The idea of a wine of the month has different meanings to different people.

For my dad, that’s probably whatever box wine Costco has on sale. That’s fine, but not really my cup of tea if you know what I mean, no matter how much I like Bronco Wine Company or Franzia.

For my wife and I, it’s probably a reasonably priced bottle from a recent vintage available winery direct, or as part of one of my clubs.

For my business partner a wine of the month is probably something he bought a decade ago and has stored for and meticulously cared for in the time since.

I think we can all guess who is drinking the highest quality wine, but overall I’m sure we can all be happy with our choices. Lastly, if you’re looking to have some wine delivered straight to your front door, I hope you give my monthly wine club a try.

It seems that every year the gift basket business gets bigger and bigger. From corporate gift baskets to those of us who simply don’t know exactly what to buy for our loved one’s…..gift baskets offer a real alternative and the industry is growing as a result.

While I can appreciate that every business (like every consumer) has the ability and certainly the right to make their own decisions about which products to include in their gift baskets, I always wonder when I see exactly the same wines included in gift basket after gift basket. How is that providing value and adding a level of interest for your customers?

I might be biased, but I think we’ve done an outstanding job with our gift baskets at Uncorked Ventures. Yes, we’re at the upper end of the price spectrum, but the quality of products are consistent with that. Personally, I’d rather receive good value while paying a bit more rather than paying less and getting wine and food which is available at my local grocery store.

If you’re starting to think of holiday gifts, which many people are already here in September, why not consider giving wine gifts this holiday season?

Wine gifts give you two big advantages. To start, they are among the most luxurious gifts which can be given. Secondly, even if you don’t know wine well yourself, you can still give the best wine available because true professionals are going to be selecting it for you. When you combine this selection process with outstanding packaging (which you should insist upon) you can have a gift which is a true Home Run for your gift receiver, no matter how seriously they take their wine.

As always, the middle to the end of the month is an exciting time at Uncorked Ventures.

This month finds more wine club shipments as well as the beginning of our plans for the holiday season. I was asked how to describe our wine clubs to someone who is a novice to online wine clubs and I said our premise was simple, better wine.

It hasn’t been often that I’ve either written about sports in this space as of late, or frankly updated this blog. That has a lot to do, of course with being largely responsible for writing our official company blog over at Uncorked Ventures. While I certainly enjoy the work, it isn’t easy to write two wine pieces per day which is largely why this blog has suffered.

Today one thing caught my attention in the sports world (and no it isn’t the fact that my home town Padres are set to deal 3-4 pieces after never being able to overcome a terrible April, or the fact that the Lakers were swept out of the playoffs which is especially distressful because they are the only big market team I can cheer for) which was Yao Ming retiring.

I’ll also remember the Yo-Yao commercials from Nike which were classic, but the man himself always seemed to have a sense, at least from afar that his presence as the first foreigner picked #1 in the NBA draft was larger than himself.

A short piece over at ESPN confirms. Yao will always be one of those guys I remember playing simply because his skill set didn’t match my expectations. I never thought I’d see someone of that height shoot 80%+ from the free throw line or be able to step out to 20 feet to make jump shots without acting afraid of the paint. He was a special player and one of the few I’d make a point to watch at some point during every NBA season.

Lastly, for a company interested in doing business overseas…..his success marketing himself, clearly with plenty of help, is something we can look toward with hope for the future.

Matt and I recently began reworking the education section of our site. While we don’t have an exact format yet for what we want to see in that space, we’re filling in some of the clear omissions.

One of those omissions was not having a page dedicated to Marsanne. While the wine isn’t made into it’s own wine (blended with Roussane) it’s an important and underutilized grape from the Rhone Valley of France.

The question is this: What would you like to see from our education section? How can we become a more valuable resource than Wikipedia?

Every so often you see a story which makes you scratch your head. For me, working on SEO for my own site, this was certainly one of those cases.

JC Penny Slapped by Google

So let me get this straight, one of the largest retailers in the United States is saying that they were in effect duped by a SEO company? Given the amount of resources available to JC Penny and their brand name, I find that incredibly hard to believe. Heck, they could have simply tried to follow Google’s suggestions HERE.

I understand that Fortune 500 companies are generally being led by people of an age in which SEO wasn’t a cornerstone to any business, in many ways for large retailers it may never be, but pleading ignorance has never been an acceptable excuse in other avenues and it shouldn’t be here. Just because something is both convoluted and complicated shouldn’t mean you get a free pass when you get caught cheating.

Personally, especially when given the fact that some of these links are going to remain and stay as helpful links moving their SEO in the right direction, I hope Google handles Penny’s more in line with how they handle any small business which doesn’t spend millions on advertising each and every month. Sure, it’s naïve to think but given my site was removed from the index for about a week after it was hacked, I hope there is something more than a simple slap on the wrist here. If Penny’s returns to the index and ends up in the top 5 for SERPS without ever having done any real work on their site, what does that say about the future of search? What have they really lost? A few weeks at #1 in December is well worth that same amount of time out of the index in February. This isn’t one which needs to be entirely complicated, simply get all the bogus links removed and then penalize them long term for the rest.

I won’t have a chance to get everyone an update on wider life for a few more days at the least (things are busy both professionally and personally, well definitely personally) but I was sad to see that social media darling Gary V has chosen to close Cork’d.

Cork’d To Close It’s Doors

It’s an interesting situation on a number of levels and not simply because it appears to be Gary’s first significant failure in the wine industry. Originally a pet project of web developer Dan Benjamin and designer Dan Cederholm the site was created as a way to allow people to share tasting notes and wine recommendations Web 2.0 style. Gary V of Wine Library fame came into the picture and people had huge hopes for a site which everyone rightfully thought would compete with and likely replace Cellartracker.

It didn’t work out for one reason or another, despite a number of GREAT ideas by the folks at Cork’d, especially Jon Troutman who has shown himself to be one of the most professional and educated wine writers in the field today. I liked the idea of bringing in bloggers to help create content, which seemed to add a level of interest to the site while offering free content and the SEO benefits which came with it.

Along with everyone else, I’ll be interested to see where Gary V and the rest of the Cork’d team land. Their next project will be an interesting one, but unseating Cellartracker grows more difficult by the day.

We can still get a shipment out to you if you live relatively closeby to our warehouse in rainy California. Have a look at our wine gifts!

Ice Wine

Yesterday I saw a picture of snow on the ground in Bordeaux and added it to the Uncorked Ventures Facebook Page, we received a few comments about the post which is customary now, but one of those comments came from the Great White North and one of our favorite SEO experts, Jim Rudnick.

He said “sigh…they probably just heard it’s a canuck trick to make our Ice Wine so dang good….those french guys just are copy-cats, eh! ))”

Well played Jim, really well played….but some of our customers and my readers from warmer climates probably saw ice wine and were confused. It’s not something I see in stores here in San Diego, even fine wine shops don’t have much in the way of inventory.

That’s not a good thing either because ice wine is one of the most interesting innovations in the wine industry in some time. For some time, cooler climates have been largely left out of the wine industry, but ice wine gives those areas which have snow on the ground as early as October a way to craft truly world class wine.

To start, ice wine is made from grapes which are allowed to freeze on the vine. Unsurprisingly, Canada and Germany are the two largest producers of ice wine, with a few American states attempting to improve quality with New York State largely taking the lead in that regard.

For German wine producers, it must be nice for those outside of the Mosel region to have a wine which doesn’t give them constant concern about achieving adequate ripeness.

Ice wine does come with its own set of growing conditions and problems associated with them, which helps to lead to the rather hefty price tag often associated with this style of dessert wine.

To start, the grapes need to fully ripen on the vine first and then the producer has to patiently wait for temperatures to drop enough for harvest. Canadian wine producers are slightly more lenient with regulations than their German counterparts, but generally speaking grapes aren’t harvested until temperatures hit 19 degrees Farenheight (-8 Celsius).

Of course, the real reason for the high prices often associated with fine ice wine is that each grape gives only one drop of wine. When this is combined with the risk that producers run every year by leaving grapes on the vine for so long after achieving ripeness (grapes are a deer favorite in winter) you can see why the industry needs high prices for its product.

If you enjoy sweet wines, ice wine is a nice place to start. Among the sweetest of all wines produced, it also carries high enough acidity to achieve a level of balance not found in cheaper alcohol.

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving with family and friends. For me, as always it was nice to get a couple of days off as well as spending some time with those closest to me.

Black Friday has come and gone, but the newly named Cyber Monday comes tomorrow and frankly I’m excited to see the results. We’ve seen good statistics so far this holiday season and the online retailer association is heartened by a 16% increase in online spending from this time last year (how do they get stats that quickly?) so the month of December should be a lot of fun.

As always, if you’re looking for a great wine gift please give us a look. I’m sure you (or your recipient) will be quite happy with the quality of wine delivered.

One aspect of our business which has kind of come out of the blue has been wine tasting fundraising. Aside from the clear benefits to any business (getting in front of people with large disposable incomes) the events that we’ve done thus far have been quite a bit of fun and have supported good causes.

It’s gone so well, that we’ve created a new page on our website to help people find us via search engines and give them some more information about our fundraisers. Given the bad economy and large number of organizations looking to raise funds from schools to hospitals to area specific charities, there are certainly plenty of groups for us to work with.

If you were looking to put together a wine tasting charity event, what other questions would you want to have answered before contacting us?

Our Page: Wine Fundraiser