As always, Alder of Vinography continues to set the standard for wine bloggers. This time it is regarding wine blogger ethics. It’s both inspiring, transparent and as thorough as you can get… I’ll be drafting a similar code of ethics to be posted here shortly.

Earlier this year I started a series of posts about why wineries should blog. I was reminded of this series reading a couple of posts this week from Paul at the REthink blog and Josh at Pinotblogger. In fact Josh’s riff on Paul’s post is the best logic for why wineries should blog I’ve yet seen. Thanks for the great reading material and food for thought, guys. More on this subject upon my return home…

Over the past year, I have been following the Stormhoek meme over at gapingvoid (where the drawing to the left comes from). The winery is now entering the U.S. market and has an ambitious plan to supply their wines for 100 (wine) geek dinners across the country. I have volunteered to host one here in the Twin Cities on May 4, 2006 at 7:00 p.m. From my Frappr listener map, I see there are several local listeners who might be up for a nice evening of wine, food and conversation. Since I don’t know exactly how many to plan for, I am asking everyone to drop me an email so I can get a rough headcount before announcing the restaurant (but I have two restaurants picked out in St. Paul that would be great). We’ll be paying for our own food, but the folks at Stormhoek will be providing the wines. You don’t have to be a tech or wine geek to attend, but there will be a high proportion of local bloggers, podcasters, vloggers and wine lovers in attendance 😉

More details to follow in coming days…

UPDATE: Very cool, even perhaps, “groovy”; Hugh has linked to my humble wine blog. Better have a very blogable wine dinner now (he said as the pressure increased 🙂

Tom at FERMENTATION has nailed the Stormhoek meme and, as a bonus, has provided the most compelling reason for wineries to blog:

“The bigger story, that Decanter didn’t touch on, and what is a brilliant flash of insight, is the notion that “corporate blogging” in the wine world can play a key role in the positioning and explanation of a wine or winery if the practices is authentic and strips away much of the divide that puts wineries on one side and the customer on the other.”

I think I’ve beaten this point into the ground, so I will now turn my attention to why wineries should podcast…

Mike has posted a complete outline of how to start a winery blog over at The Winery Web Site Report blog. The only thing I would add to his list is to choose relevant keywords and use these in your posts. Over time, other bloggers will link to some of these and your Google PageRank will improve. There is also some advanced search engine optimization you could do if you want to be fancy and own some keyword combinations. Finally, put a robots.txt file on the root of your blog to encourage search engine indexing. It’s a simple thing to do that does make a difference; you can check out my robots.txt file as a guide.

I would also point out that you can use the open source WordPress software for free (this software powers Winecast). Many hosts have a one button install script to make this a less than 5 minute install, but even where this is not supported the install is pretty trivial. The best thing with this approach is you don’t have to do anything geeky to resolve your blog as www.yourwinery.com/blog as long as you do the WordPress install in a directory called “blog”.

Given my current employment status, I would be happy to set-up any winery with a WordPress blog in exchange for a wine sample and a link back to Winecast. Interested parties can get a hold of me via email or my mobile phone at 612-804-0090. I’ll have your blog on the Internet in about an hour… but do heed Mike’s first and fourth points beforehand.