Another exciting wine festival is coming to Fort Mason this month and I’m very excited to have to have the opportunity to get the inside scoop from the festival Director. Pinot Days San Francisco crushes SF with five days of great, varietally-correct Pinot Noir festivities, starting on June 24th. Lisa Rigisich, together with husband Steve and partners Eric and Teri White are bringing over 200 Pinot Noir producer and vendors of the delicate grape to Fort Mason in San Francisco on Sunday June 28th for the finale Grand Festival Public Tasting, where I will be delighted with the outstanding array of tasty Pinot available to taste!

We’ve made a couple of nice improvements to how we push updates to your twitter feed. (more info on how to connect your WineLog and twitter accounts here)

1. We now delay updates to your twitter feed by 5 minutes. This enables us to combine activity on one wine (e.g. if you rate and comment on a wine) into one update that goes to your twitter feed. This will also prevent unnecessary twitter updates if you change your rating on a wine, etc.

2. We have updated how tweets are added to the @winelog feed. We now space the updates out throughout the day based on how much activity is happening on the site. So instead of seeing 20 updates from @drxeno at once, those updates will come every two to ten minutes.

(more after the break)

I’ve just updated the website to use the word “Rose” (missing the accent) where we had been using “Blush” in the past.

What are you talking about?

Well, “rosé” and “blush” are most commonly used to refer to the same thing: wines that are neither Red nor White. These wines are different shades of pink. In fact, “rose” means “pinkish” in French.

According to Wikipedia, “Blush” was originally coned by Charlie Kreck of Millcreek Vineyards in Sonoma to describe a pink colored wine he made from Cabernet grapes. Kreck trademarked the name, but that didn’t stop other American wineries from using it to describe their pink, semi-sweet wines.

Purists may only use Rose for French or European wines and Blush for American wines, but in general both terms are interchangeably.

Making perhaps, one of the biggest viral marketing coups in the nascent wine social mediasphere, Murphy-Goode Winery in Healdsburg has blown up the interwebs with its A Really Goode Job search and marketing campaign. The basics are these:

- Live on the property in northern Sonoma Valley in Healdsburg in a private home.

- Work by using all means of social media to promote Murphy-Goode and its wine and the whole of Sonoma County with the provided camera video camera, handheld device and/or smartphone. You’ll “need” to taste hundreds of wines for free and eat all over the Valley, as well…shucks.

- Get paid 10K/month for a 6 month contract.

The reach and influence of wine bloggers and wine social media mavens have exploded over the last couple of years, particularly in the last 12 months. Major wine critics have have noticed and responded, wineries and all three tiers of the wine business oligarchy have also taken notice and begun to capitalize on that influence (or are already playing catchup). The recent exhaustive and outstanding industry whitepaper by VinTank, Wine & Social Media is the first to encapsulate and quantify this influence and serves as a very important reference for these interactions between wine business, their consumers and the key social media mediators (human and software/websites) of these connections. It is a groundbreaking accomplishment and a signpost of the rapid, continuing maturity of the wine social media sphere.

I’ve received a free sample for some wine that is … simply … awesome. It’s really good stuff. I’m sure that 90% of your would like this wine. It’s that good.

I considered just sending an email to our users asking you to buy some, but I’ve promised wine producers that WineLog can do better than that. I’ve promised that we can find the top 1% of WineLog members who would absolutely love this wine.

Are you one of the top 1% of WineLog members perfect for this wine? Help us find out.

Continuing where the 1976 Paris tasting left off after the success of the fictionalized account Bottle Shock, this past summer, that growing hotbed of boutique winemaking, Bakersfield, CA is planning their own global wine showdown next month. First broken by the Dregs Report, this promises to be the biggest tasting since the last time Europe and America clashed in the wine business.

It’s that awesome time again when the Wine 2.0 (Twitter) folks gear up and take over San Francisco! Wine 2.0 San Francisco Expo is taking place on Thursday April 2nd and if it’s anything like the past events…it’s going to be a killer wine shindig!

The second and last day of our latest Pops & Son Wine Trip series took a dramatic turn, ie, Pops was no longer involved, unfortunately! That cold that was was starting to come over him in the morning of the first day and then really kicked in during the afternoon? Well, it hit big time and he woke up this day feeling terrible…no wine for Pops! Poor guy ended up in bed all day…so our plans changed!

It’s been a crazy week for us here. If you haven’t noticed, WineLog.net has been offline for almost an entire week. And before that our uptime was spotty. I’ll try to cover the key points of interest below, but feel free to comment here or contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

What Happened?

The company we were hosting our site with secretly sold their business. With no prior notice, our servers were migrated to a new location. This caused a bit of downtime as we updated the winelog.net domain to point to the new servers.

This wouldn’t have been so bad, but it turns out the new setup was not really ready. A few days later, the server restarted randomly, was down completely at times, and finally “disappeared”. The support team cited “hardware issues”. We lost access to the server and had to fight hundreds (thousands?) of other clients for the attention of the support staff to get our servers back.

When the servers came back, we realized they had been restored using backups from January 27th. We have lost all data updated on the site between January 27th and February 7th. This is probably about 250 new users, 500 newly added/logged wines, a few blog posts, and numerous other bits of data that we know if very important to our users.

We are very sorry that your data may have been lost, and we are doing everything we can to get it back.