The Man from Mosel River

I enjoy reading the Wall Street Journal, especially the weekend issues with the addition on food, culture, arts and wine. The 5-7 April edition contained an essay written by Lettie Teague titled: “Five wine blogs I really click with”.

This one was again about the wine blogger and his or her influence on the wine industry in general. Lettie claims to have scrolled through 10,000 pages of wine blogs. I wonder if she has come about The Man from Mosel River, but I guess not.

Lettie claims that wine drinkers hardly read wine blogs. Well, maybe so. Of the five blogs she recommends as the best bloggers beyond tasting notes, I knew only one (Brooklynguy). Shame on me.

I learned from the essay that there are about 1,450 odd wine blogs out there (I guess she includes only the ones written in English), of which about 1,000 are amateurs, non-professionals, people who do it for the glory, for personal satisfaction.

Well, people in the wine industry have called wine bloggers a “powerful force, capable of challenging or even eclipsing traditional media and conventional wine critics”. That might be an exaggeration.

According to Allen Wright, who has organized various wine bloggers conferences in North America, only about 18% of all wine bloggers today have been blogging for more than six years.

Hurrah, I call out, I must be one of them since I have started my The Man from Mosel River blog in January 2007. I do not recall all these years but I can also confirm that it is getting harder and harder to keep going.

Regular visitor know about my predicament. Lettie also identifies the one and most important constraint: time. There are so many things out there one could do, and blogging takes time and effort, drains energy, and one needs a lot of passion to just stumble along.

However that may be. Let us have a look at her selection. The five select bloggers are:

1. Brooklynguy
Brooklynguyloveswine.blogspot.com

2. Cellar-Book
Cellarbook.wordpress.com

3. Odd Bacchus
oddbacchus.com

4. The Cellar-Fella
cellarfella.com

5. Benito’s Wine Reviews
wine-by-benito.blogspot.com

I visited all of the blogs above and must say they are a bloody good choice.

To all of us I say, keep on blogging. Some people seem to read our ruminations. Thanks Lettie for letting us know.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 6th, 2013 at 9:57 pm and is filed under wine, wine bars, wine regions, wineries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.