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Winners of the Louis Roederer Wine Writing Awards 2012

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Congratulations to the many winners of the Louis Roederer Wine Writing Awards presented tonight in London.

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Whilst the awards that Vrazon helped to create,the Born Digital Wine Awards, recognise the growing talent of content written specifically for online media, it is fair to say that this is not yet the mainstream of wine writing.

Tonight’s categories covered some important areas such as newspaper columnists and wine books that are terribly important ways to reach consumers and hopefully will continue to do so for many years to come.

Of course it was also a pleasure to attend the event to catch up with many good friends, listen to the entertaining Mr Charles Metcalfe, Chair of the Judges, and to enjoy the many Roederer champagnes including a small taste of Cristal 2004.

Here are the winners that were announced tonight:

1. Artistry of Wine – Colin Hampden-White

2. Emerging Wine Writer of the Year – Erika Szymanski (Palate Press)

3. International Online Wine Columnist / Blogger of the Year –  Andrew Jefford

4. International Wine Website of the Year – Peter Liem (www.champagneguide.net)

5. International Wine Publication of the Year – The World of Fine Wine

6. Regional Wine Writer of the Year – Tom Bruce-Gardner (Glasgow Herald)

7. International Wine Book of the Year – Summer in a Glass, Evan Dawson

8. International Wine Columnist of the Year – Michael Fridjohn

9. International Wine Feature Writer of the Year – John Stimpfig

Congratulations to all the winners and the equally worthy shortlisted candidates, particularly to our successful online friends at Palate Press including David Hoenig and Evan Dawson, as well as Peter Liem, flying the flag for online writers.

For full details and shortlists, head over to www.theroedererawards.com

Born Digital for the best online wine content

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What was the best wine article or video that you read in 2010? For many people, the answer is probably something the rest of us have never heard about. It might have escaped our attention, it might have been by someone who doesn’t publish that regularly, or more likely, it was written in a language we do not speak.

Some writers or creators of video, audio, photography and other media, are consistently good. They might get noticed for their overall contribution – such as blog awards that take into account an entire blog’s output over a year. They deserve these awards for their great efforts, but few of us are sufficiently dedicated to compete with them, and even these awards are often limited to single languages or countries.

Unfortunately that means that some of the best content is lost or ignored.

So Gabriella, Ryan and I decided to do something about it, and it took quite a while to work out how we would do it.

If you follow the various projects I am involved in, you may have heard of the Born Digital Wine Awards (or #bdwa). These awards recognise individual pieces of work about wine (initially for articles or videos but we are looking to expand into audio and photography next year) in ANY language, that were specifically created for online publication. We want to showcase the best stuff, wherever it was published, on its own merits (i.e not only if you happened to publish 51 other posts that year), and promote those who are doing something that benefits lots of wine lovers around the world by being available online, hopefully, but not exclusively, free to all.

As well as getting a broader audience for this material, there are great prizes which will include a substantial cash prize for the winners in each category and valuable runner-up prizes too.

SUBMIT YOUR BEST STUFF

This is NOT a popularity contest with votes and canvassing that favours established bloggers. This is a contest for the content creators and so it needs the authors to submit up to 3 of their own articles. If this is YOU, then submit your articles STRAIGHT AWAY as the deadline is 28 February 2011. You cannot nominate others, but we strongly encourage you to dig out your favourites from 2010 and leave them comments, or send them emails, to tell them to participate.

Visit the awards site to read all about the award categories, and the illustrious judging panel (that does not include us), and PLEASE enter your favourite materials. We have already received a great many entries in at least half a dozen different languages, but we’d love to see as many as we can in this launch year.

We hope that by this time next year we will have helped wine lovers to find a treasure trove of new wine content, and be building a way to incentivise, and reward, those who are building and sharing the online wine culture.

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What awards are we talking about?

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If you have read my blog for a while then you’ll have seen some posts on the American Wine Blog Awards and know that for one reason or another I think that they could be improved (in particular that there are plenty of other blogs out there that are not American).

However, the reaction in the wine blogging fraternity to the list of finalists has been rather negative (except for those who qualified, of course!) and concentrating a little more on who DIDN’T qualify rather than who DID.

Here are some reactions:

Jill at Domaine547
Tim at Winecast
EnoBytes

I just wanted to put it on the record that despite my misgivings about the US centric nature of the awards, I think they are a good idea and will help to introduce quality new blogs to a wider audience. I’ve been doing this for some time now and I hadn’t heard of a great percentage of these finalists before.

There is already talk of creating a new award, one that would be broader in scope (not just bloggers) and reach (not just Americans around the world). I applaud the idea, but let’s not take away from the PR efforts Tom Wark at Fermentation is doing and maybe keep those discussions for later?

If you haven’t voted, I do urge you to take a look at the site as there are some very interesting sites in the running and you too might discover a new gem.

All of which reminds me that I MUST update the blog roll with all sorts of new sites and blogs I read regularly. I am still thinking about how I might organise it so any suggestions of sites that should be included (yours?) are still welcome.

Wine Blog Awards

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Okay, the AMERICAN Wine Blog Awards, have now announced the finalists.

There will be lots of sites in everyone’s Readers imploring you to vote for them, and I think you should definitely take a look at the results.

Some of these sites are new to me and I will check them out before voting.

Just for the record, here are the sites in each category that are not 100% US based (as per my previous post) – of course even some of these may well have some US connections (in fact they all do):

Best Wine Blog Writing
ON THE WINE TRAIL IN ITALY

Best Single Subject Wine Blog
CATAVINO

Best Winery Blog
LA GRAMIERE

Best Wine Blog Graphics
ON THE WINE TRAIL IN ITALY

Best Wine Review Blog
[none]

Best Wine Podcast of VideoBlog
[none]

Best Wine Business Blog
[none]

Best Overall Wine Blog
[none]

Blog Awards

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You may already be already aware of this, but Tom Wark at Fermentation established the American Wine Blog Awards in 2007, and nominations are now open for the 2008 awards. I think this is an excellent initiative that we should all support.

This is not a post to canvas for votes or nominations, I am pretty sure my interests are far too esoteric to appeal to appeal to a broad range of readers, but rather it is an appeal to broaden the reach of the awards themselves.

The categories are:
Best Wine Blog
Best Single Subject Wine Blog
Best Wine Review Blog
Best Wine Business Blogging
Best Winery Blog
Best Wine Podcast or Video Blog
Best Wine Blog Graphics

These awards are already very popular and generate a lot of nominations and votes, but the vast majority of these are from reades and bloggers in the USA. If you are reading my blog I assume you have at least a passing interest in wine and I know from my trusty Google Analytics account that a large percentage of you are from outside the US. If so, head on down to the awards pages and nominate your own favourite blogs from all over the world. The only provisos are that they are blogs about wine, written in English and updated regularly.

As Tom will know, I think that the term “American” in the title is misleading, but more on that another day (it seems surly to go into that now).

Let’s spread the word and make this competition, including the nominations, votes and awards, even more representative of wine blog readers around the world.

Thanks Tom!