Mark's Wine Blog

This Blog is Carbon Neutral

Many of my friends would tell you, that although I don’t necessarily show it outwardly on an everyday basis, I do believe strongly in environmental causes and like to what I can, when I can. I also believe strongly that companies and governments needs to give their citizens more choice when it comes to environmentally friendly alternative forms of transportation, packaging etc.

In that vein, I recently came across a company that helps ensure that your blog is carbon neutral. As it turns out there is a cost in terms of the number of visitors that visit this blog. That environmental cost is largely made up of the energy that it required to power the servers and other hosting mechanisms.

“My blog is carbon neutral” is an initiative, originally started in Germany by the “Make it green” programme, that has the goal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. We plant a tree for your blog and thereby neutralise your blog’s carbon footprint for the next 50 years! Everyone can make a small contribution to the environment. Every tree counts!

One of the things that Matt and I talk about almost daily with Uncorked Ventures is that we never know exactly where the next big bit of business is going to come from. By now, we have a pretty good idea about how many new members of our wine clubs we can expect, but there are always other opportunities.

Sometimes those include the possibility of shipping some wine to Japan (if law permits) or even finding a case or two of rare Italian wine to ship to Oklahoma.

It’s these types of side projects that make not only our days more interesting, but allow us to continue learning more about wine and the entire industry as we become a larger part of it.

One of the challenges I’ve faced since starting Uncorked Ventures has been a combination with my relative inexperience with fine wines (when compared to others, including my business partner Matt) especially when combined with the fact that I live in San Diego where we don’t have many high quality wine stores.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t especially enjoy paying retail price for wine any more, but occasionally there are bottles which I’d like to try, either for personal enjoyment or for possible inclusion in our wine club, without creating the pressure and sense of urgency that often can accompany free samples. Simply put, sometimes it’s easier to pay for a single bottle of wine instead of having a winery or winemaker feeling slighted because you didn’t purchase a couple of cases after receiving a free sample.

In that vein, my wife and I started to try out a few well known wine stores here in San Diego starting last weekend with a trip to San Diego Wine Company, which is located on Miramar Road about equidistant between the 15 and 5 freeways.

I noticed immediately that they featured a nice selection of Napa/Sonoma wines, including offerings from Vineyard 29, Larkmeade and Audelssa which I’ve talked about at length in this space previously. Very impressed with both the selection as well as their pricing when it came to northern California wine.

As for the central coast wineries, I wasn’t nearly as impressed as they seemed to largely be missing the outstanding wines being produced in Paso Robles and Santa Barbara County, with one offering from Tablas Creek Vineyards, but nothing else of note.

I hope to come up with a scoring system in the coming days.

Until then, I hope your week has been as enjoyable as mine already has.

So I decided that it would be nice to get to know a few other bloggers and journalists within the wine industry, so I’m in the process of planning a meet up of wine journalists in Southern California, to be held somewhere in San Diego.

I’ve gotten a few good responses already both over the phone and via Twitter, so it should be a ton of fun.

Uncorked Ventures is going to provide a few wines to taste (one’s that you haven’t had before, even at Family Winemakers or AVA tasting events) as well as appetizers.

Are you interested in attending?

When I first started talking to Matt about starting Uncorked Ventures, I didn’t realize some of the natural enjoyable elements of the business. Aside from spending more time with family I didn’t realize that I’d enjoy the people so much. I know I’ve talked about that at length on this blog, but I was reminded last week that another enjoyable aspect of the business has been having the chance to share in other start up businesses.

One of those is Metro Citizen, which is an online magazine. Interestingly I was originally contacted by found Carolina Riviero through this blog and I am happy to be part of their editorial team. In that vein my first article has been published and I’m quite happy with the result. The online magazine is an interesting medium because it makes pictures more important then they are normally, which is quite different then what I do on a daily basis. Frankly speaking, I’m excited to see where this business venture is able to go in the future and how we can continue to support each other as both Uncorked Ventures and Metro Citizen grow.

Congrats on the 1st issue, I’m glad I was able to be a part of it.

In my continued attempt to create a community for my readers here at Mark’s Wine Blog, I’ve installed the CommentLuv plugin. As many of your know this plugin will show your most recent blog entry (with a link of course) at the bottom of your comment.

Yes, I am still keeping this blog do-follow.

Although I won’t promise to keep either commenter friendly approach forever, I enjoy the interactions that I have with readers and hope this will continue to foster those relationships over time.

What do you think?

Last week was a lot of fun being able to spend quality time in wine country with my wife, it was also a welcome break and one of the first true vacations I’ve taken in some time since started Uncorked Ventures. I’m also happy to say that it appears our efforts on the SEO front are truly beginning to pay dividends as it seems the time of our “Google Dance” has ended and we’ve settled into the first page of search results for one of our targeted keywords.

As I start my week I’d be remiss without taking some time to thank the people at Vineyard 29 (specifically winemaker Keith Emerson), Alpha Omega (Jean, Henrik and Chelsea) and also Copain (John as well as their sales staff) for taking the time to talk with my wife and I. I know she especially enjoyed the trip and I was happy she was able to relax during a much deserved spring break.

Lastly, we’ve had a few earthquakes here in Southern California over the past 24 hours. Despite living in California for about 25 years now these are the first few earthquakes that I’ve ever really felt, I’m glad to say it’s no where near causing damage, but it can be a little disconcerting if for no other reason that we’ve watched how many movies showing California being completely destroyed (or becoming an island lol) once the big one hits.

For me, it’s back to work on the SEO front as well as adding content to the website. I feel energized by my trip and am ready to get back to work.

So this part of the month brings me to the best part of owning a part of Uncorked Ventures, spending time in wine country. After departing from the peninsula tomorrow my wife and I are spending 3 nights in Petaluma with at least 2 daily tastings planned from Wednesday through Friday. This is certainly the fun part of the job and why all the SEO hours make sense.

I hope to have a few videos to share over the next week from this trip.

Moving Forward

Every so often it seems we reach a tipping point either in business or personal lives, for me these type of points have not only been difficult to predict, but they can be difficult to manage as well. I think this is especially true when we reach a point where a significant choice stands in front of us and there is perhaps no clear answer, even if the only reason for that is because we can’t see our nose in front of our face. You know, make the easy choice that is closest to us…in order words the simplest solution is usually the correct one.

For Uncorked Ventures part of this choice is how quickly we move from our original goals of crafting 3 of the best wine clubs on the planet, to some other ways to bring in income for the new business. I’ve heard of open door lawyers before (you know, any case that comes in is what I specialize in) and I want to be careful to not become an open door wine store so to speak, that is I want to be careful to note dilute our message because we’re working on so many different things at once. At the end of the day, the goal is to get hard to find wine into the hands of consumers at the right price. Of course, like any business, there are better ways then others to do this for our bottom line.

It’s hard to turn down what could amount to a number of sales, but there is certainly an opportunity cost when it comes to using either my time or Matt’s time since there is always something else we can be doing. For example, how much time should we be spending on SEO work which should pay off down the line (although no guarantees) versus time spent working with potential in home tasting clients?

So I ask my readers this, how would you go about finding new wine club members?

New York Cork Report

In my continuing quest to give my readers a series of wine blogs they should be reading, I give you the New York Cork Report.

By far the preeminent blog covering all things New York wine the Cork Report has grown to include close to 10 regular columnists focusing on everything wine related from Long Island to Niagara to New York City wine shops.

With such a small amount of the top wineries shipping to local wine stores across the country this is one of the few quality resources available for anyone looking for professional level coverage of New York wine.

Stop by, say hello to Lenn….just don’t mention to him that the Steelers are over the hill!