A BIG "Thanks" to all my Readers, you're the best!

Hello everyone I can't believe it has been almost 2 years since I started this blog, and wow things have changed so much for me in regards to finding my voice, putting together a clear consistent review process, recieving more wines for review, gaining some credibility amoung some of my peers, attending trade tastings and conferences to enhance my exposure to a greater variety of wine, working with some great PR professionals and most importantly gaining some readership, with some great feed back from my readers. I also see I have an international audience as well and can hardly believe some of the places in the world where my blog is being looked and hopefully read. Some of you just lurk out their and that's fine [I'm just glad you are there]. However, I would continue to encourage to everyone to feel free to disagree or celebrate some of my conclusions, as I welcome and look forward to every comment I receive.

Just to show that as readers of this blog, you're in very good company, the content you read here appears to be providing some relative and important dialogue on the subject of great wine for great prices. I've included a snippet of this article entitled, "Wine authors that just stood out in 2010" below which listed this blog as trending very well for the first quarter of 2010 and over tenfold from this time last year. I was very surprised and happy to see that this blog had made this very auspicious list of wine bloggers who are also trending higher in valuation and readership. However, you still will not find my blog in the top 165 wine blogs, apparently this blog is on the other list which is not visible, and the total is list size is 380. I have no idea where this blog sits numerically on the list, but I am very thankful to you my readers that the trend of increased readership and valuation of this blog is moving in a very positive direction.

"Here is the quarterly ranking of web sites. Webmasters need not apply as the contest includes all sites. The table shows only the 165 ‘best’ — ‘best’ is evaluated with public website metrics. These figures permit to include all sites — not just blogs. Here below is a story of the poll and an analysis of the results." -Estelle Platini of the Blog Cellarer.

She went on to say, "These sites currently enjoy public recognition and more readers. The sites whose valuations increased tenfold in the past 12 months are:"

» Wine Whore,

» Cuvee Corner,

» 1winedude,

» Oenologic again,

» The Crushed Grape Report.

After reading her post I looked into the Google Analytics page which monitors the readership of this blog and indeed it showed a significant increase in traffic from this time last year. It does appear that this blog does stand in the crowd of so many different wine blogs and winery blogs that talk about wine and wine culture. So at this juncture I wanted to say publically to everyone who has even spent a moment on this blog, those who've taken the time to dialogue with me about the content, and for those who took my advice and grabbed some of the wine I've recommended, here is a huge Thank You!

Until next time I wish you all well and leave you with this parting thought from one of our "founding" fathers, Benjamin Franklin who was quoted to have said, “Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance” and indeed it does. So again I lift a glass to you all and say cheers!