Hello World.

This new site is the second generation of NorCalWine. It’s fresh look and range of content reflect the changes which have occurred in the wine market, wine blogging, the internet overall and my own place in the wine world since I established the first site in 2008.

This interface is clean and graphically oriented but flexible for the reader. Content will include blog articles of various lengths, collections of short wine reviews, detailed single-wine reviews, photos, videos, audio interviews and more. There will be a new wine of some sort at least five days per week.

The site will devote a lot of its coverage to wines and wineries of California. However, unlike the previous incarnation, you’ll also see articles about regions and wines from elsewhere in the United States and from around the world. Articles on food and distilled spirits won’t be uncommon.

Change is good

Two elements of NorCalWine.com 1.o won’t reappear. The winery listings, always a pain to maintain, have been made redundant by Google. The calendar of wine events was also too laborious to maintain on my own. I will, however, continue to highlight important upcoming events in which I think you’ll be interested. I’ll do that through articles and the newsletter.

Also gone are RSS feeds which were always buggy. To get regular updates by email, please sign up for the newsletter. [See the sign-up box at the top of the sidebar.] All I need is your email address (which won’t be shared with anyone). You’ll receive one confirmation email right away. Please remember to click “confirm” in that email, otherwise you won’t be subscribed.

One feature I discontinued on the old site but will be trying again here is comments. The amount of spam and the inability of backend tools to stop it had become a nightmare. But I’m on a new platform now and hoping comments go smoothly. It’s nice to read your thoughts.

You may have noticed the url for this site is not NorCalWine.com but rather FredSwan.wine. The new url will always work, but the old will be migrated over too. For now, the old address is still tied to the old site which remains active while I migrate past content which is still relevant.

If you have been kind enough to link to articles on the previous site, I’m afraid those links will soon be broken. If that content is important to you, please send me an email. I’ll prioritize moving it over and give you a permalink.

Support your friendly blogger

Since I took a hiatus from adding content to the old site before launching this one, folks naturally stopped visiting much. Now that things are full-speed ahead again, I’d appreciate your help in spreading the word about this site. If you like what I’m doing, please tell your friends and share the articles with the handy share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Due to changes in the world of web, my plans for monetizing NorCalWine.com 1.0 quickly became obsolete. And, sadly, wine blogging in general remains a pro bono effort for the most part. Yet hours spent creating good, free content don’t contribute to rent payment or cat food. If you’d like to help out a bit from time to time, drop me a few clams via the Donate button in the sidebar. Your contribution, in any amount, will be very gratefully received.

Finally, while I maintain strict impartiality and my reviews/scores cannot be bought by producers, etc., you can totally rent me 🙂  I’m an excellent wine educator, speaker/moderator, tour guide, freelance writer, tasting coach and all-around wine guy. Please see the “About” section for more about my background, credentials and services. If you, your friends, company, magazine, winery or region are interested in my services—or those of the San Francisco Wine School, for whom I do business development—I’d love to hear from you. Click on that little envelope in the upper right to shoot me a direct email.

I hope you enjoy 2.0 and the new content to come.

Cheers,

Fred