Reflections on the net and blogging

Interesting reflections on wine blogging and why do it by Hervé Lalau here on Chroniques Vineuses. Hervé's site is now averaging 500 visitors a day, which is 15,000 a month and around 180,000 a year. There are plenty of wine trade magazines that would be delighted with such a readership.

I have Jim's Loire for many of the same reasons as Hervé cites, especially as it allows me to cover much more and more regularly about La Loire than I have ever been able to do in print. Furthermore the opportunities in the specialist print media in the UK have shrunk as magazines has disappeared or been amalgamated. Jim's Loire allows me to visit producers and for me to be reasonably confident that I will be able to write about them on this blog, although I have to acknowledge that it can be some time after the visit that I have time to write it up. Indeed I'm aware that I have still have to write a number of reports on visits to producers like Pascal Potaire (to be completed), the Puzelats, the Lamberts at Domaine Saint-Just (Saumur) and Antoine Simoneau (Saint-Georges-sur-Cher). Unfortunately (or fortunately) other work gets in the way.

Visits to Jim's Loire average out at around 180 a day over the past four months, which is encouraging as it is still less than 11 months since we launched it.

I have always been amazed by the number of messages I have received and continue to receive from my first website – www.investdrinks.org. I haven't averaged it out but I probably get three or four messages a week at least from people who have been cold called by wine investment companies, emailing me to ask whether the company is legitimate and whether they are being offered a good deal. My advice is never to buy from any wine investment company that calls you out of the blue. If you live in the UK you can block unsolicited cold calls by registering with the Telephone Preference Service, which is a free service.

I'm also staggered by the success of some of these wine investment cold callers, managing to persuade people to write five-figure and, occasionally, six-figure cheques to companies they know little or nothing about and for wines they have sometimes only vaguely heard of and for which they are quite often paying well over the going rate. From time to time there are examples when the cold calling company doesn't even bother to buy the wine – just pockets the money and disappears.

Robert Beynat

Like Hervé I'm convinced by the significance of the net not just for communication but for commerce as well, unlike Robert Beynat, le grand fromage of Vinexpo, who at the press conference at the end of Vinexpo dismissed internet wine sales saying that the net will 'never be anything other than a marginal circuit for sales.' I don't know if this is what Robert really meant to say but it provoked considerable, often biting, comment at the end of this Decanter news story.

This comment gives a flavour
‘Coming from the country that invented the Maginot Line and whose most interesting wine trade group is the quasi-terrorist KRAV, comments like Mr. Beynat's do not surprise me. When French wine production is surpassed by Argentina or Hungary maybe they will start getting it.'
Brendan Chudik, San Francsico’