A new year is a time for predictions and resolutions but for me it’s also a time to take stock. Last year was a difficult year for me personally and, thus, Winecast. I entered and closed 2007 basically between gigs and it’s unclear where this will take me this year. Although I’ve enjoyed working in the wine trade, it’s also created some challenges to my writing here. So I’m looking to return to the corporate world early this year which will eliminate any appearance of conflict of interest.

Whatever the outcome of my employment situation, it’s clear to me that things have to change here in the coming 12 months. After looking at my stats for 2007, the most popular content are my wine reviews and podcasts. Although I posted many reviews in 2007, as many or more remain scribbled on the pages of my tasting log. I’ve also recorded a number of podcasts that remain unreleased.

So my goals for this year are simple: post here as often as I can, featuring wine reviews, and produce more podcasts. I’ll also do some blog redesign, read more wine books and actively seek sponsors.

I appreciate everyone who’s participated in the discussion here in the past year and look forward to meeting many more friends in 2008.

Happy New Year and cheers!

During the past week, I’ve been watching a lot of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” show on my TiVo (as I write this post, more is being recorded as part of a marathon on The Travel Channel). Of course, I’ve been aware of Bourdain’s antics over the years but have not read any of his books or really watched his TV show until the past week.

In typical fashion for me, something resonated with his world-weary sarcasm, irony and, yes, discovery which led me to watch 10 hours of No Reservations and pick up his first book “Kitchen Confidential” of which 161 pages are now read.

How did I miss the pleasure of his wit, insight into the restaurant business and recommendations on when to eat seafood while dining out? Until this past week, Bourdain was the snarky judge on Top Chef who I assumed Tom Colicchio demanded be on to make him seem more reasonable by comparison. But now I see Bourdain as an old friend who is giving me the inside skinny on what it’s really like behind the scenes in restaurants. So it made me wonder who would do the same for the wine industry?

Almost every book about wine props up the romantic notion that great wine mostly comes from privileged ground in the Old World where centuries of learning and adaption to the earth produce these ethereal beverages. The French even invented a word/marketing strategy called “terroir” around this notion. While some of this is based upon fact, the real story is drastically less romantic based upon my short time working in the wine trade. And because I take non-disclosure agreements seriously, you will not see many such anecdotes on this blog unless anonymous sources start sending me emails.

Sure, there are a few juicy books about the wine business that sometimes expose insider details but they are always told from an outsider’s point of view. James Conaway’s “Napa: The Story of an American Eden” and the more recent “The House of Mondavi” by Julia Flynn Siler come to mind. But no one has taken on the first person, I-know-where-the-bodies-are-buried approach to demystifying the wine industry.

So who will tell the real insider story here, a la Bourdain?

This is a quick one for all bloggers using Wordpress. Once you upgrade to the shiny new version 2.3 don’t just blindly convert all your categories into tags. Although you will have a cool tag cloud, there are some other issues to be dealt with… just keep those categories the way they are and start tagging your posts (where did I put that MySQL backup?)

Every so often, a perfect storm of work, personal commitments and an occasional Ken Burns documentary keep me from posting here. Usually it’s just several days but in this case it’s been over two weeks. So forgive me if I post a bit more frequently over the next few days to catch up…

Besides not writing or podcasting I pretty much stopped my blog reading. As I returned to Google Reader last week, I had the maximum 1,000+ posts on each of my subscription categories. So I simply pressed the “Mark all as read” button on most categories except for wine blogs.

In my perusal of the past several days, a few posts stood out. But none of these got me thinking more about wine blogging than Jeff’s post over at Good Grape on how 98% of Wine Bloggers Are Hacks. When I saw Ryan’s post today asking the difference between amateur and professional wine writers, I started to think about my credentials, or lack thereof, for what I do here.

Jeff’s post highlights veteran wine writer Matt Kramer’s piece about how 10,000 hours of training is the minimum to attain expert status in any field. Said another way, that’s 3 hours a day for 10 years. It’s been 9,458 days since I turned 21 back in the early days of the first Reagan Administration. To be fair, my wine drinking started three years earlier due to the drinking age in New York being 18 at the time but I really didn’t get into wine until I transfered to a university in northern California in 1980. If I assume that I spent an hour each day studying wine since then, I’m nearly at that 10,000 hour mark now. But my daily consumption of wine didn’t really begin until the mid-80’s and tasting wine is not the same as reading about wine.

So I’m still very much a hack by this definition.

Ryan’s post this morning asked when a blogger crosses the threshold from amateur to professional status? Since by definition an amateur does not get paid for doing a particular task this seems like an easy question. But in this age of affiliate marketing and sponsorship most wine bloggers can earn some sort of income from blogging. But this is not yet enough to earn a living for any wine blogger I know so I guess most of us are still amateur wine writers (or critics, if you like).

But I don’t think this matters very much as wine bloggers are starting to be taken seriously by consumers. Expert or professional status might have been the hurdle for wine writers in the print era but in today’s low-cost, online personal publishing era this barrier has evaporated.

I’ll still working on getting my 10,000 hours in, anyway

I’ve been a subscriber to the Wine Spectator online since I let my print subscription lapse a few years back. It just seemed to be a waste of paper piling up for the various roundups, Top 100 listings and occasional articles that would attract my attention. So the web version seemed like a good idea, if only to save some trees and clutter in the house.

I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed the current outage of the Wine Spectator website today but they sent me an email informing me that they would be down for the entire week. I guess it’s not just a database problem that could be recovered from in a few hours at most sites; they went down hard.

But I’m not sure if it matters much given all the other choices for reading about wine online these days. So maybe I should cancel when they come back online and try Robert Parker’s online subscription (I do miss Neal Martin’s prose)?

Or maybe I should just save my money all together?

Much has been written about the recent California State Fair Wine Competition where Franzia’s Charles Shaw Chardonnay was named a double-gold metal winner. How can a wine that sells for $2-4 at Trader Joe’s markets across the U.S. best the top wines from California that often sell for more per bottle than Charles Shaw Chardonnay sells by the case?

The answer is it is not possible. What I think happened was one of a few things that I haven’t seen anyone write about.

Batch Variation

Charles Shaw is made in industrial quantities from inexpensive grapes grown in California’s Central Valley. They have also been known to buy wine on the bulk market to bolster their blend as the market allows. My guess is the bottles judged at the California State Fair came from a vastly better batch than what I, and other wine podcasters, have tasted.

Palate Fatigue

I’m not sure who the judges were for this event, but I expect they were all well qualified to distinguish thin, flabby wine from truly complex and interesting wine. Given the hundreds of wines sampled at the competition I would expect some palate fatigue might have contributed to this result.

Random Chance

The blind format for tasting is absolutely the best way for wine to be judged as it takes away all the preconceptions one might have for a given wine. But one of the artifacts of this approach is the line-up of wines can affect the tasters perception. So I think the most likely cause for Charles Shaw Chardonnay winning double-gold (the equivalent of a 98 score) is the wines tasted immediately before the Shaw. Since many California Chardonnay falls into the over-oaked, buttery category, a fruit-forward, little to no oak wine might appear “better” due to the contrast in styles.

But I could be wrong here and Shaw Chardonnay could be one of the best values available on the U.S. market today.

The last time I tried this wine I left unimpressed but I will pick up a bottle and put it into a blind tasting along with some of the best that California has to offer. It will be interesting to see if my judgement in Minnesota lines up with a Judgement in California. As with all wine tasting, your mileage may vary.

Now seems like the right time to put on the table how this system might work in practice. After thinking about this some and considering what Ryan wrote the other day, I humbly propose we wine bloggers adopt the following rating scales:

Overall Wine Quality

* Flawed, Not Recommended
** Average
*** Very good, Recommended
**** Delicious; A Wine of Distinction
***** Outstanding; A Classic Wine

Value/QPR

* Bad Value
** Average Value
*** Good Value
**** Great Value
***** Excellent Value

We can discuss the merits of adding half-stars to this mix once I get a read on the community’s reaction to this proposal. In the meantime, vote on what our icons should be below (aggregator/email readers might have to click back to the site to vote):

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts on this modest proposal. I believe we are making some progress here.

I seem to have stirred up a fair amount of discussion in the blogosphere about my proposed 5-star (or whatever image you want) system for rating wines. Emboldened by the positive comments from my fellow bloggers I posted a couple of test reviews to Snooth and Winelog and then reposted here (see last 2 posts).

Umm, not good; the formatting was off and, as subscribers to my Twitter feed will attest, I had to do a bit of work to get these reviews presentable on the site. I don’t think this is due to anything in the feeds but from some issues with my current Wordpress theme, since all the tests I have done on my personal blog have worked without any modification.

So my question for other wine bloggers is what needs to change in the format of the reviews before you will join me in using the 5-star system (and these Wine 2.0 services) to post your reviews?

Earlier this week, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs delivered a keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. With his famous reality distortion field fully engaged, his “one more thing” at the end of his announcements was devoted to the über-hyped iPhone and how developers could write applications for it.

As Om Malik posted Tuesday, the iPhone will change the mobile phone landscape but it will also power Wine 2.0 because the application programming interface (API) for the iPhone is the web itself. At first, I thought this was pretty insignificant; in fact, my first reaction was “so what” but the more I think about a mobile phone running a fully featured desktop web browser the possibilities for interesting Wine 2.0 applications come to mind.

Want to post a tasting note to Cork’d or Bottletalk while sitting in a restaurant? No problem. Check prices or scores via Snooth or WineZap while in the aisle of your wine store? Go for it. Read your wine blogs? Of course.

Anything you can do on the web can now be consumed on the iPhone which will be great for Wine 2.0 usage and innovation. Sure, the pricing for this device is way too high now but the same could be said for my Motorola RAZR a few years ago; now they are free with contract.

Give this a couple years and you will really see some interesting traction in the marketplace and anyone with online wine information, recommendations and a wine store will benefit. As long as they make their user interface simple and easy to navigate with a mouse, that is.

For a taste of what’s to come, just fire up Safari on your Mac, and now Windows PC, and check out some of the early iPhone sites.

Photo credit: Engadget

With all this attention to ethics and disclosure over the past few days, I have also been thinking about wine ratings. No, not writing descriptions about wines and if I like them or think they are good values, but the numerical score.

Quite by chance, I received an email today that included a link to a wine review site I had not visited before, Pointless Wines. The author’s thesis is pretty simple. He reviews wine and does not award points like some of us do. There are also some interesting articles about the 100-point system that, when I triangulated with a post Ryan did a few days back, gave me pause as I return to writing reviews.

How important is the score to the reader of the review?

I know, we have discussed this subject before here but, without beating a dead horse, would it really matter too much if I just left those scores out from now on? After all, “The web should be something different.“

Food for thought, anyway.