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 [...]

We’ve just added a new feature to WineLog, which allows anyone to upload an image to be associated with a wine. We’ll be using the new system to add wine label images to as many wines as we can, and we hope you’ll help us by uploading labels too. We also hope that you’ll upload other photos of yourselves drinking the wine.

Here are some brief instructions for how to upload your own wine photos…

1. From the wine info page, click on the “add new image” link below the wine image…

Peaks of Otter Winery is a fine maker of fruit wines, which was representing at the Virginia Wine Festival. Our buddy Mike (to the right of Kim there in the photo) told us that the Peaks of Otter stand was a can’t-miss at the VWF. But even if Mike (who had been to the festival the year before) hadn’t tipped us off, I think we would have recognized the big crowd of happy winos that was constantly formed around the P of O stand.

You see Danny John (if I remember correctly) was a very entertaining guy and also very good at running a tasting. He could take a group of 6 people through the entire P of O catalogue in about 3 minutes… all the way from the uncanny blueberry muffin wine to the explosive Kiss the Devil wine (made from 30 different varieties of peppers).

… and avatar uploads are working in IE now. We added avatars to the site like 7 years ago, and we just realized tonight that uploads weren’t working in IE.

Now perhaps I’ve grown too attached to Firefox. Maybe. But I’m also sure that someone else must have tried to upload an avatar in IE and failed. Know that if you EVER run into trouble using the site, you can contact us using the contact form (unless that’s broken now too). Seriously, our email etiquette is superb, and 80% of people who email us get their problem solved.

So yeah, avatar uploads are fixed in IE. I want to see a lot more custom avatars now. Go play.

People often email WineLog, confusing us as a winery’s website. So we get to share in all the praise and criticism directed at you poor winery folks. Here’s an interesting one we received about a synthetic cork that is difficult to re-insert:

“I enjoyed your Shiraz Merlot. However, I did not finish the bottle of wine. It is impossible to reuse the stopper you used for this bottle. It is some kind of plastic that defies going back into the bottle. Not everyone consumes the entire bottle each time it is opened. I am afraid I will have to make it a point not to purchase any of your wine in the future.”

Ouch. First, if the wine is good, don’t stop buying it just because of the cork (I’m actually fond of synthetic corks). This problem has been solved by third parties, and it’s called the “Wine Vacuum Pump”.

Below are a couple options I found at Amazon which are very affordable.