Tag Archives: Wine Curmudgeon

Wine Curmudgeon most popular posts 2018

most popular posts 2018The Wine Curmudgeon’s most popular posts 2018

The blog enjoyed the best year in its 11-year history between November 2017 and November 2018, with some 600,000 visitors in one form or another. You can be impressed; that I did that with my nickel and dime operation speaks to how desperate wine drinkers are for intelligent, well-written, and unbiased information in the post-modern wine world. Of which you can read more on Thursday in my annual state of the wine industry rant and essay.

The key here is “in one form or another.” Some two-thirds of blog readers never visit the blog anymore, but access it through the daily email or an RSS feed. This is a tremendous change. As recently as a couple of years ago, those figures were reversed. This skewed some of the top post numbers in 2018, since people who don’t come to the blog aren’t counted in the same way as people who do. Internet analytics are even murkier than the three-tier system.

Nevertheless, if the way people use the Internet changes, the blog will change with them.

What else happened between 2017 and 2018?

• Blog readers continue to get younger (maybe half younger than 40) and the number of women continues to increase (perhaps as many as 2 1/2 out of five). Again, murky counting.

• The Barefoot wine value post, written in 2009, was No. 1 for the fourth consecutive year. And it wasn’t even close, with almost one-third more hits than the No. 2 post. I have accepted this as the blog’s fate, and will just update the top of  the post with links to more current Barefoot reviews.

• More than three-quarters of the blog’s actual visitors arrived via searching, the highest ever. The most common search term? Barefoot wine, of course.

The most popular posts from 2018 — as well as a couple of other highlights — are after the jump: Continue reading →

Birthday week 2018 starts Monday

birthday week 2018The blog’s 11th Birthday Week begins on Monday, with terrific prizes again this year

Birthday Week 2018, the 11th annual, begins on Monday with terrific prizes for the blog’s readers. The daily giveaways are the Wine Curmudgeon’s annual thank you to everyone who reads the blog and visits the site, since none of this would happen without you. And we need some cheering up after the past 12 months in cheap wine.

Contest rules are here. Those of you who get the blog via email or RSS will need to go to winecurmudgeon.com and click on that day’s prize post to enter.

Each day next week, a prize post will run in addition to the regular post. Pick a number between 1 and 1,000 and leave it in the comment section of the prize post. You can’t pick a number someone else has picked, and you need to leave your guess in the comments section of this post — no email entries or entries on other posts, like this one. Unless the number is in the comments section of the prize post, the entry won’t count.

This year’s prize schedule:

• Monday: A $50 gift card from Boony Doon Vineyards.

• Tuesday: A wine t-shirt from Zazzle. And, yes, men’s style, too.

• Wednesday: A $100 gift card from Wine.com. Thanks to Wine.com, a long-time supporter of the blog and what we do here.

• Thursday: Four Schott Zweisel wine glasses, just like the ones the Wine Curmudgeon uses.

• Friday: Three wine books — an autographed copy of the cheap wine book, an autographed copy of “Wine Trails United States & Canada,” signed by Washington Post wine columnist Dave McIntyre, and a copy of Peter Stafford-Bow’s “Brute Force.”

Besides the prize giveaways, I’ll recap the past year on the blog — the top posts and the least liked on Monday, as well as my always insightful analysis about what it all means and the future of the wine business on Thursday.

Picture courtesy of Humdrum Paper, using a Creative Commons license

Halloween wine tales 2018

halloween wine taleNo Halloween wine tale for 2018. But you can read the previous six and enjoy. Because who else can combine wine, classic characters, and Halloween?

• A Halloween wine tale 2017: Dr. Who
• A Halloween wine tale 2016: Kolchak: The Wine Stalker
• A Halloween wine tale 2015: I am Legend
• A Halloween wine tale 2014: Frankenstein
• A Halloween wine tale 2013: Dracula

Five things the WC’s wine refrigerator has in common with the French presidential wine cellar

presidential wine cellar

The WC’s wine fridge is always open to the public.

Who says you have to have a presidential wine cellar to show off your wine collection?

The wine cellar in France’s presidential palace welcomed the public for the first time in its 71-year history over the weekend. This is a big deal, given that France has long been held as the world’s greatest wine producing country. And how many wine aficionados would want to see how the cellar’s 14,000 bottles reflected that?

But who says you have to have a presidential wine cellar to show off your wine collection? “Voulez-vous un verre de Bogle sauvignon blanc, Monsieur le Président? Ou peut-être un verre de Texas tempranillo?”

Hence, five things my wine refrigerator has in common with the French presidential wine cellar.

1. One quarter of the cellar’s bottles are from Burgundy, while half are from Bordeaux. I used to have a bottle of Bordeaux in the wine fridge, and actually have two bottles of white Burgundy in it now.

2. Among the bottles in the cellar are Cheval Blanc, Latour and Puligny-Montrachet, as well as a 1906 Sauternes. I visited Cheval Blanc during my epic Bordeaux adventure, sampled a terrific Latour at a trade tasting many years ago, and the Big Guy and I drink Puligny with some regularity. Plus, I enjoyed a glass of Sauternes (not 1906, however) in May during a half-price restaurant promotion.

3. Some 1,200 bottles were auctioned from the cellar in 2013. I have given away not quite that many bottles (samples, mostly) to friends and dinner guests, as well as to plumbers, electricians, and the like in exchange for work around the house.

4. French President Emmanuel Macron is apparently a wine geek who fared well in a recent blind tasting. Plus, he drinks wine with lunch and dinner. I drink wine with dinner, but not as often at lunch as I would like. And, despite my incredible wine geekiness, I am a notoriously bad blind taster.

5. This weekend’s guests will be shown a gold-engraved 2000 vintage of Mouton Rothschild and a 2004 Chateau Margaux. I have never seen bottles from those producers, let alone tasted them. But I have heard of them.

writing about wine

The cyber-ether loves the Wine Curmudgeon blog

wine curmudgeon blogTwo rankings put the Wine Curmudgeon blog among the top 100 wine sites on the Internet

Good news for those of us who love cheap wine. Two website rankings put the Wine Curmudgeon blog among the top 100 wine sites on the Internet for 2018.

Amsterdam Diary (and no, I don’t know why it ranks wine blogs) says the site is among the top 90 on the Internet, while Feedspot puts the blog among the top 100 sites.

This is a big deal, and not just because I like to boast about the Wine Curmudgeon blog. First, that I made these lists speaks to the need for credible, well-written information about the wine most of us drink. Which, of course, many in the wine business prefers we don’t know, since they want to sell us crummy, overpriced wine.

Second, I made the same lists as sites with more money, employees, and ad revenue, including the Wine Spectator, VinePair and Wine Folly. Here, of course, I do everything myself. That says a lot about how much you appreciate what I do — and is one of the reasons I keep writing the blog.

Labor Day weekend cheap wine book extravaganza: Free shipping

cheap wine bookBuy one cheap wine book or 10 – you’ll get free shipping

Click on the link and buy a cheap wine book between now and midnight, Sept. 3 and get free shipping. What better way to celebrate the holiday than to buy three or four books? Or even more. Dec. 25 will be here before you know it.

Check out normally, and I’ll credit the free shipping when your order is processed. Also note that we’ve streamlined the WC web shop, making it easier to use. And, as always, I sign every book bought from the WC web shop.

July Fourth blog schedule changes 2018

The blog is off for the July Fourth holiday next Wednesday, and there are couple of other changes in our schedule next week:

• The wine of the week, which usually runs on Wednesday, will run on Monday. That way, you can buy it to enjoy on the Fourth.

• Our regular features return on Thursday, including Friday’s post discussing the continuing divide between what we buy and what the Winestream Media tells us we should drink.