Here’s a question that recently hit our inbox. I thought others out there might be interested in how to log wines through the WineLog Mobile site and might not even know about the cool send yourself a message feature.

The email:

I really like your mobile site, and it looks great on my iPhone. But it would be REALLY great if I could add new wines to my log through that site. As I’m out and about, and reading about new wines or at the store or at a friend’s house, it would be so helpful to be able to add them to my log immediately. Do you have plans to add that to the mobile site?

My response after the break…

For those of you who aren’t aware, the blogger Jeff Stai (El Bloggo Torcido) also runs a winery. And the Twisted Oak wine is excellent.

I’ve had a lot of their stuff at different wine events and the Twisted Philly event they setup for us, and it’s all been good. Not a 2-star wine to be found. I’m especially fond of their Tempranillos and other overtly Spanish-influenced wines.

Despite drinking just about everything they offer, I only have a proper “logging” for 3 of their wines.

You could do a lot worse than buying a bottle or two… case or two… of the twisted juice.

» Here are the Twisted Oak wines available for sale at WineLog.net

When you click on the “buy now” links found all around the WineLog website, you are taken to a page that will show you one or more links to sites where that wine is sold. Buying wine through these links is a great way to stock up on the ol’ happy juice. It’s also a great way to support WineLog; we have deals with some of these sites to get a little bit of cash when you make a purchase.

And if we can’t find that wine for sale anywhere, we’ll also show you a few similar wines that we do have “buylinks” for. So click through these links if they look promising.

(New) Filter Searches to Show Only “Wines for Sale”
Sometimes the similar wines aren’t really so similar. (Hey, we do our best.) If you are doing a search on the site and only want to see wines that have buylinks themselves, you can click on the “show wines for sale” option in the left side menu to… do that.

More details after the break…

So I’ve been waiting for an occasion to bust out some more box wine. I had a good experience with Hardy’s Box Wine in the past, but have been wanting to try something from the King of Box Wines: Franzia.

The Super Bowl is a perfect occasion for box wine. 5L is a lot of wine. It’s like 30+ servings, so you need a big crowd to get rid of the stuff quickly enough. I guess it’s cheap enough (at about $12 for 5L) to throw some out, but I’m one of those guys who eats everything on his plate and tries his best to waste nothing.

We haven’t been posting much lately, but a lot of folks on the internet have been writing about wine. To get your fix, check out some of these interesting blogs and news articles I ran across lately.

Four interesting links after the break…

Click here to nominate WineLog.net as the best bootstrapped Start-up.

Web awards are fun. This one means a bit more though. It would really make us happy to receive some recognition for the amazing stuff Kim and I have done with this site.

I guess we’d have to prove two things to receive this award. (1) We’re bootstrapped and (2) Our site is “best”.

Boot-strapping Young Gent
While many of our competitors have received hundreds of thousands of dollars of financing, WineLog has been operating as a labor of love. We’ve taken no angel or venture capital investment to date. What money we do need (for wine, traveling, servers, and little bit of marketing) has come from the founders’ pockets.

While many of our competitors are developed and run by teams of developers, WineLog was built by just Kim and I part-time. For the record, 4 full-time developers = 1/2Kim + 1/2Jason. (The advice from our CEO Bill has been invaluable as well.)

I don’t want to knock the other companies for taking funding or hiring help. I think those are smart moves in many ways. It’s just not our way right now. With so much varied potential in this Wine 2.0 world, we like staying small and nimble so we can find our niche and attack opportunities quickly. That’s what we’ve been doing. That’s what we’ll continue to do.

Press attention is easier to get when you receive investment (partly because investors validate your business and partly because saying “one million dollars” is impressive), and it would be nice to be recognized for doing the opposite: building something great with limited resources.

(read on for why WineLog is awesome)

If you’ve been paying attention to the blog, you’ve probably noticed the great posts by Ward a.k.a “Dr Xeno”. We are very lucky to have someone as insightful and down-right fun blogging for us.
Take a look at Ward’s blog posts and his very thorough wine log.
Ward also went to last night’s Wine 2.0 event at […]

It’s nearly the holiday season, so you’re probably asking yourself an important question: Other than the wines on my WineLog wish list, what can I put on my list for Santa?

How about a Wine Tube?
An elegant and stylish wine rack tube fabricated in stainless steel and will hold 12 wine bottles. This design allows for your wines to be displayed horizontally and labels can be placed so that your collection can be seen hands-free. Wine racks come with mounting hardware included.

The folks at Wine-Wall.com sent us a wine tube, and I can confirm its elegance and ingenuity. Well, I don’t know if I would use the word “elegant”. To me, the design is more “industrial” than “Victorian”, more appropriate in a downtown loft than in grandma’s house (unless you have one of those uber-hip grandmas). Of course I mean all of this in the kindest sense. And the stainless steel rack is very chic and wouldn’t look out of place in some fancier settings.

When we announced that we were going to be at the Virginia Wine Festival, our very own Dezel (blogs, winelog) recommended that we be sure to make a stop at the Corcoran Vineyards booth.

Dezel said that Corcoran was a “young winery, but producing some pretty tight reds”. I don’t have great notes, but I remember liking what I tasted. The star of the show however was a white, the 2005 Corcoran Viognier which got a 5-rating out of me and a 4 from Kim.

It may have been the fact that everyone at the booth was busy ranting on about how great the Viognier was as we approached, but I like to think that I was able to put that behind me and make an unbiased judgment. We brought a bottle of the Viognier home with us, and haven’t drunk it yet. So we’ll get a chance to reassess.

There is a new book out by Mondovino director Jonathon Nossiter. The book, billed as the ”anti wine guide“, should be a good read. Too bad it’s only been published in French so far… though an English version is due “late next year”.
From an AFP article:
Launched in Bordeaux on Tuesday evening, Nossiter said the book, “Le Gout […]