#DWCC14: Campaigns – one reason I blog

 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.