The Wine Knows

I'm reading the new book Wine Politics, and it's a rather fascinating look at the business side of the wine industry and answers a lot of questions about why things are the way they are.

Our dear friend and Wine Press Northwest columnist Braiden Rex-Johnson has joined my blogroll with the launch last week of Northwest Notes. She already has posted several items since launching Thursday.

I just completed my article on Northwest Riesling (ah, the thrill of deadline!). For a variety of reasons, I chose to use Google Docs to write it.

A cool little tool in Google Docs is a word counter that also includes reading levels. According to this, I've written to a seventh-grade level. That makes sense since newspaper journalists tend to target about seventh- or eighth-grade reading levels.

Two years ago, Steve Roberts embarked on a journey of Washington wine country. His goal was to create a guidebook that focused on wine tourism. Steve ended up breaking the state into a dozen regions and 32 "wine trails," basically a touring guide.

This week marks the second anniversary of this little blog on the wines of the Pacific Northwest.

I launched this blog with the idea that we needed a way to communicate what was happening in the Northwest wine industry more often than we could in our longtime weekly email newsletter.

I've written with some frequency about finding your niche in the Northwest wine industry, and I love to highlight those who are.

In 2005, Heather Lewis saw a need that wasn't being filled in her hometown of Walla Walla, Wash. She was frustrated because she couldn't get the information she wanted about local wineries. The Walla Walla Valley Wine Alliance did a good job with maps, brochures, etc., but everything was moving so fast, that kind of info was out of date soon after it was printed.

Braiden Rex-Johnson is taking over the wine gig for the Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest magazine.

Looking for some wonderful insight into the Oregon wine scene with a lot of international flavor tossed in? Elevage has joined the "must read" spot in my RSS feed. It's written by Vincent Fritzsche, a Portland resident who loves wine, apparently goes to a lot of wineries, makes his own noncommercial Pinot Noir and is hoping to get into the wine business.

I'm most of the way through George Taber's To Cork or Not to Cork, a book that looks at the history of using corks as wine bottle closures.

Tom Wark over on Fermentation does an occasional post interviewing various wine bloggers. He asks the same questions to each blogger, so it's interesting to see their answers ("Prius or BMW?" "Chablis or California Chardonnay?").

One question whose answer interests me is, "Do you accept samples for review?" Many bloggers do not, it appears, but that's because they might have special interests and do not review wines.