please re-subscribe to the new mp3 feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/winecast-mp3

I did this to reduce confusion and provide more podcasts on the feed that have been getting pushed off the main feed by my increased blogging. I’m also getting some much cleaner listener stats since my move to Feedburner. The only downside is losing some nice reviews, so if you left one (like Bill from Wine for Newbies did; hint, hint) feel free to leave another.

Thanks!

I’m on several email lists where wine publicists send their latest news releases. Most are boring new wine releases or some winery event. I don’t think any of them have driven me to post here until this morning’s note from Appellation America announcing a new winery directory.

Not too newsworthy until you read that the key feature is Google maps integration. I have to say that this is a very cool application of Google’s API and very useful for wine lovers to look down from high on our favorite vineyard. Google’s restrictive license prevents me from reposting any pictures here, but click this link for Ridge’s Dry Creek Zin, here for Amity Vineyards Pinot and here for Wolffer Chardonnay, Merlot and/or Cab Franc. Make sure you click on the “Satellite” button before you zoom in for full effect.

One word of caution, some wineries have P.O. boxes for their address and not the actual winery address which might mean you are looking down on someone’s house and not a vineyard

Kudos to Appellation America for this innovation. Check it out here.

The single most popular post here is for my review of Mark West Pinot Noir 2004. Google “Mark West Pinot Noir” and the second result, after the winery website, is to that note. Each month, the Google referrals in my logs are dominated with “Mark West” mentions. So it was with great anticipation that I tasted the 2005 vintage of this wine.

Before I continue, an important note. Look for “Appellation California” right below the Pinot Noir on the label. The winery produces another bottling called “Vin De Corse” made from wines produced on the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. That’s a long way from California and from what I liked in the previous vintage. I tried Vin De Corse at a tasting earlier this year and didn’t think it is in the same league as their California wines but other wine bloggers seemed to like it.

Mark West is a négociant label buying grapes and wines on the bulk market. In the winery’s colorful data sheet, they detail that 66% of the grapes come from the Central Coast, 22% from Sonoma Coast, 4% from Napa, 3% from Mendocino and 5% from “other” (presumably California’s un-sexy Central Valley). The blend is a bit of a shock for Pinot purists being only 85% Pinot Noir (the minimum amount to be called by that varietal in California), 13% Syrah and 2% Chardonnay. I applaud the winery for being so forthcoming with these details, as most other $10 and under Pinot Noir is also spiked with Syrah but few tell the tale. Last year I used a vague 20 point system for the review of the 2004 vintage, but my rating on the 100 point scale would have been an 87 or 88.

Mark West Winery, Pinot Noir, California 2005 ($10) - Ruby in color with a purple rim. Aromas of black cherry, raspberry and sage. In the mouth, smooth raspberry and wild cherry fruit and spice flavors finish with silky tannins. Not as impressive as last year’s vintage but still a nice value. Given the “Sideways effect” on Pinot supplies in California, I’m pleased they were able to pull this off at this price.

13.8% ABV
Natural cork closure
Score: 84

Buy this wine online

So I publish what I hope is a meme-worthy post and check out the blog to make sure there are no typos or other problems. Everything looks OK, so I scroll down and notice the gapingvoid widget image and click into it:

As usual, Hugh is keepin’ me humble. Rock on!

My post the other day started a discussion in the comments with Joel from Wine Life Today and Vivi’s Wine Journal. We both agreed that the current Web 2.0 wine sites (I’m calling them now “Wine 2.0″) don’t have enough benefits to reach critical mass and that a “mashup” of these sites is most likely the only sensible strategy. But what features should these new sites have and who will use them? First, let’s look at the current offerings:

Wine ratings, tasting notes and tagging

Cork’d
Logabottle
WineLog
TastyDrop
Openbottles
WineDemocracy
WARPA!

Wine recommendations and online store

Bottlenotes
Adegga (not yet released)

Cellar Management

CellarTracker
WineFetch

Blog aggregator and tagging

Wine Life Today
Vinolin

So lots of wine tasting notes, ratings and tagging is going on with a few other specialty sites aimed, I think, at different types of customers. If you are a wine newbie, for example, you might be looking for wine education, tasting recommendations and an easy way to sample different types of wine. A wine enthusiast has already developed preferences to wine styles and some brands and might be more interested in a place to keep, organize and share their tasting notes. The wine collector is looking primarily for cellar management and valuation data for their collections. And finally, the wine geek is probably looking for ways to read wine blogs, capture tasting notes and find new wines that might fit their palate. Of course, some of these groups overlap somewhat, so Wine 2.0 sites can’t just define individual customer groups and make sites specifically for them.

I guess all this is uncovering the complexities facing the companies and individuals developing these sites. As I stated when I began this post, I don’t think any of the sites here will prosper without some additional features with the possible exception of the cellar management sites. So what would I do if I was given the opportunity to lead one of these sites?

Let’s start with the plethora of wine ratings and tasting note sharing sites. I would mashup an Amazon-like recommendation engine that would present a list of wines to try based upon the ratings I have input into the system. I’d also make it super easy to order these wines in either a WineZap-like system or an online store. I also like what TastyDrop has done in this space with their rating system. For the wine recommendation sites, I’d add the rating, tasting note and social features found in sites like Cork’d and TastyDrop. For the cellar management sites, I would focus on user interface and accessibility to mobile devices like mobile phones. And finally for the blog aggregators, I would group common information together like memeorandum does for politics. Perhaps using existing Technorati tags or imposing some wine specific tagging system would automate this process (for example, if I tag a post “tasting note” it would be aggregated in a special page devoted to all tasting notes and filtered by varietal and/or region).

These are just my first thoughts on these issues and hope that others in the wine blogosphere (vinosphere?) will add to the discussion. Perhaps through this conversation we will arrive at some Wine 2.0 sites that reach critical mass and become indispensable for wine lovers.

If you have a Wordpress blog and like Vinolin as much as I do, you’ll appreciate this quick hack of the main admin Dashboard screen in Wordpress. Instead of the geeky Wordpress blog bits, the latest stories from Vinolin are presented each time you log-in. Just replace your current “index.php” file in the “wp-admin” directory of your Wordpress installation with this file (uncompressed, of course). It will even get better once the folks at Vinolin put more stories on their feed (hint, hint; 20 posts, please).

Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Although my php is clean, this is released with no guarantees, Caveat Emptor, etc. Use at your own risk…

Beau has just announced the contest phase of Wine Blogging Wednesday 26 over at Basic Juice. Join me in guessing the origin of the 19 wines submitted, but do this by next Saturday, October 21. Bonne chance!