Which Wine Blogs Matter?

wbaTracking the breadth and depth of the wine media is not an easy job. Writers come and go. Editors change jobs. Addresses change. Phone numbers and emails no longer work. And of course, there is always the new writer or new column or….a new blog.

This latter breed, the blog—specifically the wine blog—is what I want to draw your attention to in this entry on the Wine Media.

For the publicist, marketer and winery owner, one of the most difficult things to do is determined to which of 1.6 billion wine blogs in existence ought attention be paid—let alone samples sent? I don’t have an easy answer for you. I don’t have a list of 25 wine blogs that you ought to put on your list of media contacts or samples recipients.

What I do have for you is a simpler recommendation:

Look very closely at this year’s finalists in the Wine Blog Awards. Then, look at the list of winners going back to 2007 when I founded the Wine Blog Awards.

The finalists are determined by a panel of judges consisting of other writers, winemakers, reporters and editors. They look at hundreds of blogs before whittling them down to four or five finalists in 9 categories. Past winners are the result of judges and the public assessing the finalists. All this amounts to a pretty good indication of where the quality is.

However, this will not tell you what the readership of these blogs might be. And it is a truism that a blog with no readers is just a personal diary.