Congrats to the Winners!

I think there ought to be a Wine Blog Awards category Most Candid Winery Blog. That certainly would be Wilma's alone.

I look for an eccentric variety of articles, given technical background in the "trade". For example, there was a conference, somewhere, a few years ago, which had a theme centered upon the new coastal AVAs. I learned from the conference direct links that a few new coast enology enterprises had composed thoughtful and detailed descriptions of viticulture measurements for each vineyard bloc, as a manager might while designing cultural plans and cropping profiles, although many factors influence actual realtime decisionmaking.

Sometimes, too, I have wished to find a grape and wine test lab's blog which explains product design decisions and alternatives, as well as logging atypical seasons or microclimates. Those traditionally are far from open source public discussions; they are more like closely held trade secrets. Yet, the cognoscenti commonly discuss those traits when examining the competition's products and the conditions within various geographic regions. There is ample talk online at wine websites, and in tech notes, concerning the interrelationship between soil and must composition; I would like to see a website give more room to those evaluations.

Another Wine Blog Awards category I would like to see would emphasize qualities which are more literate. Some wine writers clearly are extensively educated and have refined aesthetic sensibilities. Their blog material often stands in contrast to other, more mundane, commercialized websites.

There are yet more categories missing from the Awards, though the effort clearly is doing well and can serve as a worthwhile, timely guide thru the substantial quantity of available online material.

Well, I'm going to try to find an English version of the website of the École Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Montpellier. At first look, that famed French viticulture teaching institution appears to be called SupAgro now.

I wonder if climate change is affecting French growers and winemakers, too, in these years of melting icecaps and altered, magnified weather.

In the northcoast we've returned to weather patterns of last year, almost. Late rains, inducing worries about early botrytis, or low fruit set for some varietals if they were blooming when it rained unseasonably late; then, too, we have seen summer late morning inland fogs, and there is some rumble of opinion about the harvest already appearing to be late again in 2011. Next, while it is still summer, could be a week of daily Tmax>100F; I read recently of the new Diffenbaugh forecast for ten additional days yearly of heat peaks over 95F by 2029; so maybe new canopy alternatives are in the making among the experts now, if I can find their blogs and the Wine Blogs Conference, North America, locates those sites, too, in time for next year's awards.