Ken Morris, the communications and marketing manager over at Grgich, dropped me a line to let me know that he started a blog (last Frebruary): Grgich Blog
We always get people in the tasting room asking about what we’re doing now in the vineyard or the cellar and we have sales people who are not at the winery so we got into the blog business as a way of passing along quick reports of what’s going on.
I always start by visiting the main Web site to see whether you can find the blog from there, and Grgich didn't disappoint, even though it would be nice to feature more than a pretty unassuming text link, and maybe add it to the site's main navigation, so you can be exposed to it as you navigate the site.
The biggest issue for me is that Grgich isn't using off-the-shelf blogging software, and as a result, they don't have an RSS feed, which means I have to manually check back to see if anything's new, which means (generally) I don't.
Ken's used an interesting technique of sub-dividing his posts into "In the ..." sections (in the vineyard, tasting room, cellar), and includes photos, which is good. Ken is also finding his voice -- I think you can tell which posts began life as a newsletter article, and which are specifically written for the blog.
Again, because of the "homebrew" blogging software, the posts don't have bylines, so it's hard to feel that there's a real person on the other side of the posts.
I would subscribe if I could, but in the meantime, I've added Grgich to our list of winery blogs, which now stands at 70 entries.
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