American Wine Blog Award winners – and other blogs you should read

The votes have been tallied, added to the jury’s vote (70% popular vote, 30% jury), and the results are now official. The winners for the 2009 American Wine Blog Awards have been announced.

Nice bunch of blogs in that list: Vinography (twice, and a winner for two yars in a row), Lenndevours, The Good Grape, The Wine Collector, Michel Schlumberger’s Benchland Blog, and Bigger Than Your Head, a blog I discovered as a finalist in the 2008 AWBA. 

Congratulations to all, and happy blogging for many years to come.

While I’m at it, though,

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American Wine Blog Awards: still time to vote… and to argue

Folks, if you like wine blogs in general – and certain wine blogs in particular – you still have a little over a day to vote for the finalists of the American Wine Blog Awards, the main recognition offered to wine bloggers for their passionate efforts to present different points of view on their – and your – favorite drink.

I happen to think that,

It’s AWBA time again

It’s that time of the year again. The Oscars, the Grammys… the American Wine Blog Awards.

These Wine Blog Awards were created by Tom Wark of Wark Communications and the Fermentation Blog, one of the most widely read wine blogs on the web. They are now in their third year, and were created with an interesting mix of public voting and judging in mind.

Right now, until midnight tomorrow, February 8, you can nominate your favorite wine blogs by simply leaving a comment in the appropriate category on Tom’s blog (please feel free to nominate this blog, if you’ve enjoyed it – just not in the graphics category…). From there, a panel of judges will select four blogs in each category as finalists. And then, the vote will be open to the public again. The more suggestions at this point, the better the chances for the finalists to be representative of what people are reading and enjoying in the growing world of wine blogs.

So go ahead and nominate. Then come back and vote, when the finalists are out. A little recognition goes a long way for wine bloggers, who more often than not are doing this in their spare time, with little or no revenue in return.

Oh, I almost forgot. The awards are in.

Though they generated a fair bit of discussion, about whether or not they were representative and valid, the American Wine Blogging Awards were announced this week by Fermentation blog’s Tom Wark. I have to congratulate Alder Yarrow for the two awards won for his blog Vinography, well-deserved indeed. I’m also glad about Tablas Creek’s Winery blog Award for… best winery blog: I started getting interested in Jason Haas’ blog after a really great post about the great cork debate, and have been a fan since (the wines are pretty great too).

No award process is perfect, but after reading Tom Wark’s discussion of the whole thing, I have to say the AWBA seem about as good as it can get, for a world as fluid as wine blogging. Points were awarded both for public vote and for judge’s votes, nominations were open to the public, while the finalists were selected from this open list by the judges. Could the Awards be improved upon? Probably. Should they be back next year? Tom Wark seems to be hesitating (perhaps from all the criticism), but I certainly think it would be worth it.

Grab a glass, a computer and… vote

Got a favorite wine blog? There’s so many of those (enough to have caused the emergence of a loose wine-blogging community), that you favorite might be a gem known only to a few hundred readers worldwide.

Then again, maybe your favorite is one of the major pages on the scene. And maybe it’s a finalist in the 2008 American Wine Blog Awards, created by Tom Wark, a wine-sector public relations specialist who also runs the Fermentation Daily Wine Blog. I’m not 100 percent sure how the finalists were selected (the blog entry says that the identity of the judges who made the selection will be revealed after the vote), but what is clear is that it’s your chance to vote, which you can do from the Fermentation blog.

The polls, so to speak, are open until March 28, at Midnight (not clear if that is Eastern or Pacific Time, so do it early).

I think the awards are a great idea, and a reflection of the growth and increased respectability of wine blogs in the wine world. If I may make a suggestion, though: why not call them the North American Wine Blog Awards, which would be inclusive of those of us who write about wine from the Great White North (which is not a euphemism, with the 17 feet of snow accumulated over this winter in my hometown of Quebec City). And if the trend in wine blogging keeps up, we’ll be voting in the World Wine Blog Awards in less time than it takes to say “malolactic fermentation”.