Over the weekend, Tom Wark of FERMENTATION opened up nominations for the 2009 American Wine Blog Awards. Don’t let the name fool you, these awards are open to any English language wine blog no matter where in the world it’s published.

Last evening I cast my nominations in the seven categories which include the new Best Industry/Business Wine Blog category. Tom has dropped the category of Best Video Blog/Podcast category this year, which is not too surprising given how few wine podcasts are being regularly produced these days.

I invite you to join me in casting your nominations for your favorite wine blogs by visiting FERMENTATION and posting your picks in the comments. From the first three days of nominations it looks like there will be a great field for the judges to choose the finalists. You have until midnight Pacific time February 8th to post.

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• American Wine Blog Awards are Live (wineblogger.info)

Springwise is a great resource for ideas that I’ve followed for the past several months. Last week they published their top 10 food & beverage ideas for 2008 and two great wine ideas made the list with a bonus pick at the end.

#5 – Twitter Taste Live

I’ve been involved in this event since the second tasting and agree that this is the most significant wine idea of the past year. Starting from literally nowhere, organizer Craig Drollett of Bin Ends Wine has created a global wine tasting event that is as powerful as Wine Blogging Wednesday. And he did this in about 5 months. A lot of people don’t think Twitter is a good platform for wine tasting events but I think we’ll look back on this in a year and see the genius here. You’ll have to trust me on this one.

#8 – WineSide

With the economy in the tank, wineries will be hard pressed to pack visitors into their tasting rooms. Why not bring the tasting experience home? That’s what’s behind WineSide, a patented 6 or 10 cl sample of wine sealed with a screw cap. Wineries can easily send these samples not only to critics, wine writers and bloggers but also to their prospective customers (um, how about Twitter Taste Live?). The major barrier to adoption for U.S. wineries is a reasonable mobile bottling facility. If anyone wants to invest in such a business, I’ll run it for them. Seriously. This is a real market opportunity here.

.5 – Volute

I think this should have made the top 10 but I’m biased. Added as one of the 3 bonus entries, Volute is a single serve wine brand packed in an aluminum container. You know, the airplane size but not in glass that can break and is not as recyclable. Not only does aluminum recycle more efficiently, it’s also lighter than glass reducing it’s carbon footprint. I hope to see more wines packed like this in the future.

I’ll be on the lookout for more of the wine related ideas on Springwise and will bring them to you throughout the year. UK readers might want to check out Naked Wines straightaway.

[Via Springwise]

Perhaps I should have read the New York Times before making my prediction yesterday that wine consumption would decrease as consumers gravitate to lower priced wines. As they published Wednesday, consumers are indeed selecting lower cost bottles but are purchasing more for about the same total dollar amount as a year ago. This bodes well for wine merchants and producers of lower priced “value wines” in the $10-15 price range. It seems consumers are more comfortable with three $15 bottles than one $50 bottle.

The piece speculates on the reasons for this but I think it’s likely that people have stopped going to restaurants and are cooking more of their meals at home. It’s good to see wine being thought of as an affordable luxury even if consumers are trading down in price.

So I could be half-wrong about that last prediction; I really hope I am.

Photo by sparktography on Flickr

The clever people over at Google have identified an apparently growing problem of emailing while intoxicated (EWI) and have taken steps to prevent it. The new “Mail Goggles” feature of their free email service challenges the user to 5 math problems before sending an email after hours. The user is in full control of which hours they want to designate and you don’t have to opt-in to this unique service. This should cut down on those drunk emails that seem like a good idea at the time but usually aren’t.

Although it will likely not catch drunk mathematicians, others who have a problem in this area will be well served. You know who you are

Read all about it on Google’s Gmail blog.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, Amazon.com will begin to sell wine in a just few weeks here in the U.S. The announcement came from The Napa Valley Vintners association and not directly from Amazon. Also reported was that New Vine Logisitics will be Amazon’s shipping partner when they go live.

Rumors have been circulating for some time that Amazon would enter the market but most observers thought they would concentrate on high volume brands. But the Amazon head wine buyer was on the floor checking out wines at the recent Family Winemakers of California and I have spoken with several smaller wineries who have been in discussions with them.

As I posted back in March, I think his is the most signifiant development in wine distribution since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. And Amazon’s actions in the past 6 months have validated my hypothesis that medium to small wineries are their target. Their decision to work with regional wine associations is a good one from an industry relations, recruitment and PR point of view. I don’t think it was an accident the announcement came from the Napa Valley Vintners and think we’ll see announcements from other winery associations before Amazon formally launches their wine business later this month or in early October.

This is a great development for both wineries looking for online distribution and for consumers looking for small production, artisan wines. I expect the shipping fees to be reasonable like Amazon does for all their other products but their Prime service will be a must for serious wine lovers. For $79 a year, you get free shipping on all purchases with second day delivery. No word on if that speed will be honored for wine but if it’s just free ground shipping for wine, that will be huge for sales. With increasing fuel costs, shipping is becoming a real problem for wineries as it adds significantly to their customer price. If this is a non-issue, then wineries stand to benefit greatly from what Amazon if offering.

This is not good news for other online wine retailers who do not have the deep pockets to cover the significant shipping costs or the economies of scale that Amazon has. But I still think there will be a place for niche e-tailers like domaine547 and wine marketing sites like woot and The Wine Spies.

I think this is the biggest wine story of the year and will be blogging about what this means for wine marketing over at my company blog.

Cheers to Amazon and welcome to the wine business.

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As I’ve blogged here many times, I think wineries who are not involved in social media are missing something important. Not only is it less expensive than more traditional outreach, the results are often better from a brand and customer loyalty point of view. What social media gives you is that personal connection with the customer online, like you get in the tasting room.

So I’m going to talk about how wineries can take advantage of blogs, podcasts, wiki’s and social networks on my next trip to California later this month. Although there will be some slides involved, this will not be “death-by-Powerpoint” but an interactive talk in the vein of BarCamp. It’s open to anyone who whats to learn more about social media or who wants to share their learnings. I will prepare about 40 minutes of material and see what develops as we talk about this topic.

If you are interested in attending, just head over to my company wiki and add your name and winery or company. If you no hable wiki then just send me an email at acanmedia (at) gmail (dot) com and I’ll add you to the list.

The seminar will be held from 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29th at the Sonoma Wine Library in Healdsburg, CA. Here’s a map to the location. Special thanks to Patrick from Iridesse who arranged to get the room reserved and Josh from Pinotblogger for his advice.

Hope to see you there; so who’s with me?

PLEASE SEE UPDATE BELOW FOR BREAKING NEWS

After several days of investigation, including sophisticated reverse IP address lookups, I have confirmed that Lenn Thompson, founder and editor of LENNDEVOURS, is the head writer of the satirical wine blog Wine-ing 2.0. The true author(s) of this blog have been sought for the past week by wine bloggers on Twitter who previously suspected Randy Hall from Wine Biz Radio, MonkuWino from One Wine Per Week and St. Vini from The Zinquisition.

It was also confirmed that Lenn writes most of the posts for all three blog authors but his main persona is “Over Oaked”, a broadside at California wine. Deeper investigation also revealed that the most biting commentary from author “Over Extracted” is actually penned by LENNDEVOURS contributor Jamie Gabrini with much editing from Mr. Thompson.

Even yesterday on IM, Lenn denied having anything to do with Wine-ing 2.0 but an IP address sniffed on the site led back to Thompson’s Long Island home proving he was not enough of a geek to use a Tor server when posting to his clandestine blog.

Now that this mystery is solved, and the American Wine Blog Awards are behind us, it is not clear what wine bloggers will complain about on Twitter. But something will likely emerge in coming days. Stay tuned…

UPDATE: New information has come to light which has confirmed Lenn Thompson is NOT the author of the satirical wine blog Wine-ing 2.0.

I received word from my forensic data researcher that the data packets traced back to Mr. Thompson’s home actually came from a proxy server in Chicago.

I also got a call from Mr. Thompson’s wife, Nena, who said, “…he barely has time to write at LENNDEVOURS, so I’m sure he’s not wasting any time on this Wine-ing foolishness.”

I apologize to Mr. Thompson for any problems this story may have caused for him and will continue my investigation to uncover the true author(s) of Wine-ing 2.0.

Tom Wark has announced the winners of the American Wine Blog Awards and revealed the judges who not only determined the final nominations but also accounted for 30% of the final vote. And it seems this combination proved successful as the winners didn’t all come down to who could motivate their readers or listeners. In fact, nearly every winner was one I voted for.

Winning for Best Blog Writing and Best Wine Blog is Alder Yarrow of Vinography. Another double winner is Dr. Debs of Good Wine Under $20 for Best Single Subject Wine Blog and Best Wine Review Blog. Both very deserving winners.

Rounding out the rest of the winning blogs, Steve at The Wine Collector took Best Business Blog, my friends at Grape Radio were recognized for Best Podcast or Video Blog, Tablas Creek got Best Winery Blog and Chateau Petrogasm won Best Wine Blog Graphics.

I’ve been somewhat critical of these awards but my remarks have not been taken exactly in the way I’d intended. I never meant my comments here or in the OpenWine Consortium to be taken as an “alternative” to the American Wine Blog Awards but some have taken this view. Whatever the outcome of the discussion, I fully support what Tom is doing to recognize great wine blogs and am looking forward to next year.

So what wine goes with crow, anyway

It’s funny how things turn out sometimes. As soon as I think I have an idea so niche someone would not possibly do the same thing, that thing happens.

I like the view popurls gives me on the conversational web, all on one page. So I thought an aggregator of the wine blog world would be interesting so I hacked a proof of concept and shared with my Twitter friends. This was right after I saw Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop which launched with a food but not wine blog page. But that all changed when Josh at Pinotblogger Twittered about wine.alltop.com today.

It’s an honor to be on this page, but a double honor to be just “above the fold” and to the right of (hopefully) my future blogging buddy Eric of the New York Times. I’m not sure who to thank for my fortune. It might be the folks at Electric Pulp just up the road in Sioux Falls, South Dakota who put Alltop together. But I like to think it was Guy himself who remembered me as some schmo who asked for this autograph on my tattered old copy of The Macintosh Way last year when he was in Minneapolis.

So thanks, Guy… I owe you some nice wine and a good ticket to a Wild game when you are here next… and, yes, I’m kicking butt

Check out Alltop here.

In what can only be described as a publicity stunt, Dutch winemaker Ilja Gort of Chateau de la Garde has had his nose insured for $8M (euro5 million). This policy was taken out at Lloyd’s of London who also insure wine critic Robert Parker’s nose for $1M.

While I couldn’t find too much information about the wines, I did find this humorous video on YouTube of the $8M nose in action:

No, I will not be contacting the ladies and gentlemen at Lloyd’s any time soon