Various Goings On in the World Wine Web

The fluidity of the world wide web is only surpassed, perhaps, by that of wine. OK, I’m reaching, here. It just sounded good.

Yet, there is something true to that idea. Things can move fast, and in sometimes suprising ways, on the Web.

For instance, thanks to a timely Tweet from Tim at Winecast, I found out that Amazon is supposed to add wine to its expanding catalogue of goods within weeks. We’ve come a long way from the world’s largest online bookstore.

Tim points out that, interestingly enough,

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Would you like a little science with your wine?

After I posted about the incidence of cork taint in wines, and started a discussion on Open Wine Consortium about the subject, I did a fair bit of searching for serious sources about the subject – and also about other defects in wines and various types of closures. (A fair bit of that research, by the way, was done through Ablegrape, which allows you to pinpoint scientific articles, among other advantages.)

Along the way, I stumbled on the web site for

Got corked wine? We want your data.

A few days ago, I started a discussion on the Open Wine Consortium regarding the actual prevalence of cork taint in wines. It followed a previous blog post on data from the Société des alcools du Québec, our very own state monopoly, that suggests cork taint should be present in well below 1% of all wine sold.

Quite a discussion that has been. Fiery at times, even. The lack of reliable data was regularly cited – and not really answered.

That’s when we got a suggestion from

Wine Bloggers, getting (it) together

There are a lot of conversations going on on the internet, a lot of communities coming together through blogs and Web 2.0 sites, a lot of people talking and learning about subjects of common interests through social media. But in the end, there is nothing yet that can truly replace face to face meetings and live conversation.

This is why, in August and October, there will be not one but two Wine Blogger Conferences that will allow wine bloggers from around Europe and the Americas to come together and discuss issues that matter to them and to the wine world. Oh yeah. And to taste wines and have great meals together – something that still can’t really be done over the Internet.

The first one,