It takes a lot to make us who we are. Genetics, environments and most importantly, people help shape the person that we become as we continue to get older. I have been blessed with a number of good, warm people that have surrounded me as I stumble through this life. Friends, family and on this particular day, Fathers, have been a major positive influence on whom I’d like to be whenever I finally grow up.

Corkage fees have been controversial for as long as they have been around. I admit, I have been distressed numerous times in the past at having to pay a corkage fee on wine that I already own. It’s similar to the feeling I get when I have a fee to withdraw my own money from a bank! Yet, with friends all over the food and wine industry, I also get a lot of great perspectives on the topic.

After getting both of our outfits squared away, we decided to start the celebration of the end of 2008 with a stop at one of our favorite local steakhouses and cocktail bar, Moresi’s Chophouse in Clayton, CA. Moresi’s is housed in were two historic 1800’s era buildings, now combined, in the long-standing rural enclave of Clayton, CA. Ed Moresi, longtime proprieter of the outstanding family dining and sports bar establishment Ed’s Mudville Grill (check out the amazing collection of sports memorabilia!) son Dom and the rest of the Moresi clan have created a wonderful stop within the small, comfortable downtown of Clayton.

One of the things that I’ve really tried to step up in my personal wine education is my ability to guess a blinded wine’s provenance or origin. What is the grape, what is the region and if I’m super-lucky, what is the actual wine?

In this case, led by Lisa and Joe, the gOenophiles’ intrepid vinous adventurers decided to try and tackle one of the most difficult cases of guessing a blinded wine’s varietal…New World Syrah/Shiraz vs. Zinfandel.

Wines to try before I get old.

Are you tired of seeing certain wines reviewed or being auctioned for exorbitant prices? Do you often wonder, “what’s the big fuss”? Would you like an opportunity to voice your opinion? If so, what would be the wines you choose? I made a list of my current picks of the moment, a winemakers dozen, if you will. These wines are Old World biased, but when you grow grapes in the same place for thousands of years it’s going to help the quality a bit.

1. Le Montrachet: The Chardonnay, a 20 acre vineyard with approx.18 growers and 26 producers, straddling the villages of Puligny and Chassagne in the Cote de Beaune of Burgundy. The vineyard practices and winemaking of the best producers are meticulous to a fault. The wines from the Le Montrachet vineyard are some of the most age worthy whites produced, 10 years being the absolute minimum, unfortunately most is drunk much too soon. Patience has its rewards, but with the 2005’s priced over $500, I’ll drink any vintage offered.

2. Domaine Romanee Conti: (DRC) Legendary Burgundy producer of some of the finest and some would rightfully argue, the finest Pinot Noir grown on the planet. While there are six different wines: Romanee-Conti, La Tache, Richebourg, Romanee-St-Vivant, Grand Echezeaux, and Echezeaux. The only one available to mere mortal’s price wise is Echezeaux. (’87 $700, ‘02 $900) To heck with the children’s tuition fund.

10 more great wines after the break…

Wine.Com has taken the esoteric and somewhat archaic direct wine shipping laws into their own hands. At the very end of last year Wine.Com, took direct aim at competing online wine retailers by engaging in their own “sting operation” to flush out competing retailers that flout the direct wine shipping laws. Wine.com claims to spend millions in an attempt to satisfy these laws for their own business needs.

This was first reported in the Wine Market Report 12/27/07, where they actually published some of the letters that Wine.Com wrote to state governments detailing these non-law abiding retailers, complete with order confirmations and receipts as evidence of the wine that was shipped illegally to Wine.Com’s “sting operators” in each requisite state. The Wine Market Report was immediately credited and re-told by Alder Yarrow in his venerable Vinography blog on 01/04/08 and the report itself, was archived at the Specialty Wine Retailer’s Association (SWRA) site here.

Since Alder’s post, the issue has exploded across the blogosphere and into more traditional print magazine sites…

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)

A little under a year ago I met Jason and Kim. They are different from the rest of us. They are young, very mature for their age, and they see a bigger picture for themselves and WineLog. Also, my wife and I had never been to a self-uniting ceremony before. Pretty cool.

I’ve been tagged by El Jefe to write about why I blog. And I blog all over the place. So I’ll try to answer a more specific question: “why do I blog at WineLog.net”?

Why does WineLog.net even have a blog?
We are asked this a lot. And it’s true, we don’t really NEED a blog. WineLog’s core offering is the wine log itself. We want you to keep track of the wines you’re drinking so you’ll never forget that perfect (or sub-par) bottle. We want to recommend wines to you based on what we know about you, because we don’t want you to waste your money, time, or constitution on a bad wine.

But the WineLog blog also helps us and our users in a number of ways. In no particular order, we use this blog to…

I really enjoy taking people on tours of our Calaveras County, California winery, crush pad, and wine cave. As part of my “shtick” I ask if anyone in the group knows what “Calaveras” means - and I am continually surprised at how few people who visit us know the answer! Do you? Or do you even know how “Napa” got its name? Well, let’s find out about the names of some California wine-growing places…