Vinodiversity Blog

Open that Bottle Night

Here is a reprise of an article I wrote  5  years ago 

I don't really know, but I suspect that many (if not most) of the readers of this blog are Baby Boomers. So we are entering the contemplative phase of our lives. Some of us have made wills and we are all busy planning for our retirement.

Many of us have accumulated a few bottles of wine that we regard as special, either for the wine itself, or the memories attached to it. (I have two bottles of a James Joyce Bloomsday Centenary wine, and 1974 Vintage red called "A Certain Grandeur" for example).

But what is going to happen to this glorious plonk when we shuffle off? Is it going to be wasted on the Bacardi Breezer generation? Not a pleasant thought.

The only sensible thing to do with wine is to drink it. 

The Americans have come up with the idea of Open That Bottle Night, held on the last Saturday of February, this year it's the 25th.

The idea is to set up an occasion and open a special bottle, or two, that would otherwise be left in the shelf for too long.  Some BYO restaurants in the US even waive corkage for OTBN. I'd like to see that done here.

At one level it's a marketing ploy, just like St Valentines Day, but it can help us to take stock of what is in the cellar and when we think we are actually going to drink the stuff.

So there you have it, what are YOU planning? Remember you can't take it with you.

I've decided to see if I can get the ball rollling with a twitter campaign using the tag #OTBN

By the way the cartoon above is from my good friend Lord Sedgewick of Strathmore

Add to the twitter comments  at #OTBN or perhaps comment below

Sad Tale of a Wine Blog

I sometimes check out a listing of wine websites to see where I stand with the top guys - vanity really, but even though I have been drinking wine for 42 years I'm still human.

You can see the list of top 100 wine websites  at http://www.cellarer.com/best-wine-websites  I am about 50 on the top 500.

One of the websites I decided to check out from the Cellearer's list was Goodgrape.com 

It's a blog, and if you look at it it is one of the best. But the latest post, on 6 December says that the owner has decided to put the site into hiatus. The workload is too high. Unfortunately blogs rely on (almost) daily feeding so the blog has had a catastrophic drop in traffic, see the graphic below which is taken from Alexa.

This was the state of play on 2 Jan 2012, less than a month after  the last post. What will the traffic be like in 3 or 12 months.

All of the work that has gone into the blog resides in archives, and the value of the site to readers and the author will be lost. If the same amount of work and skill had gone into a website it could have been left unattended for a few months with little erosion of web traffic, and teh author would have maintained most of the income.

The bigger picture

One of the problems of the web is that it creates what Tom Friedman calls Electronic Herds. People see what they think is a trend and social media mean that the trend is amplified into a mad rush.  This happened with blogging about a decade ago.

Many wine writers, good and bad, were attracted to blogging as it was free, or nearly so and it gave editorial independence. Only a few blogs managed to attract a serious audience. 

The essential problem with bogging is that the items are arranged chronologically, rather than logically.  A well designed website leads its readers through material in a logical way,  blogs attempt this with categories and tags but they don't really work. Search engines tend to send traffic only to the latest posts.

People used to look for information in text books and references, rather than a plie of magazines. Now they look in websites rather than blogs.

You can see an extended discussion about why websites are better than blogs for most businesses in these articles.

http://bitly.com/uCwxiA Blog or build

http://bitly.com/tamTEQ Wordpress vs SBI

OK blogging has it's place.  this is a blog but it is embeded in my main website.  But the moral of the story is don't rely on Blogging as your main game.