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2010 Awards

Following is a list of the 2010 Wine Blog Awards finalists:

Best Wine Blog Graphics, Photography, & Presentation
Good Grape
Snooth
Spittoon
Swirl Smell Slurp
Winesleuth

Best Industry/Business Wine Blog
Good Grape
My Daily Wine
New York Cork Report
Think Wine Marketing
Wine Biz Radio

Best Wine Reviews on a Wine Blog
Bigger Than Your Head
Enobytes
Good Wine Under $20
Jason’s Wine Blog
Spittoon

Best Single Subject Wine Blog
Catavino
Elloinos
New York Cork Report
Tinto y Blanco
Vinsanity

Best Winery Blog
4488: A Ridge Blog
Been Doon So Long
Quevedo
Tablas Creek
Twisted Oak

Best Writing On a Wine Blog
Catavino
Chronic Negress
Drinkster
PaulGregutt.com
Steve Heimoff

Best New Wine Blog
A Long Pour
Drink Nectar
Notes From the Cellar
One Brilliant Bottle
Swirl Smell Slurp

Best Overall Wine Blog
1 Wine Dude
Dr. Vino
New York Cork Report
Palate Press
The Cellarist

Below is an outline of the 2010 Wine Blog Awards process:

  • The awards were started by Tom Wark of the blog Fermentation in 2007. In 2010, Tom asked the organizers of the North American Wine Bloggers Conference to take over the process. Much was changed in 2010 (a website dedicated to the awards, an open comment and suggestion period, the addition of Best New Wine Blog, and the deletion of the term American from the title) and much remained from Tom’s vision (the nomination of blogs by the public, the judging panel, the selection of five finalists, and the voting on finalists by the public).
  • The awards are open to any English-language wine blog located anywhere in the world.
  • The applicable qualifying period for the 2010 awards is April 1, 2009 through March 31, 2010.
  • Blogs must have posted at least 52 times during this period to qualify for the awards, with one exception (keep reading).
  • The seven award categories from 2009 will be joined by a new award for Best New Wine Blog, given to a blog started during the qualifying period mentioned above and with no minimum number of postings required.
  • The nomination period is April 1-7, 2010. Nominations are open to the public and will be made via this website. Each blog nominated for a category will be included in the selection process; additional nominations for a blog in the same category will have no effect, so once a blog is nominated for a category there is no reason to nominate it again.
  • A panel of 11 expert judges will evaluate all the nominated blogs for each category during the period April 8-30 and will select the top five blogs in each category. The panel will include judges from outside North America. These judges are all volunteers and put in loads of hours reviewing the many nominated blogs.
  • The public will be given the opportunity to vote for the finalists of each category from May 24-30.
  • Each category winner will be chosen based on 50% of the input coming from the judges and 50% coming from the public vote.
  • Winners will be announced on Friday, June 25th at the 2010 North American Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla, Washington.
  • johnlopresti
    There is a lot more to maintaining a site than merely one post a week. I read one wine blog which often posts new material every few days, much of it humor, satire, philosophy (imagine that, on an enocentric blog), music, contemplation; even legislative history. A separate site is posted by a wine insider with a moniker apparently derived from a 70s satirical cartoon; its observations are sometimes, Addison-like, less than weekly, yet, remain poignantly familiar to those of us who have worked for estate vinifying institutions. A third, also unqualified for the awards process, is a recently created site which is causing a stir in wine marketing, but also because of its academician-creator's background, very deep on history and science.

    Yet another unqualified 'wineblog' site which I visit occasionally only rarely has a new article, but each effort has a longing earnestness and enologic brilliance, often interspersed with ageold literature excerpts. Its originator is attending the conference. What a treasure for the online world of viticulture and enology.

    One of the interesting outlier genres for purposes of awards would be some of the excellent material which appears on some actual winery sites, which provide technical glimpses into the composition of their individual wines.

    I am glad the awards are restructured. Keep up the good work, and consider the kinds of merit some of these "lesser" participants offer to the wineblogreaders.
  • Hi folks - I wanted to follow up on something reported over at Another Wine Blog ( http://www.anotherwineblog.com/archives/8524 ), where they claimed there was a change made after announcing the finalists. Specifically:

    "Current nominees from Survey Monkey are:

    7. Best New Wine Blog

    - A Long Pour (http://alongpour.com/)
    - Drink Nectar (http://drinknectar.com/)
    - Swirl, Smell, Slurp (http://swirlsmellslurp.com/)
    - Notes From the Cellar (http://notesfromthecellar.com/)
    - One Brilliant Bottle (http://onebrilliantbottle.wordpress.com/)

    And this was Copied and Pasted from the Voting Page at 11:00 a.m. Central:

    7. Best New Wine Blog

    - A Long Pour (http://alongpour.com/)
    - Drink Nectar (http://drinknectar.com/)
    - My Wine Words (http://mywinewords.org/)
    - Notes From the Cellar (http://notesfromthecellar.com/)
    - One Brilliant Bottle (http://onebrilliantbottle.wordpress.com/)"


    Can anyone confirm that and if that actually happened, why it was changed?

    Cheers!
  • My Wine Words was disqualified and replaced by the first alternate in the voting. It had posts that pre-dated the "New" qualifications.
  • Thanks, Joel.
  • francoziliani
    my nomination: http://steveheimoff.com/
    I like so much the indipendence and the intelligence of the post
    Franco Ziliani
  • VinoPigro
    Hi Allan,
    thank you for your reply. Yes, I do agree, to judge wibe blog in a different language is complicated. It need a strong organization - and WBC is more important to organize! -
    But, maybe, in future somebody could think to a...foreign jury? One for language? One award for every wine blog in foreign language? Italian, French, Spanish, German, Portoguese...too many?
    Ok, it's REALLY a crazy thing! Never mind.
    Sigh.

    Lizzy
  • allanwright
    We'll keep thinking about it! We do hope to make this a truly international award.
  • VinoPigro
    Great idea: It's a pity you want to reward only wine blog in English language...so the rest of world is cut off!
    :(

    Lizzy
  • allanwright
    Hi Lizzy,

    We considered opening the awards to blogs in other languages but we just took over management of the awards and decided we did not have time to do this properly in 2010. Judging blogs in other languages really complicates things. Do we have one "best foreign language blog" award? Do we pick three or six foreign languages to include? Do we compare blogs across different languages, which somehow requires judges to compare blogs they perhaps can't read? We are looking for suggestions!
  • Along similar lines as Joe's recommendations, I would suggest giving awards, a gold, silver and bronze, to the top three wine blogs in each category. This might require a modestly expanded base of entries. Joe is quite right, that by adding blogs from outside North America, there is now a significant increase in possible nominees.

    With respect to Kathy's comment, while I don't believe it is necessary for the five judge panel to have read every word written on every blog nominated, it is important that the judges already be familiar with the wine blogging community at large. Someone selected from WineBusiness.com, for example, would add credibility not only because they are pros but because of the daily updated blog roll on their site.
  • Three pieces of feedback (because you asked for them! :-) :

    1) These changes are going to be GREAT for the awards!

    2) I would consider expanding the list of finalists from 5 to 7 or even higher, since the pool of blogs that are eligible in each category will have expanded significantly from past awards, both due to organic growth and to the inclusion of blogs based in countries outside of the U.S.

    3) This is an idea for the future, because I think it's too early to do it now - consider mimicking what other awards programs do and create a Lifetime Achievement award in some of the categories. This award would basically be saying that blog X has won that category so many times that they are ineligible to win it again, and they might then become a judge for future awards in that category, etc. This has been done for example in magazines like Modern Drummer, so that Neil Peart doesn't win Best Rock Drummer every year.
  • Kathy
    Thank you for taking this on.
    As an EPpy judge, I encourage you to reconsider the number of judges and time span.
    Five judges cannot read and review all the entries (52 blogs per entry x categories x est 100 entries plus visuals plus links plus comments generated plus focus based on category plus relative differences based on POV and judge's understanding of language use/issue for multiple "English" sites...) in all categories in 22 days. By somewhat conservative estimates that is a million words. Plus reviewing some in order to make final selections...
    More judges (different judges by category), more time = more credible and enjoyable results.
    Thanks for considering this.
  • Cool!
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