Writing About Barefoot Wines for Nomacorc

Here's my latest piece for the Nomacorc, a short piece on Barefoot Wines and the need for a better appreciation of everyday table wines in the United States. Check it out! The piece also features the freelance work debut of Bella, current dog intern here at Benito Wine Reviews.

I realize the blog has been a little quiet, but I've been busier than ever writing freelance as well as technical writing at the day job. But fear not... I have many reviews to release over this summer. Stay tuned!

Welcome, New Readers!

If you're seeing this blog for the first time, it's probably because of a Canadian study about analyzing content on wine blogs using new software called Leximancer. My wine blog was one of five chosen for a study published in the International Journal of Wine Business Research. The other four blogs used in the analysis were Vinography, Dr. Vino, 1WineDude, and Wannabe Wino.

Becca over at The Academic Wino blog wrote up a nice summary of the paper. Be sure to check it out as well as her many other fascinating articles about the world of wine research.

Check out the links to the left for the quick intro to my blog. Favorite Posts is self-explanatory, Press covers various media appearances and awards, and Other Publications goes into my freelance work for a number of different websites.

Welcome to Benito's Wine Reviews, and I hope you enjoy it!

"Where've you been, Ben?"

The scene is a dentist's office in 1993. Dana, the dental hygienist, asks me, "Where've you been, Ben?" and laughs. Even I, a fan of puns, cringe slightly.

It was a joke that I heard roughly once a month for five years as I dealt with the regular schedule of tightening braces. Towards the end I could actually sleep through the procedure. It was also a pediatric practice, so I was the only patient driving himself to appointments.

I thought about this phrase recently because I feel like I've been neglecting the wine blog while at the same time doing more writing than I've ever done in my life. Here's what's going on in addition to my previous piece on working with Microsoft and the day job that keeps Bella fed.

I've picked up a freelance gig writing for Snooth.com, the company that has previously sponsored my press junkets to New York and Lodi. My first article for them is about 5 Wines for Prime Rib. I'm looking forward to more work with them in the future.

I'm also writing content for Nomacorc, the synthetic cork factory I visited back in February. I've written several pieces for their new blog, and the two that have been published are interviews with winemakers about five wines they love. One from Michael Honig and one from Ben Mayo.

This main site will always be the clearing house for everything that I write, and as I rapidly approach the ten year mark I am committed to continuing reviews of wines here at BWR. There are many great wines awaiting review downstairs, and I know that many more will be coming in the next two months during the holiday rush.

Thanks to everyone for reading, and be sure to check out my freelance pieces!

Birthday Weekend

This weekend, I turned 38. I was in Nashville to attend the wedding of a cousin a decade my junior, but I also got the opportunity to take a road trip with Bella and hang out with my buddy Paul for the first time in quite a while. I received a lot of kind Facebook birthday wishes over the past couple of days, with many questions about which wines I consumed. And the answer is zero.

Instead, I enjoyed great cocktails prepared by people other than me. Between the wedding and a dinner at my grandparents' house, Paul invited me to my first visit to The Patterson House, a small speakeasy with an eclectic range of spirits and recipes as well as a list of rules that must be followed. I had a lot of fun with the Summer Negroni and would share pictures, but alas, they discourage the use of cell phones at the very dark bar and it makes for a more pleasant experience.

Back at Paul & Anna's place, I was treated to martinis. I overhead a conversation about what size to fix, and discovered that they had developed an internal standard of sizes depending on mood and occasion. As I am currently working on a lot of process standard documentation in the day job, I was happy to lay out the proportions for them in proper retro style. Enjoy!

Slightly better version with adjusted recipe... I can never quit tinkering with these things.

Day Off

Normally I have a post every Monday, but I'm taking a day off. And by taking a day off, I mean to say that I still have my full-time day job as well as multiple writing gigs with deadlines and requirements of their own.

One of those assignments has had me running around Memphis all weekend, eating at different restaurants and in this shot, catching a quick snapshot of the Elvis Presley statue just west of Beale Street. I am, in the words of the King, "Taking Care of Business" to keep the lights on here at Casa de Benito. Back in a day or two.

Microsoft OneNote for the Mac

As part of my involvement with the Microsoft Office 365 group, I'm getting some great opportunities to network with other Office users around the country. I've particularly enjoyed conversations about math and Excel in my day job (quality assurance), but that doesn't fit too well with what I write about here. However, I was really excited at the recent announcement about the release of OneNote for the Mac desktop. Even better, it's free.

As faithful readers know, I've been an Apple user since 1983, though I've also been using Windows, OS/2, various flavors of Unix, and other more obscure operating systems throughout, and I've been using Mac versions of Microsoft applications for decades now. OneNote is a note taking application that syncs with your free Microsoft account. What this means is that you can edit the same document on your desktop, iPhone, iPad, or even via the web on any computer connected to the internet. On top of that, you can share documents for collaborative editing with other people. It's not like Word or PowerPoint, but is more of a virtual whiteboard where you can jot notes, post photos, highlight items, make to-do lists, etc.

Here's an example of a way I was able to use OneNote in my blogging life to build my Monday post. I took photos with my iPhone and added a photo of the bottles to a note. Later when doing the initial sips, I jotted simple tasting details on the desktop app. I got the idea for the Portuguese mussels and added a shopping list, which I was later able to check off on my phone while at the grocery store. Then I was able to take the photo of the dish with the iPhone and later have a basic set of jottings with which to build the bigger article.

My desktop MacMini is upstairs, the laptop tends to live downstairs (or travels with me when I leave town), and the iPhone lives in my pocket. I can easily work on any note wherever I am and not have to constantly e-mail documents back and forth to myself.

Once you get used to working with the program, it's as easy as dealing with an index card, except that the index card can be multimedia (music, hyperlinks, photos, video, etc.) and is backed up in cloud storage, so you don't have to worry about leaving your tasting notes on the restaurant table or accidentally throwing away that pile of envelopes that contained important musings. I've lost physical tasting notes and photos in the past, and look forward to using OneNote for a more modern and efficient workflow.

This is one way to use OneNote for wine blogging, but in my group I've gotten to hear about how people use this for taking notes in college, handling schedules for children, building sermons, and coordinating weddings. My parents have installed it on all of their Apple devices, and Mom and Dad are already testing it out with the to-do lists and having a blast.

Like I said, it's completely free on all platforms, so give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

Bella: Week One

For a stretch of one year and one month, the house was empty of dogs for the first time since 1998. Though many offers came along, I wasn't really in a good place to take in another fifteen year commitment, but a unique opportunity presented itself: an extended dogsitting gig for my buddy Paul.

Bella is no stranger to this blog, having appeared as a model with a Rob Roy and with a bottle of Barefoot. She and I have always gotten along great together, even though Paul has done the hard part of raising her, training her, and getting through the chewy furniture-destroying phase.

What type of dog is Bella? Some sort of Jack Russell mix, though I've always thought that she looked like she belonged in an old Three Stooges, Marx Brothers, or Little Rascals film. She'd awkwardly tug on a tablecloth and reveal the knuckleheads hiding under the table, or would chase alongside the kids on bikes, or bark and alert her owner that shenanigans were afoot.

I've settled back into the routine of life with a dog more quickly than I thought I would, though she's so easy to handle that it requires zero effort on my part. She puts up with my snoring, doesn't mind the piles of wine samples scattered around the living room, and curls up into an adorable little ball on the end of the bed at night.

Welcome, Bella! I hope you enjoy your stay.

Office 365 Project

I get a lot of offers to sample things that aren't wine. When it's a gadget that I think is useful or a book that might interest you, the readers, I'm happy to take a look at it. There are plenty of other offers that I turn down either out of ethical considerations or simple good taste. When I was approached to test drive Microsoft's Office 365, I was pretty excited. Despite being a committed Apple hardware user since 1982, I have been using Windows and Microsoft applications on a regular basis in school and work since the late 80s. Office 365 provides for things like cloud storage and access to the Office applications on tablets and smart phones.

When I started the wine blog years ago, I wanted to keep it simple. I'd built websites from scratch and chose to use the free Blogspot software because I didn't want the blog to feel like work. Years later, I discovered that to get ahead and keep things organized, and to build my web presence as a writer, that I really needed to treat it like a business. For most of the past nine years, I've taken notes on scraps of paper, consulted physical prints of tasting notes, and then later taken everything upstairs to type it all up.

On my recent post about Morellino di Scansano, I tried using some of the Office 365 functions for the first time. The digital tasting notes and region information came via a USB stick, which instead of dumping on the computer, I instead uploaded to SkyDrive. While tasting the wine, I could grab the PowerPoint presentation with maps and everything on my iPhone, and when it was time to jot down notes, I could utilize One Note.

Instead of jotting down tasting notes that might get lost (and trust me, that has happened, especially when that one envelope with scribbled details gets tossed out with the junk mail), I was able to type up a note, take a photo of the bottle, and sync it so that later I could access it from my desktop computer, my laptop, or elsewhere with my iPhone.

In the interest of efficiency and the striving for kaizen (continuous improvement), I'm looking forward to using these tools to take advantage of opportunities like working on the blog while sitting in line at the DMV or being able to recycle the piles of printed PR material and instead keep everything neatly organized in one central, digital, online repository.

It's obviously tough to change your habits, but because I work in Quality Assurance, I'm excited about scrapping my old processes in search of new ones that save time, eliminate excess steps, and allow me to spend more time focusing on the wine and the writing rather than digging through a pile of papers looking for that one tech sheet or trying to remember which camera got that one good label shot. Over the months I'll be going into some more detail about these process changes, and I look forward to sharing with you what works and what doesn't as I strive for improvement. I'm hoping soon to do an entire review from start to finish, using nothing but the iPhone and the various Office 365 applications. I'm not there yet, but my goal is that I can slip it in without anyone noticing a difference. Perhaps I already have...

Note: This software was provided as a sample for review. There is no financial compensation for this test drive, and all opinions are my own.

Tools of the Trade

I'm taking a moment during this dark and rainy night to give another little behind-the-scenes look at how this blog is made. On a recent weekend I gathered together my cameras that I use to take photos for this blog. The Fuji S5000 was retired as soon as I purchased the Nikon D40 in 2008, and the Nikon DSLR remains my primary camera for taking pictures of bottles of wine. The Minolta has not been used in years but I often take the lens off to do microphotography. That's more about an enthusiasm for science than anything wine or food related.

The little pocket Canon camera has been my go-to when either convenience or social courtesy has not permitted me to drag around the big Nikon and the additional telephoto lens.

When it comes to taking notes, I still do pen and paper using whatever will fit in my pocket. I've made custom notebooks before, used moleskines or other commercially bound journals, and many times just write in the free space of pre-printed tasting sheets. While traveling, I rely on my 2009-era MacBook, and most photo editing and seated writing occurs on my 2012 MacMini with the huge screen.

But last month I added another tool to my belt. My parents gave me an iPhone for my birthday (which was used to take the above photo, though captions were of course done in Photoshop). I'm using a white iPhone 5c, and the photos from the past two blog posts were taken with it. They're not the best pictures I've taken, but I'm still getting used to it. However, it's convenient to have one device that takes decent photos, allows you to take notes, and even publish to Facebook/Twitter/Blogger/etc. Oh, and even make a phone call when needed.

I'm not going to get rid of the Nikon, because I rely too much on specific shutter speed and f-stops and other settings. And the laptop is far too useful for many other applications, so I'm hanging on to it. I'll find a good home for the little Canon, and will continue to find apps and workflows that allow for the use of the iPhone in public settings where I don't feel like dragging around twenty pounds of electronics.

At the end of the day, I'm sure I'm still going to keep scribbling notes on envelopes and scraps of paper, and most of my pictures will still be taken with the Nikon and edited on the MacMini. But I'm forcing myself to use the iPhone for all of its amazing capabilities, and hope to provide more dynamic coverage outside of my kitchen in the future.

Farewell The Roommate with the NV Lenoble Cuvée Intense

After living together since 1997, The Roommate has finally gotten married. We stuck together for well over a decade through two dogs, three different residences, and many ups and downs. We're practically family after having spent most of our adult lives with each other. She's striking out on a new life on her own, and while I wish her and her new husband the best, I know that we'll keep in touch.

At the wedding, it was a pleasure to meet up with The Roommate's family, my friends Paul, Anna, Sally, and Terry, and to have the opportunity to introduce Julia to this sort of extended family that I have in West Tennessee.

While The Roommate has been mentioned on this blog from time to time, she doesn't drink (though loved opening boxes of samples and looking at the labels) and her wedding concluded with a strictly dry reception. I had no problem with that, as it's not that uncommon here in the South, and I was respectful of the wishes of the church. After I told the new groom to keep The Roommate fed regularly and supplied with Diet Cokes, Julia and I returned to Memphis. Upon getting home and taking off the suit, I realized that I had the perfect opportunity to pour a glass of proper Champagne and reflect upon the years.

I first had a vintage Lenoble served by Mike Whitfield when he hosted my 35th birthday party. Lenoble was founded by Armand-Raphaël Graser in 1915 and is a strictly independent, family-operated Champagne house. It's the best of both worlds: the spirit of a grower Champagne with the dignity of a recognized house.

NV Lenoble Cuvée Intense
Champagne, France
40% Chardonnay from Chouilly, Grand Cru from the Côte des Blancs
30% Pinot Noir from Bisseuil, Premier Cru from the Montagne de Reims
30% Pinot Meunier from Damery
$40, 12% abv.

Golden delicious apple and Bartlett pear flavors, light white fruit aromas and a clean, crisp finish. Beautiful acidity and medium bubbles. Only the slightest hint of toast on top. Excellent balance all around, and a very dignified Champagne. I love the blend of grapes here, particularly the hearty dose of Pinot Meunier. Highly recommended for a great quality-price ratio.

Cheers one more time to the happy couple, and best wishes for the future!

Note: This wine was provided as a sample.

Advertising Notes, and Happy Tempranillo Day!

Advertising on this site has always been minimal, and I've primarily just used the Amazon Associates program with links in the sidebars. They're a well known company and millions of people feel comfortable shopping online with them. However, with the launch of Amazon Wine, I've got an opportunity to solve a big problem I've had in the past. Lots of readers e-mail me asking where they can buy a wine featured here, or if I can sell them a bottle. I've always been hesitant to link to specific online retailers, mainly because there's nothing in it for me and I can't personally vouch for or against them. For right now, Amazon can ship wine to the following states: California, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming and the District of Columbia.

I'm going to play around with the ads and figure out the best way to incorporate them without looking obnoxious. I will continue to link the name of the wine to the specific winery or American distributor whenever possible. My advice to all of my readers is to always support your local wine shop first--if you can't find a specific wine, they should be able to suggest a good substitute. If that doesn't work, check the link to the winery and see if they ship to your state. And if that doesn't work or it's not a domestic wine, follow the links at the bottom of the post and help support your humble wineblogger. If I start seeing positive results, I'll take the time to go back and add purchase links to older posts.

UPDATE Nov. 11, 2012: Looks like Amazon is not paying referrals on wine. Goodbye links!

Now, back to the wine!

Thursday, November 8, 2012 is International Tempranillo Day, coinciding with International Stout Day, which I had to pass on because I stick to either wine or beer--I've found the palate doesn't work with a combination. Also because there's only so much time for tasting between getting home from work and going to bed.

The most notorious wine PR holiday is the Beaujolais Nouveau release, but lots of others have been started like Champagne Day or the lesser known Öküzgözü Day on April 4 in celebration of Turkish grapes. I was happy to join in on this one because of my love of Spanish wines. They are generally tasty, food friendly, and inexpensive: a perfect trio.

On top of this, I also received four Cavas, which I'll be writing about later. Stay tuned!

2011 Tapeña Tempranillo
100% Tempranillo
Tierra de Castilla, Spain
$10, 13.5% abv.
The nose has a touch of cinnamon and black plum. On the palate it's rich and fruity with firm tannins. This is a great middle of the week wine that will go well with casual burgers and pizza fare, and is a great bargain at a sawbuck.

2009 Vaza Rioja Crianza
100% Tempranillo
Rioja, Spain
$15, 13.3% abv.
This is my favorite of the three, and yes, I'm a little biased towards Rioja. The profile here is full of black cherry with a hint of eucalyptus. Mild tannins and balanced fruit and black tea on the tongue. Serve with roast pork and grilled vegetables and be in heaven.

2010 Valdubón Cosecha
100% Tempranillo
Ribera del Duero, Spain
$15, 14% abv.
This wine is pretty young, as right now it's full of cassis and oak with really firm tannins. However, I think it should be great in two years and I'd love to serve it with braised oxtails.

Note: These wines were received as samples.

New Article at Serious Eats

Today marks the publication of my fourth article at Serious Eats and the one that I'm most proud of so far. My goal as Memphis Correspondent is to show the rest of the world that there's more to our cuisine than just ribs, pulled pork, and fried peanut butter banana sandwiches. At the same time, I care a lot about our local BBQ restaurants that attract people from around the world.

Since this is how I tend to order when I'm escorting a visitor on yet another Memphis BBQ marathon, I chose to focus on delicious non-pork menu items at some of those establishments with the 8 Best Non-Pork Dishes at Memphis BBQ Joints.

Also, congratulations to the winners of the 2012 Wine Blog Awards! I didn't win my category but I was in great company and hope you check out all of the winners and finalists. Lots of them attended the Wine Bloggers Conference in Portland, Oregon where the awards were announced. There are plenty of recaps and hundreds of tasting notes waiting to be read.

The 2012 Wine Blog Awards

I've been nominated as one of the finalists for the 2012 Wine Blog Awards in the category "Best Wine Reviews on a Wine Blog". Since the awards were introduced in 2007 I don't think I've ever been a finalist, but someone usually submits this site for consideration. I'd like to thank the panel of industry and wine blogger judges that selected my blog out of the now thousands of English language wine blogs online.

Want to show your support for Benito's Wine Reviews and some other great blogs? Get out and vote! Only eight categories, and you don't have to create a login or give an e-mail address or anything like that. Thanks, and cheers!

Welcome Serious Eats Readers!

Welcome first time readers, and I hope you enjoy my site. Check out my favorite posts for some of the hits from the past seven years, or zoom through the topic links at the bottom left. Despite the name of the blog, I write a lot about food and many other subjects.

Long time readers might be asking themselves, "What's going on?" A couple of months ago the food website SeriousEats.com was looking to hire writers in various cities to cover specific local topics. Memphis was not on that list, but I made a persuasive case and after some test posts and writing/photography samples, I landed a paid gig as the Memphis Correspondent. I've been an avid reader of the site for years, and am excited to write the occasional article for them, like my first one on...

Where to Eat Fried Catfish in Memphis: 6 Spots to Try

This won't really impact Benito's Wine Reviews much, since I'll be writing about local food and restaurants, topics I don't cover a lot here, and they have their own wine and cocktail writers. While I hope this brings in new readers, I'm primarily doing it for the experience of writing with an editor, writing with space constraints, and taking on assignments. I'll keep to the regular schedule of three posts a week here, though when something is published on Serious Eats I'll probably just make a small post with a link to the article. I'm really looking forward to flexing some different writing muscles and getting the opportunity to share some local favorites with readers throughout the country and around the world.

Spring Cleaning

Lately I've been spending some afternoons in the backyard, enjoying the last cool afternoons before our dear River City turns into a sweaty, mosquito-infested furnace. The blue jays are getting territorial, there's a massive raccoon that crawls along the neighbor's fence, and I train the Nikon on a spot of daisy fleabane that seemingly popped up overnight. I assume that means it's time to break out the weed eater and lawn mower and begin grooming the grounds on a weekly basis.

This also means that it's time for spring cleaning at Casa de Benito as well as on the blog. Today I went through the links at the left, and thankfully, I only had to remove a couple of sites. I normally only remove a site when it hasn't updated for more than six months or has been turned into an Amway site or something more serious, like using a font that annoys me. Next up is scrubbing the list from Winebloggers In The South. I haven't found that many new sites recently, but I haven't been looking as hard. I'm certainly still interested, so if you're a... wineblogger in the south... feel free to let me know.

I'm not going to go back through all of my posts on this blog and update the links. There's a lot of dead ones back there, but some wineries change their website structure frequently, some have gone out of business or have been purchased by other companies or have other complications. In other instances I've linked to a recipe or a website that no longer exists. It happens, and if such a link is crucial to your particular needs, copy said link and learn how to use the Wayback Machine.

I've got some other fun backend stuff to deal with this weekend. There's some spaghetti code that needs to be cleaned up, I need to take a look at everything and see if I want to keep the same general layout, go with one of the new Blogger templates, or start learning how to utilize the power of HTML5 to make this site a more pleasant reading experience on everything from iPhones to massive widescreen monitors. So there might be a few coding glitches here and there, but at the end of spring cleaning we'll all be far happier.

Macbeth: 1999-2011

"The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of."
--Macbeth, Act II, scene i

Our dear fox-red Labrador Macbeth passed away on Monday after some lingering health problems. He will be deeply missed.

Unlike the gloomy Thane of Cawdor, Mac was full of Falstaffian appetites and good humor. He was a dog with a loud voice who genuinely enjoyed hearing himself bark, was a strong swimmer, and was covered in muscle but as gentle as a lamb. Even when he was just a hamster-sized pup, he was always hungry and anxious to climb behind the couch, under the TV cabinet, or work himself into any inconvenient spot he could find, grunting along the way. He was quick to make friends with strange people and dogs, and as long as you didn't mind some slobber, everyone adored him.

The Roommate brought him home in 1999, after the two Labs owned by her parents had a romantic liaison and whelped a litter of a dozen pups. They were in all shades from white to black, but Mac was the only fox red out of the group. The Roommate had also been the driving force behind the rescue of Wolfgang a year earlier, as well as Mac's mother Goldie being adopted by my parents. In turn, such exposure encouraged my brother and my friend Paul to get dogs after years of living without pets. We all thank her for bringing so many special animals into our lives.

Mac had such a broad personality that he acquired a ton of nicknames over the years. It started with Haystack and El Fuego and Dozer, and developed into Maccy Dog and Mr. Jowls and a host of others that are slightly embarrassing to list here. Like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, one name was not enough for him.

Over the years I used him for a few shots of wine bottles, in part because he was so photogenic but in part because he'd schnorfle around the table looking for dropped morsels of food or stray ice cubes. Guests at the house got used to that massive head poking up from under an arm or between the legs. And when it was clear that no treats were going to be handed out from the table, he'd groan and flop over on the floor, covering a substantial part of the linoleum.





He was a handsome lad, and remains in our hearts and thoughts forever. Until we meet again, you're a good boy, Mac.

Blog Headers Art Roundup Extravaganza

Since my last roundup of headers in 2009, I figured it was time to gather some of the hits and misses of the past two years. After that post, I was messing around with a lot of different options (as always, click on the images for bigger versions).

Based on Beeman's Gum, I loved this August 2009 design but after a few weeks it didn't seem to be a good fit for the site:



While I have a great appreciation for the De Stijl artwork of Piet Mondrian, there's a reason why this one never saw the front page. Mostly a sketch to figure out something new, which is a good way to stimulate the old frontal lobes:



The Schwa Corporation version wasn't much better, but it was October and I considered putting this up for Halloween:



This October 2009 blue header stayed up for a while, and I still like it, based loosely on the 1967-1974 SAAB logo from Sweden:



One of my all time favorites, and I'm still proud of it... the beautiful January 2010, five year anniversary, art deco, aviation-themed header, reminiscent of The Rocketeer:



In September 2010 I briefly played around with a Victorian theme, but couldn't get it to work. It was old fashioned in the wrong way, and the longer I played with it, the more it looked like a bordello sign from an old Western:



I scrapped it all and decided to go bigger and bolder with a 1950s look, but this wasn't quite right....



Shift the hue a bit and hey, that looks better. This and the argyle pattern stayed up for a long time to the love and disgust of many:



Finally time to retire the slant and argyle... No, we're not going to use the look of a 1990s 'zine, though if this had been made into a movie it would have starred Ben Stiller, Winona Ryder, or Bridget Fonda. Perhaps all of them:



I flirted with the idea of the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign, but really, it needs more bats. I'm determined to come back to this one some day. I'm really happy about the jaunty star on top of the "i" in "reviews":



Finally settled on the look of a 1940s-era Saturday Evening Post that's been scratched and scuffed and banged around for 70 years:

News and Updates

Happy birthday to Wolfgang, who turns 12 this summer. Don't know the exact date, just that he was born in June or July back in 1998. Some say that he's merely the last in a long string of random pairings among stray mutts. Others claim that his mother was a coyote and his father was the western wind. Either way he's been a faithful member of the household lo these dozen years.

* * *

I've done a bit of housecleaning here at old BWR, cleaning up some dead links on the left and making a few tiny design changes. Some of the sites listed in my Memphis and National/World blogrolls have died off or have changed URLs, so those have been updated. And just so everyone knows, I'm not going to delete the link to your site if you go on vacation for a week. In my experience I've found that if a site hasn't posted in four months, it's probably dead and gone.

Speaking of other blogs, I'm still maintaining a lengthy list over at BWR's sister site, Winebloggers in the South. There are about 45 sites listed there, and while I rarely post new content there, I have a few brief profiles of newly listed sites. (And I'm still looking for wine blogs from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, so drop me a line if you hear of any.)

A new feature here: static pages. This is something I've always wanted to see implemented in the Blogger software, and while it was rolled out earlier this year I'm just now noticing it. Unlike regular blog posts, these are undated informational pages that will be linked at the top of the page or on the sidebar, where mine currently reside. I might move them later, or incorporate a graphic of some sort, but for now I've made three: Sample Policy (what kind of products I'm interested in reviewing, and a standard disclaimer), Press (interviews with me as well as other media mentions), and Favorite Posts. I'm most excited about that last one--this is my 820th post, and while I've tagged the archives with keywords, it's still a lot to dig through. If you're new to this blog, I've picked out some of my favorite past posts, including a bunch of the weird and funny cooking stories. Anyone up for frog legs?

If you use Blogger/Blogspot and are interested in creating static pages like this, here's an introduction.

Winebloggers In The South

After five years of blogging about wine, one steps back and wonders what to do next. Obviously the main site is important and isn't going away, but there is a desire for something more. And in lieu of trophy wives and sports cars, I decided to build a secondary blog. (Note to companies that promote trophy wives and sports cars: yes, I'll accept samples for review!)

Winebloggers In The South or WITS is intended primarly as a set of links for, well, winebloggers in the south. I built this because it didn't already exist. There are lists out there containing most of the thousand English language wine blogs (and trust me, I've seen nearly all of them in the research phase), and winebloggers scribbling away in the various states that aren't California or New York tend to link some of their nearby fellow bloggers, but I wanted a site that would focus on Southerners.

Do I think that those of us in the South are better wine writers? Not necessarily, but I feel that we have a unique perspective combined with a rich literary history and a cuisine that can be both rewarding and frustrating when it comes to fermented grape beverages. There's also something to be said for the "art through adversity" angle: it's easy to be a wine lover in California, but harder in "flyover country". Get far enough away from a major metropolitan area and there's a good chance you're the only wine fan in your neighborhood or social circle. We have to put up with weird laws left over from Prohibition on top of our weird laws left over from the Civil War. We have to combat ignorant stereotypes about wine in our communities while simultaneously fighting ignorant stereotypes about the South around outsiders. Above all we really want to share our love of wine, in our own distinct voices and with our own diverse perspectives. I'm hoping to learn things like how wine fits in with the Caribbean fusion cuisine of Florida, or in a beer and cocktail-focused city like New Orleans.

I'm looking to include winebloggers who currently live and write in the states listed: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Why these? I picked the states that say "y'all" and swapped Kentucky for Oklahoma. So far I've found sites from all of the states except for Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana--there's bound to be some out there, and I'm hoping that those bloggers or their readers will contact me and let me know.

Other reasons for doing this:

• I really want to highlight some cool blogs I've found, and my list of links was getting unwieldy.
  
• I want to stand up for the idea that yes, Southerners can know what they're talking about when it comes to wine. We also wear shoes and have indoor plumbing, despite what popular culture tells you.
  
• It's an experiment in branding and social networking and other stuff. I'm tracking hits and responses and links from day one, which might be of use in future wine blog studies. If the whole site is a failure at the very least I can leave it up as a set of links to great blogs. And by the way, it's really hard to design something "Southern" without resorting to the Confederacy, symbols of a specific state or football team, or something else that might cause problems.
  
• I can do profiles on some of these sites, I can post oddities that might not fit here on BWR, or I can just ignore the thing for weeks at a time. Again, the primary purpose is as a list.
  
• My greatest hope is that it promotes cross communication between various WITS. Like I said, in this part of the country it's very easy to feel like you're all alone in your wine appreciation. And just in the short time since I've launched this project I've found that a bunch of these folks from Georgia and Texas are pretty friendly and are way more active on the social networking front than I am. The more we talk to each other, share ideas, and link one another, the better we all fare when it comes to the broader enterprise of wineblogging.

Cheers, y'all!

P.S. Yes, it's been two weeks since I actually reviewed a wine on "Benito's Wine Reviews". Fear not! Next week is mostly wine!

Benito vs. Poland: Polmos Bialystok Żubrówka

Yet another Eastern European treasure thanks to Dave R.! I first tried this a couple of years ago at his mom's house and he recently gave me the remainder of the bottle, with a few ounces left. Brought in from Germany, this is the authentic Polish liquor. More on that in a bit.

Żubrówka is a Polish rye vodka flavored with buffalo grass. (As you can see in the photo, this company includes a stalk of the grass inside the bottle for decorative purposes.) It has a wonderful aroma to it--not necessarily fresh green grass, but more the scent of a grassy field in autumn when most of it is brown. There's a powerful lavender aroma, tinged with vanilla and almond. Despite being so fragrant, it is mild and smooth and goes down easily. I can't possibly imagine how you might mix this for a cocktail, but it is very lovely on its own. Really just half a shot is perfect--you can sit back and sniff it for a while before slowly sipping the barely sweet vodka.

If you haven't seen a bottle like this recently, well, there's a reason for that. The authentic product shown here has been illegal in the US since 1978 due to trace amounts of coumarin (which occurs naturally in the grass), but like absinthe, a separate version that conforms to FDA regulations has been introduced to the US market. There are fierce arguments in the Polish-American community over these new products; I don't know enough about the issue to speak definitively on it.

Also... The bison is a symbol of the American prairie, right? What's it doing on a strange Polish vodka? There's also a European species of bison, the rare wisent. It was nearly eradicated between WWI and WWII, with less than 50 animals left in captivity and none in the wild. Since then there have been efforts to rebuild the population. For a similar tale, take note of the aurochs, the ancestor of our modern cattle and valuable domesticated food source for the past 8,000 years. The last one died out in 1627.

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Quick Note About the New Rules

Thanks to the new FTC regulations concerning bloggers, I will begin posting disclaimers when I've received a bottle of wine, a book, or other product for review. A lot of the wines featured here arrived as free samples--I've never promised a positive review or even that I'd write about it. Nor have I ever received compensation or other gifts in exchange for positive reviews. All of the winemakers and public relations companies that I've dealt with have been professional and above board. While I haven't made big public statements about this, I do have a strong sense of ethics that has not been called into question in the nearly five years I've been doing this.

I haven't previously mentioned disclosure in posts because I think it looks clunky (imagine every movie review including a statement about who paid for the tickets, or the precise contents of the gift bag given at a premiere). It states right there below my photo that I accept samples for review. The decision handed down today only concerns new media--blogging, tweeting, etc. Old media writers are not impacted. There's a lot of confusion about this new policy, and the FTC has not made it clear what the precise requirements are for disclosure.

So here goes: at the moment I am writing this from my friend Paul's house. I'm currently enjoying a Coke Zero from his fridge. One of the freebies offered to me during my stay over here is access to the food and beverages in the kitchen. The Coke Zero was offered without expectation and will not impact my opinion of the quality of Paul's house should I choose to write about it in the future. The soft drink is crisp and somewhat bitter, with a flavor that is closer to Coke Classic than Diet Coke. Marketed at guys who don't want the calories but who might view Diet Coke as being a "female beverage", Coke Zero was introduced in 2004 and is sweetened with acesulfame potassium and aspartame.