There’s a site called urltrends.com which sends me monthly reports, in visual and textual fashion, of how my website and my blog are trending. These reports display eight-month charts of Google Page Rank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Google Link Popularity, Yahoo! Link Popularity, and more. I can even compare my sites to other sites and blogs. The latest urltrends report for this blog arrived via email last night, and almost made me fall out of my chair.

Winehiker Witiculture suddenly has a Google Page Rank of 6!!!

I won’t attempt to explain what Google Page Rank is; plenty of technosites already do a pretty reasonable job of it. Suffice to say that “6″ is good. It is very good, and it’s telling me that I’m doing the right things. I think I’ll keep on doin’ ‘em.

Already, my traffic has gone up about 20% today, though that’s extremely short term. We’ll see what the next month brings. But Holy Cow anyway.

~winehiker

Uncork the possibilities! Write a review about californiawinehikes.com.

If you’re a blogger and you love really good wine – or love somebody who does – I hereby offer you a contest: review my website, California Wine Hikes, and I’ll link to your review from my blog, Winehiker Witiculture. If your review is the best one submitted, you will win a case of wine.

If you don’t have a blog, you can still participate! Just post your review on Amazon.com.

For details, read on.

The rules are pretty simple: your review must be at least 200 words long and you must include a link to the California Wine Hikes home page and to this post. If you like, you may also link to any other page on California Wine Hikes or to any posts on this blog.

The most important element of your review? You must be completely honest. Tell the world what you like and/or what you don’t like about the site, how it could be improved, or why you would or wouldn’t choose to book a tour. It doesn’t matter what categories your blog covers, though it will be helpful if your review is written in English. Nevertheless, I will accept all reviews.

After you have written your review, send me an email that contains the URL to your posted review. In turn, I will periodically update my blog to list links to all new reviews – daily, if possible.

To provide you an incentive to write high-quality content, I’m offering to ship a case of wine (that’s twelve 750ml bottles), personally selected by me, The Winehiker, to the blogger who posts the best review.* The total value of this case will be at least $500 U.S., not including tax and shipping. Folks, that’s almost $42 per bottle. And believe me, it will be really good wine. If you’re the winner, and if you wish, I will make every attempt to tailor my wine selections to your taste (within reason).

The review that garners a 2nd place finish will win its author one bottle of wine valued at approximately $40.

Even if you don’t win any wine, you’ll still get a link from me. Therefore I recommend you write the best review that you possibly can. Remember, your review will be read by a lot of readers, many of whom will be commenting. Their comments on your blog will help me decide which reviewer to give the prize to. Meanwhile, this contest will close on November 1st, 2007; I will ship the wine to the lucky winner shortly thereafter, and announce who that lucky winner is here on this blog.**

Does this contest sound blogworthy to you? If so, then it is your chance to show off the quality of your writing. So, my fellow blogger/reviewer, best of luck to you, and have fun! I look forward to reading your review.

UPDATE: The contest winners have been announced. Please see Wow! We have a winner in our Review My Site contest.

Forward this post to a friend.

~winehiker

*This contest is free to enter. The winner must reside in an area to which California Wine Hikes can legally ship the wine or provide a valid address to which California Wine Hikes can ship the wine for pickup by the winner. Some U.S. states and some international locales do not allow receipt of wine shipments from California; check with your local jurisdiction before entering this contest. California Wine Hikes will not ship alcohol to persons under the age of 21. By entering this contest you swear and affirm that you are over the age of 21. California Wine Hikes makes every effort to ensure that alcoholic beverages are not delivered to anyone who is under the age of 21. By entering this contest you are acknowledging that the person receiving a shipment of alcoholic beverages from California Wine Hikes is over the age of 21. You also agree that any alcohol received from California Wine Hikes is intended for personal consumption and not for resale. If you do not agree with these conditions of use please do not enter this contest.

**Stay on top of the best reviews by subscribing to Winehiker Witiculture via Bloglines. Here’s how to subscribe.

One of the great beauties of wine – the thing that attracts so many of us to wine – is the almost infinite variety of scents that wine imparts to us. Wine offers a broad range of olfactory experiences across a notable spectrum of grape varieties and, beyond color, it is aroma that often characterizes our first honest impressions of a wine. From berry fruit and jasmine petals to dirty socks and wet dog hair, it is possible for a wine taster to smell hundreds, if not thousands, of scents in a glass of wine.

As a writer, I am quite fond of words. And yet I often find myself grasping for the right words to describe the aroma I’m smelling or flavor I’m tasting. Without a handy tool to assist with bridging that tongue-brain connection, I find that my tasting notes can sometimes be incomplete. Fortunately there is such a tool, and many wine tasters, novice and expert alike, use it regularly. We owe much to the wine scientists at the University of California at Davis, one of the nation’s leading winemaking and grape-growing schools, where years ago a wine aroma wheel was developed.

The ‘fruity’ section of the wine aroma wheel. Copyright A. C. Noble 1990, 2002, and used with permission.

Back in the day, an oenologist at Davis, Dr. Ann C. Noble, consulted with scores of wine lovers and wine tasters to list all the descriptive terms they could imagine for the smells of wine. After organizing, categorizing, and eliminating all of the terms that seemed ambiguous, Ms. Noble produced a list of 12 major categories of wine smells, subdivided into 29 subcategories and 94 specific terms. Toward ease of use while tasting wine, this list evolved further into a circular table, with relatively similar smells placed close together around its circumference.

A number of aroma wheels have been developed since the good old days at Davis, including two from the Deutsches Weininstitut, written in German, for red and white wines. There’s even an aroma wheel just for Zinfandel wines. And, if you’re truly serious about an olfactory experience with your next stack of pancakes, check out this Flavor Wheel for Maple Products.

There are even some wonderful online tools for learning about the scents and flavors of wine. If you have time to kill this weekend, pour yourself a glass of something aromatic and delicious, then sit down with your favorite PC for an afternoon with The Aroma Wheel Big Spin Game from Trinchero Family Estates, or step through how to identify wine with the interactive Experience the Aroma Wheel from Turning Leaf. Both are quite educational, and I recommend you browse them if you wish to understand more about your tongue-brain connection, if not also enhance your wine knowledge. As a handy tasting aid, you may find it helpful to have your own colored and laminated wine aroma wheel; purchase one online from Dr. Noble herself for only six bucks, or visit the UCDavis Bookstore.

Happy tasting!

~winehiker

Just heard from Aaron Olson today. Aaron is one of my fellow Basic Juice Crew members, and one of a goodly handful who pitched in to adopt a barrel this past winter at Crushpad in San Francisco. The Crew had been invited earlier in the week by Robin Van Vliet, our de facto Crew ramrod, to be involved in the process of combining our Rhone blend components – Grenache, Syrah, and Petite Syrah – from three separate barrels to one barrel (or, as the denizens of the Rhone Valley might say, barrique).

I couldn’t get away to San Francisco today (something about a job, perhaps), and it appears that only Aaron and Robin, being San Francisco residents, were able to get together with Crushpad winemaker Kian Tavakoli on a weekday to perform the actual blending.

You might recall from a post I wrote in mid-February (see “She Mighty Mighty”: the blending of the Basic Juice Crew Red) that the Crew had assembled back then to determine just what the percentage of each of these three wine components should be in our final blend. After a few tries at honing in on the ultimate blend, we had settled on a ratio of 60% Grenache, 33% Syrah, and 7% Petite Syrah. We’d put together a slightly different proportion for contrast – one that was a close second place – and had sent samples of both to two out-of-town Crew members, Jeff Stai of Twisted Oak Winery and Beau Jarvis of the Basic Juice blog – indeed the guy who had gotten the whole Rhone blend idea rolling. Both Jeff and Beau had agreed with our blend proportion assessments, and so we were good to go to barrel.

And as of today, according to Aaron, the mighty mighty Basic Juice Crew red will now begin its oak transformation. Here’s what Aaron had to say:

hey all,

just a quick note on the blend for those that weren’t there. All is now blended and sitting in one happy BJC zebra barrel. The blend quantities are:

138 Liters EaglePoint Grenache

76 Liters EaglePoint Syrah

16.1 Liters EaglePoint Petite Sirah

The SO2 level was at 17.6ppm so sulfur was added to bring it up to 30ppm. Early June for the next check on how it’s aging, etc…

Cool,

Aaron

Doing a little quick math, it looks like our Crew has hit the mark – the mark of distinctive proportions. Hopefully the rest of the Crew (um, yes, that’s me, too) will make a better showing this June when we’ll taste our Brick House Red again. I’m sure it’ll be mighty mighty good, and especially so when we go to bottle – maybe in September 2008.

~winehiker

When checking my site stats yesterday, I saw a number of hits coming in from Feedster.com. Since that was an unusual spike in traffic, I clicked over to find that this blog was featured on Feedster’s home page as their Feed of the Day. Thanks, Feedster folks! Let’s go winehiking together.

I include this irrefutably lousy screen capture as incontrovertible evidence.
Of what? I don’t know.

~winehiker

• The 2007 ZAP Festival: a winehiker’s impressions
  Saturday’s experience at the 16th annual ZAP Festival media/trade tasting in San Francisco was delightful, entertaining, educational, and harrowing.
  (tags: zap festival zinfandel wine san francisco fort mason winehiker impressions californiawinehikes.com)
• Top Five Zinfandels of the 2007 ZAP Festival
  A list of what I consider to be the top five zinfandels poured at this year’s ZAP Fest.
  (tags: zinfandel wine top five zap festival winehiker californiawinehikes.com)

I’d rather not catch a virus if I can instead send a “viral marketing” infection to the great Cloud that is the Internet. Tonight I discovered an interesting way to “go viral”, and you can see it over in the sidebar to your right.

But I’m not sure; I really don’t think you should click on it. I probably shouldn’t dare you to click on it, either. (Even though I can overtly promise that you won’t get any computer cooties.)

But it might be fun to see what happens.

~winehiker

Fellow readers, I’ve learned a valuable lesson this week. Or, let’s just say I’ve relearned the lesson again for the umpteenth time. The lesson being, “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.”

In my previous post, I mentioned that I had tried to modify the structure of my blog and how it is presented to the public both in the URL bar and to search engines. I wanted to get away from numbers and embrace human words, for these are the things that appeal not only to people, but to page-ranking schemes.

Alas, making these changes to what is called a “permalink structure” ended up rewriting a critical file that processes the feed from this blog to feed distribution sites such as FeedBurner.com. It took six days to figure it out.

A whole Santa’s sleighful of thanks go to my site host, Mr. Kevin McNeese, for being so patient; Kevin and I both learned a few good technical things this week. I’m also indebted to Mr. John Zeratsky at FeedBurner Support for offering a solution that ultimately worked.

And now I can breathe again! I think I’ll go lace my boots and take a carefree walk in the rain tonight.

~winehiker

If you subscribe to Winehiker Witiculture via FeedBlitz, Bloglines, or other feed reader, then you may be wondering why you haven’t seen any feeds from me over the past few days. Perhaps you’ve received emails from the FeedBlitz system announcing changes to my posts. Unfortunately there is broken code on the server that hosts my blog.

My site developer, Kevin McNeese, is working on a fix. With luck, my feed to you will be restored tomorrow, and you’ll be able to resume reading my posts as you normally have.

It was my own silly fault. In an attempt to optimize the way search engines read and index my site – in short, to enhance my “SEO” and page rank – I caused an error I hadn’t foreseen, one I can’t repair myself.

Why did I make a change?

As I review how my posts are viewed through various web channels, I’ve come to the conclusion that I needed to update the way they are presented in your browser’s URL bar and in certain feeds. I’ve decided to reorganize how WordPress manages my posts so that they display by title, rather than by sequential number, in the URL bar.

It is my hope that this reflow will help you, my readers, to find what you’re looking for a little more easily by using actual human words rather than numbers. It will also help me when I review my metrics reporting, which I’ll now be able to do at a glance instead of having to click through to really know which of my posts people are reading most.

That scenario was testing well on this end; changed link names were redirecting as they were supposed to. That is, until I tested the feed.

Gol-dang technicalities….

When the feed is restored, I’ll add a follow-up post.

~winehiker

I was browsing Vivi’s Wine Journal earlier and discovered a tool from snap.com that is just the bee’s knees, so I grabbed the code for free and Voila! – you can now see a “snap preview” of any external site I link out to from this blog without clicking on it. (But click anyway, ‘cuz I’m sure the publishers of those sites will consider your visit as important as your visit today is to me.)

Gosh, I’m so excited about this javascript mouseover app that I wrote that paragraph all in one breath!

Go ahead, try it out. Do a few mouseovers on my blog here*, and let me know what you think, yay or nay. If you like the new Snap Preview tool – or even if you don’t – drop me a line below (click “leave a response”). Your response may influence me to also drop the code into my wine and hiking tours site, California Wine Hikes, where it may prove to be extremely useful (unless y’all disagree).

Thanks in advance for checkin’ it out.

~winehiker

*Let your mouse’s arrow rest briefly over any link and see what pops up.