2 August 2006 - 20:16W&S Best Of Issue

Wine & Spirits has published a Best Of Special Issue for Fall, 2006. and they included a short list of Best Websites. The only blog that gets any mention is The Red Wine Haiku Review which is a worthy mention but it’s a shame that they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge some of the other great wine blogs, such as Fermentations or Vinography.

They also fail to list any of the larger comprehensive wine reference sites like Appellation America, Wine Lover’s Page, Wikipedia: Wine or Wine Pros. The two general wine reference sites they do include are JancisRobinson.com and Tom Cannavan’s wine-pages, the first of which charges $119 per year for the bulk of it’s content and the latter of which is based in the UK (hence, any regional content is likely to be of no interest to US’uns).

I decided to subscribe based on a discussion thread on the wine forum, Harrington’s West Coast Wine Net in which someone seeking recommendations for a wine magazine was overwhelming told that it was the best wine magazine available. By a coincidence, I’m sure, that same site was listed as the Best Web Wine Forum (and no, there weren’t any honorable mentions).

Could it be that they feel threatened by anything that remotely could be considered competition given that their web site sucks? I like W&S for their editorial content and it is well designed — they publish a great magazine but they obviously haven’t figured out the value of the world wide web.