Just taking a moment to share a little bit of news with those of you who are members of the Open Wine Consortium and/or are registered to attend the First Annual North American Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa next month.

I’ve been working on a newsletter at the gracious behest of Joel Vincent, who originally spearheaded the Open Wine Consortium. I’ll be sending the inaugural issue of that newsletter to your inbox on October first!

~winehiker

Coding madly! From sunup to sundown. Thank goodness for those rich brown beans. Mmm-mmmm.

I meant to get another blog post out before today. I’ve been sucking down the coffee and working like a doggone dog since three weeks ago, doing three big things at once. One is modifying my blog, which you can now see is in a snazzier 3-column format. Sooner or later I will figure out the CSS for the dang thing; the style sheet code from my last layout was light years cleaner.

Another project has been my website itself. While I’ve now got much of the big picture effort behind me - the layout and formatting issues are essentially done - I believe I still have another week or two of 14-hour days working on a few pages worth of content and making it load a little faster. See for yourself if you can spot any changes. There are a few.

The third project? Well, I wish I could tell you about it, but I can’t. Not yet. Those of you who are in the wine industry will certainly hear about it, albeit indirectly, while those of you who still read this bitrag will see a few words from me next week about it. I’d surely tell you sooner, dear ones, but then I’d be compelled to force you to chase me up a tall steep hill on a hot dry day, which might just—well, you know…

…I may not be pulling in a paycheck right now, but I am diggin’ what I’m doin’, so I’m gonna go write on doin’ what I’m diggin’. And then who knows? Maybe you’ll dig the result.

~winehiker

[Editor’s note: that third project I couldn't tell you about? It’s now a click away.]

These past weeks have been as much of a mental break as they were a return to Ground Level. To Joy. My old self, Square One. If it weren’t for the limits of technology, who knows how long it might have taken for desire to reawaken within me—to come back to this blog.

Suffice to say, here I am again. Back on the ol’ Witiculture blog. Recharged, running full and cool. Ready to tackle new challenges.

Geez, I sound like I’m giving a stump speech.

I’d seriously begun—well, honestly, I was way past begun—to hate computing at home. And I don’t toss that particular four-letter word around too often. Technology can expand one’s abilities for accomplishment, and I’d certainly been eager, early on, to embrace it.

But this past year had found me increasingly frustrated with my PC’s inabilities to do what I asked of it. It had gotten to the point wherein I just simply refused to wrestle with the grief I would constantly bear when attempting to accomplish the most basic of tasks. Looking back, if I had only been more focused on replacing it, I probably would not have endured for so long what I could barely stand to tolerate! Indeed, some days I was ready to take a 20-pound sledgehammer to it; I truly hated to even turn the damned thing on.

Sometimes, you can’t help but feel that epithets will figure prominently in your epitaph.

Finally, toward the middle of July, and only days before my contract ended quite abruptly at VMware, my PC gave up the ghost. Ironically, I had just ordered and received new DIMM chips, and was preparing to install this new RAM when the mother board blew a trace—as if the infernal contraption knew I was going to tinker with it and should instead add insult to injury.

There was a period there in which I wasn’t sure what had happened and I’d had the PC diagnosed. I’d hoped it wasn’t the hard drive that had blown. Thankfully, it wasn’t the hard drive (and I now have everything backed up, thank goodness). But meanwhile, I’d been paying my bills and doing other personal stuff online at work—something I don’t prefer to do. I certainly hadn’t preferred to blog while at work, either; there’s always something preventing me from doing that. Call it ethics if you will. Or the need for at least two hours of research and writing time, if not more, to assemble a decent blog post.

After all, the paychecks I was receiving from VMware were, ostensibly, compensation for my actually performing a job for them, not for me.

When the gig with VMware ended—due more to fulmination at the top of the organization than to my own performance—I was suddenly without a computer. True enough, I felt free and unburdened from the yoke of PC oppression—it was now my turn!—but only for about two days. I needed to stay tapped in. I needed to pay my bills! If nothing else, I needed to be able to respond to email to the tune of 150 on a slow day.

So I got a new PC, an immensely sleek, shiny and souped-up HP box equipped with Windows Vista (which I thoroughly like, by the way). After much configuring, reinstalling, and getting back to routine, I set out to discover the new PC’s boundaries. And, as it turned out, to rediscover and expand my own.

I want to be *your* Sledge Hammer. This will be my testimony!

I’m much happier now. The joy has returned! Without going into specifics, let’s just say that I have 200 times the RAM I used to have. And I have accomplished much. Oh, so much.

And yet, these past weeks have had me in Stealth Mode as I have sought to exploit my new PC’s capabilities. Certainly I’d had a huge To-Do List to tackle—things I hadn’t been able to do on the old PC. It had become a marvelously long list.

As I’ve been checking off these items, the To-Do list has gotten longer but the stress has melted, my focus has sharpened immensely, the Joy of Accomplishment has returned, and I can once again approach my future with a newfound enthusiasm. I’m smiling again!

I love my new PC.

Now there’s a four-letter word I think I’ll be using more often.
And so, patient reader, please stay tuned for news about what I’ve been up to. There is much to tell.

~winehiker

[Editor’s note: If you’re reading this post directly on my blog, one of those To-Do items may appear evident. I hope you like the new 3-column scheme and color format. Obviously I still have work to do. But at least now I’ll enjoy doing it!]

A Winter of Discontent

Over the past few weeks and months I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with my computer’s decreasing abilities to perform even the most simple tasks. I’ve tried scrubbing them out, I’ve tried soaking them out, but I still ended up with those pesky ring-around-the-can’t-do-anything-with-this-PC blues.

I had run countless diagnostics that told me my computer was running normally and fully optimized, yet it would simply lock up every 20-30 minutes. Launching a browser would take about that long, too. So frustrating! Finally I managed to correct the registry, remove 1452 spybots (geez!), and install a memory manager, all of which allowed me to access and empty the Firefox download manager which for some reason would not previously allow me access.

After a couple of days of testing, I see that things are working as they should, which is to say, “as fast as I can type and click a mouse”. My computer is once again faster than I am! I can almost say (knock on wood) that I am once again in love with my PC!

Maybe now I can enjoy this nice pre-Spring weather we’re having here in the South Bay - maybe even work in my garden, or (could it be?) actually go hiking!

Goodbye constant frustration, hello Spring.

~winehiker

Recently Discover Networks contacted me to let me know that my merchant account could now accept the Discover/Novus Card. That was mighty nice of those folks! Up until now, the californiawinehikes.com shopping cart accepted only MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal.

To allow my customers to use their Discover cards to book a California Wine Hikes tour, all I had to do was launch my shopping cart admin account, click the Discover checkbox, then add the DiscoverCard icon to the book now feature on my tour pages. Easy peasy!

I also intend to accept the American Express card on the site someday, though at present, I find it a relatively expensive proposition. Hey, I spend a fair share on my business using my American Express card, so do you think they’ll waive the fees and just let me turn it on like Discover Networks did?

Well, one can dream.

I’m dreaming of a day in which we won’t need plastic credit cards to get what we want. Instead we’ll only have to touch the nanochip implants embedded in our temples to wirelessly synchronize with the online shopping carts containing the stuff we want to buy, blink twice, and…

…NO!! Bad dream!! No biscuit!!!

And you thought I was going to pun mercilessly about “Discover”-ing the winehiking experience, didn’t you? Clearly, it’s time for me to go hit the trail.

~winehiker

Image source: Twitter.com

Earlier today, while working on my upcoming presentation, I kept a running tab on my internationally-scattered group of Twitter friends, one of whom, Carol Bancroft of Pour More, realized she hadn’t updated her blogroll* to include a number of her wine-blogging Twitter friends. She offered to add whomever she had heretofore omitted to her list, commenting:

I am not stingy w/ my links. [I'm] all about the camaraderie in 2008

I had just completed some thoughts about camaraderie in my presentation only moments before and therefore couldn’t help but add to the Twitter conversation with a tweet of my own:

The camaraderie amongst us wine blogging brethren and sistren has been the best thing about 2007, in my humble opinion.

Overlooking my propensity to use made-up words, Carol replied that she hoped that camaraderie would continue, and I agreed, adding:

I sense that camaraderie will continue, simply because we want it to. I hope we’ll all find a way to get some face time.

If Twitter didn’t confine each of us Twitter users to a scant 140 characters, I could have added more. The conversation did later cause me to say something that I had been wrestling with for my presentation, but on Twitter, while thinking of one person - Carol - as my audience, it just came to me naturally:

What’s coinky-dinky about this word camaraderie is it’s a big notion within my sense of the experience that lies beyond the vineyard’s edge.

Sometimes it’s not how you say it, it’s just about saying it, period. That’s the sound byte nature of Twitter, the use of which many have dubbed microblogging. The simple fact is, you don’t have to say much to generate discussion, foster thought, or build camaraderie on Twitter. It’s important to note that don’t have to author a blog, either. You just have to want to say something - anything halfway meaningful, to my mind - to deepen relationships already established (via individual blogs, or not) and to develop new friendships alike, all by virtue of responding - albeit loosely - to the question that gets to the very heart of Twitter:

What are you doing?

For this simple reason, Twitter is a powerful web-based community application.** However, Twitter - great as it has become among its many thousands of daily adherents - is still just an online tool, one that I hope will regularly be a way for people to use computers to get themselves away from them. Indeed, some of us - widespread as we are - are already talking about getting together in 2008. Secondarily, some of us are talking about shipping some of our favorite wines to each other in regions where those wines are not in great supply on local shelves.

New year, new tools, new world, surely. But in the interest of camaraderie, there’s nothing more valuable than face time with your friends. It won’t hurt, either, to gain some of that face time on the trail. With a good bottle waiting, of course.

So what do you want to say today?

~winehiker

*Many bloggers feature a list of their favorite blogs. I’ve got a few listed in my blogroll; you can view them by category in the sidebar to your right.
**Check out the California Wine Hikes About Us page, which displays the latest running dialog amongst my collection of wine and hiking Twitter friends.

Es un blog de vino.
Es un blog de excursionismo.
¡Si­! Es un blog de winehiking.

Translate this blog | Traduzca este blog | Traduire ce blog
Abersetzen Sie dieses Blog | Tradurre questo blog | Traduza este blog

I admit that writing an English-language-only blog tends to exclude more than half the wine-loving population of the world and probably most of the hikers too. For instance, just a periodic glance at my geographic statistics on SiteMeter tells me that I don’t get nearly as much traffic from France, Spain, or Germany as I do from English-speaking regions. Still there’s a fair amount of traffic that I’ve been missing out on, especially in light of the current dollar/euro spread.

And yet I know there must be many folks in these locales and others for whom a hiking tour in the California wine country could provide appeal. Therefore I’ve just loaded a utility that will conveniently translate this blog into Spanish, French, and German as well as Italian and Portuguese. Other languages are as yet not supported.

FreeTranslation.com provides the translation engine. If you have had any experience using FreeTranslation.com, you may be aware that its translation engine is not perfect; local dialectics are sacrificed and sentence construction can often be downright kludgy. But with the rules and exceptions inherent in each individual language, it’s reasonable to harbor low expectations of what I deem to be a very basic language-translation algorithm.

Nevertheless, perhaps there are some of you who will find this translation option useful. If you’re bilingual, I invite you to translate this blog and see how it reads for you. I’ll certainly be interested in knowing if you find it effective as well as convenient - just leave a reply to this post.

Meanwhile, should my stats from Europe go up significantly, I’ll translate all this as being a worthwhile endeavor. Thank you for reading, wherever you call home!

~winehiker

Just noticed that I’ve racked up over 500 votes now on Local Wine Events, which bills itself as the World’s Largest Food & Drink Calendar. What’s also cool about the site is that it lists, as of today, 240 wine- and food-related blogs.

As with nearly all of the images I attach to my posts, you can click to expand them and mouseover them to find a hidden infomorsel. If you’re hopelessly snowbound or queued in an air terminal and have some time to kill, then I betcha can’t mouseover just one!

Now I realize 500 votes doesn’t hardly compare my blog to the likes of Alder Yarrow’s Vinography.com, currently ranked Number 6, or Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV, which is currently ranked Number 3.

Alas, no: I’m dwelling somewhere down around Number 40. At one time, though, I was ranked around Number 10. But many wine blogs have joined the ranks since I registered on the site about a year ago.

Nevertheless, I have somehow mustered 500 votes! And I sure appreciate y’all choosing to vote my blog to that lofty perch.

It’s a curious thing, though, to see a whole bunch of German blogs listed on Local Wine Events (at least I think they’re German). Most of these blogs seem to be attracting a great number of vote-happy fans because they’re steadily advancing in the ranks above my listing as well as many other blogs whom I would regard as having much more pull, stats-wise.

But hey, this is Chicago-style voting, which means that you can vote every day for any of these blogs if you want to. Therefore, the ranking that you see on Local Wine Events does not even remotely correlate to the algorithmically-ranked statistics shown by AlaWine.com’s 100 Top Wine Blogs and others. In other words, voting for your favorite wine blog on Local Wine Events is purely freestyle mayhem.

Which, being that it’s not 20th Century Chicago politics, is actually kind of fun.

While I suspect many of the blog authors themselves are voting every day for their own blogs on multiple machines with separate IP addresses (and you know who you are!), I believe the real reason a reader should vote for a blog is because he or she enjoys reading it, finds it a place to return to regularly, or - in an ideal world if you’re a listed wine blogger - is a real fan who is compelled to add my blog to their list of favorites and vote and vote and vote for it over and over again.

Gee, could I be hinting at something?

Well, perhaps I am. So, at the risk of being perceived as a self-ingratiating chest-thumping so-n’-so, I invite my readers to VOTE HERE OFTEN if you’ve a mind to. Or, you can just click that hard-to-miss and annoying little flashing CLICK ME over there in the right sidebar [since removed - too annoying, even for me!].

And then, by golly, you can even tell your friends! Especially if you find appeal in all things winehiking. After all, it would be kind of a neat social experiment to see how many fans The Winehiker truly has out there in the Great Blogosphere. (At least one or two, I suspect.)

OK, enough proselytizing. We now bring you back to our regularly scheduled programming. Have a happy Fall weekend!

~winehiker

Contrary to what some believe, double occupancy means “two people per room“, not “two people per bed”.

A lot of folks don’t understand hotel jargon. I must admit, I can sometimes find it rather baffling myself. And the Internet doesn’t always reveal the truth.

When booking a stay at a hotel, especially when it’s multiple rooms or multiple nights, one wants to get the best deal they can. But not understanding hospitality industry lingo can set you back rather than save you precious $$; therefore it pays to understand some key terms. This can be true when booking a spot on a group tour, too, especially if you’d prefer not to share your room with someone you’ve never met.

When reviewing my website traffic, one of the terms I regularly see people inquiring about is double occupancy, which can be simply defined as two people per room. But the hotel industry has found reason to define it further. Essentially, double occupancy means that the room charge is the same whether one or two people stay in the room. Another industry term, single supplement, refers to an extra charge paid by solo travelers who request their own room.

The issue of double occupancy vs. single supplement is often one of privacy and cost. As a general rule, many of the rooms being booked on behalf of a tour group will feature two queen or double beds, depending on availability, with the exception of bed and breakfast inns, nearly all of which feature one bed per room. If there are two beds available per room and group travelers wish to have their own (single supplement) room, they can expect to pay substantially more for their tour. That’s generally the way it works in many, if not most, situations: you can expect to pay a little more to ensure more privacy. For some, it’s a matter of peace of mind: you won’t be risking your personal items and valuables to the prying eyes (or sticky fingers) of a stranger.

At California Wine Hikes, our tours encourage group dynamics, and we therefore typically book two people per room. Assuming there are two beds per room at our tours’ lodging sites, solo travelers will be paired with a roommate. Or, solo travelers can request their own room.

We have a feature for that, and we call it I prefer to have my own room. Clever, eh? Simply put, if you are booking one of our multi-day tours, are traveling solo, and wish to request your own room, you can do so directly from any of our web pages that showcase multi-day tours* by clicking the checkbox underneath i prefer to have my own room. The price you see next to this checkbox is specific to the tour you are viewing; this single supplement price will be added to the total package cost of the tour after you click the book now button to reserve your tour.

Clicking any of our book now links will automatically direct you to a secure shopping cart. If you are planning a tour with more than one person in mind, you’ll have the option to choose a quantity of tour packages in this shopping cart (for example, simply enter 2 to purchase a tour for two people). The total tour price will be computed for you automatically, including any single supplement charge per person that you may have added.

I invite my readers and potential guests to comment on this topic. Thanks!

~winehiker

*Use the search tours feature on any page of the californiawinehikes.com website to search by length of stay.

Wine.com today alerted me to a new Advanced Wine Search feature on their website that easily narrows the search path toward a wine or wines that fit the parameters you select, all in real time. I don’t consider myself so geeky that I know what’s behind this new functionality, but I’ll climb the Tree of Educated Guesses and assume they’re using Ajax technology to power it.

There currently appear to be only 2,302 wines you can buy via wine.com’s new Advanced Wine Search; you can see this number on the bottom left of the first Search page (just click the link above). I am going to step out on one of the Tree’s lower limbs here and assume that this number represents only a fraction of the wines in wine.com’s inventory. Nevertheless, you can instantly see this inventory number recalculate on the fly depending on the boxes you check.

For example, just by clicking the Rhone Reds checkbox, the inventory will change from 2,302 to 79 to indicate that there are 79 Rhone Reds available. Additionally clicking the Chateauneuf-du-Pape checkbox yields 19 wines available from France’s Chateauneuf-du-Pape appellation. Yep, it’s pretty easy to figure out.

In the results window, you can sort by price, rating, etc., as always, plus you can still set a price range to further hone your search.

I’m going to step a little farther out on that long limb and assume that wine.com must still add inventory to its Advanced Wine Search database. But because this tool is so intuitive - and therefore quick and easy to use - I would love to see this kind of technology applied to every online store I buy products from.

I’m also betting that this kind of usability is so appealing to its web-savvy customers that wine.com will win over a substantial market share of those wine buyers who have been frustrated with their online wine-buying experiences elsewhere.

~winehiker