Wine 2.0 series: Essential wine websites for your cellar
Posted on November 5th, 2007
Saved in Wine, Wine websites
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’re sure to have heard of social networks.
One of the problems with wine that I’ll continue to allude to is the 3 P’s of wine: poncey, posh and pretentious wine talk. Social networks and, in this case, drinker generated content, may be the answer to this – wine tasted and written about by amateurs (in the true meaning of the word, amateur, i.e. for the love of). Of course, it might make the situation worse!
In the Wine 2.0 series of posts, I’ll mull over some wine websites worth a looksy:
- Bottletalk.com
- Adegga
- Cork’d
- Wine Library TV
- Added: Snooth.com.
Next week, a look at Bottletalk.com, hailing from the UK.
The 3 P’s are tricky all right. One man’s plain speaking is another man’s poncy, and there’s no way of knowing who expects what. Part of our job is to suss out the appropriate register for each conversation we have (I mean in the widest sense of ‘conversation’: from speaking to customers in person, to how to paint the vans). People can be just as easily offended by over-simplification as by an excess of jargon. The simple answer is, of course, to pitch it exactly right for each person, each time.
Hi Julian,
thanks for the comment. I agree with you absolutely. I’ve found that the vast majority of wine shops have really friendly and courteous staff.
However, most of the wine writing in the main broadsheets assumes a certain level of knowledge and appreciation so I think there’s a gap there, a gap I’m please to say blogs like yours are doing really well to fill.
Wine can be a luxury item and a status symbol (e.g. “I only drink Petrus”), like a Porsche but I think it’s far healthier to view it as part of our grocery shopping!
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