Wine Blogging and Parenting

WineZag was conceived three years ago this week. Happy Birthday to it! In a related side fact, my two amazing sons are now 21 and 18 years respectively.  With identical veracity, I anticipate the blog’s birthdays as keenly as the boys’ red letter days. Plowing into WineZag’s fourth year of wine content creation, the connections between [...]

Wine Blogger Sample Disclosure Double Standard

Are wine bloggers and their traditional media counterparts held to a double standard on sample disclosures?  While it’s old news now, if you ask the FTC, then the answer is yes.  A recent article published by the Boston Globe and then an inquiry on common practice from an academic friend who is moving into a [...]

Wine Blogs Missing Visual and Human Elements

It is hard disputing the “wine blog burnout” that Tom Wark pointed to last month when he wrote “the movement to use the blog publishing format by wine lovers [is] waning. I see fewer new wine blogs launched. The retreat will be slow, but the retreat will be with us.”  Why are wine bloggers losing interest, why [...]

Steve Heimoff on Wine Blogs and Journalism

A guy from Brooklyn meets a guy from the Bronx inside an Oakland Whole Foods to talk about wine blogging and journalism.  This is not a set up line to a cheap joke.  It’s a real vignette that was the basis of yesterday’s post about the real Steve Heimoff.  We did gab about the New York [...]

The Real Steve Heimoff

While California wines were losing my attention, Steve Heimoff grabbed it.  That may sound like an oddity since Steve is known for his sustained and successful career as California Editor at the Wine Enthusiast and, before that, the Wine Spectator.  Actually, it wasn’t strange in my world; I study journalists with a knack for integrating [...]

Wine Blog Confessions

As the 2012 wine blogging season kicked off, three notable wine bloggers weighed in with wine blogosphere predictions, analysis, and reflections.  In the last month, Steve Heimoff, Tom Wark, and Alder Yarrow posted their opinions on the evolution of the wine blogosphere, sustainable wine content creation, and/or why they blog.  I regularly follow these guys because they [...]

2011 Wine Highlights Part 2- Wine Community

When I launched WineZag in 2009, I did it under a founding motto of “wine is a lubricant for human connection that holds no bias.”  The essence of my wine appreciation has always transcended the juice, gravitating to the center of human bonding and relationships that are accelerated by shared wine experiences; either during dinner [...]

Wine Writing Styles Reflect Culture

There is no surprise that Do Bianchi author Jeremy Parzen, whose wine and food credentials drip with immersion and cultural understanding, recently managed to illustrate old world vs. new world wine writing styles in utterly poignant fashion.  In his post about the differences in European and American wine writing genres he brings new light to the [...]

Eric Asimov Sorts Out Wine Enthusiasm and Journalism

An ever present cloud of self doubt began lifting only ten minutes into Eric Asimov’s 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference keynote talk on responsible journalism, democratization of wine, and differences in generational paths to wine knowledge and appreciation.  I breathed easier as he weaved in and out of these centerpiece issues, connecting and comparing his personal development [...]

Second Vintage in the Bottle: Another Year of WineZag

Today marks two years of WineZag and that’s a pretty long time in blog years, I think.  For me, the end of both of those blogging years forced unavoidable reflection and moments of reconsideration for the massive time commitment dedicated to transferring wine experiences into keystrokes.  Truth be told, WineZag is so intertwined in my [...]

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