Blame it on Rioja

It was quite a thrill to learn on Friday on my way to work that Blame it on Rioja was nominated for a 2008 Amercian Wine Blog Award for “Best Single Subject Wine Blog.” This is only the second year Tom Wark of Fermentation has administered these awards, and from the looks of it, Mr. Wark is working assiduously to enhance even further the credibility and standards of the awards, as this year he recruited a panel of anonymous judges, presumably wine and or blogging insiders, to ensure that popular nominees are also maintaining a certain amount of editorial rigor.All of which makes it even more of an honor to be chosen to hang with the big dogs.

Okay, so the world of wine blogging is still a new dog run, and one that’s not without its critics, but I suspect that even the snarkiest of print wine journalists have done a few drive bys, if they haven’t already jumped in. It’s people like Tom Wark, and initiatives like the the American Wine Blog Awards, that continue to raise wine blogging’s profile in the popular imagination while at the same time encouraging its practitioners to continue raising the bar of excellence in their own work.

Congratulations fellow nominees (including my friends–and now bitter arch rivals!–Gabriella and Ryan over at Catavino.net); I’m looking forward to spending a little quality time looking over all of your sites and learning more than a few things along the way.

Adrian Murcia
New York City

Click here to vote for Blame it on Rioja today! Votes must be in by Midnight, March 29, 2008

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under General, American Wine Blog Awards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.