Damien Wilson
The
'anti-blogging' session, chaired by Damien Wilson, at the 2014 DWCC was largely disappointing. Louise
Hurren's presentation stood out as being interesting, useful and thoughtful. Evelyne
Resnick appeared to be thinking that she was talking to a group of producers
and the conclusions she presented following her three-year study into bloggers
were rather banal and elementary.
Louise Hurren
Evelyne
Resnick
Etienne Hugel
Etienne Hugel was interesting
initially but his presentation was overlong, self-indulgent and became an
embarrassing piece of self-promotion, including promoting his wife and her
activities. The concluding presentation from Robert Joseph was sadly largely glib
and facile.
The session
did, however, make me reflect on why I blog.
Robert Joseph
One of the
strongest reasons is that it allows me to campaign. I use 'campaign' in a broad
sense. Most obviously this applies to investdrinks, which exists to try to warn
people of the potential pitfalls and to highlight companies from whom I would
not buy wine nor the carbon credits, diamonds, graphene, plots of land etc.
that some companies also punt as investments.
Campaigning
is an aspect of wine blogging that gets very little attention. It certainly
didn’t feature in the DWCC’s ‘anti-blogging’ session.
Yet the
Internet can be a powerful and very useful tool. Not only can the net be a
means of getting information and warnings out but, equally important, it can be a
brilliant source of information. Quite how brilliant only became clear after I
set up my investdrinks website in 2000. I have frequently had an initial tip-off about companies on the ever-growing list from whom I would not buy. Often it
is an enquiry about whether I have heard about a particular company, although
sometimes I am given more details. Either way this then allows me to look more closely at
a company - see who the directors are, when the company was set up and look at
their website if they have one.
Having the freedom
to write about anything that interests me is a great plus. This means that when
I visit a producer I can write about them irrespective of their size. I can
blog about producers or events too small or too local to be of interest to a
magazine. This gives me a lot of freedom when visiting producers as I can
always write about them or include photos of them on Jim's Loire or possibly
Les 5 du Vin.
This freedom
is equally useful when warning about dubious investment companies or wine
companies such as 1855 that defraud their clients by failing to deliver wine
they have ordered. Certainly magazines, newspapers, broadcasters etc. do run
news stories on these companies and features on investment but there is limit to
the number of times they can publish such stories or news items. With a blog or
your own website there is no such restriction. For instance I can and have
posted frequently about 1855’s fraudulent behaviour.
