Scotts Name The Top 100 Most Influential Wine Blogs. My Arse!

A few of days ago I received a couple of welcome surprises in my inbox. First, it appears I’m about to come into a substantial sum of money from a Nigerian prince. Secondly, I learned that WineSnark.com has been named one of the “Top 100 Most Influential Wine Blogs of 2015”. This is in stark contrast to my present standing as “The Least Influential Person in My Own Home”.

Wine Bloggers create awards like this because they realize that actors and athletes aren’t the only insecure neurotics in need of validation. Our awards might not be as masculine as the Heisman Trophy or as phallic as the Oscar, but we still know where to put them – in the mancave next to the spelling bee trophies.

Being named in the “Top 100 Most Influential Wine Blogs of 2015” is just like winning a Pulitzer Prize, just without any skill, insightfulness or talent. This award singles out the very best writers, videographers, photographers and wine reviewers from the massive hoard of pedestrian plonk pushers populating the internet. You know, people like me.

Excel Wines of Perth Scotland created this award because they have a passion for the world’s greatest wine, for the highest standards in literature, and for driving traffic to their own website. In describing the selection process they proclaim, “It’s important to note that this is purely a statistical measure of success, not a direct measure of the writer’s talent”.

Whew … dodged that bullet.

They proclaim, “Never before has there been such a statistical measure of influence in the wine blogging community as what we’ve put together over the past several months.” It sounds like they went to great lengths to gather information from my fan.

Excel Wines used 14 different metrics to reach their conclusion. Things like SEMRush, Majestic SEO, Twitonomy, Alexa, Facebook Insights, and Moz. I don’t have a clue what a ranking algorithm is or does … it’s all geek to me.

I decided to write a blog about wine for the same reason everybody else does. I’m just not that clever or funny to sober people (by the way, it looks like your glass could use a refill). In my very first blog I wrote, “Becoming a wine blogger is like joining some weird cult. It starts with drinking wine but I suspect it ends with drinking the Kool-Aid.” Well I’m still here 22 months after it all began and after affixing this new badge to my home page I found myself wondering, “Are there really 99 other losers like me with nothing better to do with their time”?

To learn how big the wine blogosphere has become I visited Vinography.com, possibly the first American site to lay claim to the title “wine blogger”. Author Alder Yarrow has maintained a comprehensive list of wine bloggers since Vinography’s inception in 2004. Today Vinography lists 913 wine blogs but back in 2003 Yarrow googled the phrase “wine blog” and didn’t find a single wine blog on the scant results pages that appeared. Today I googled “wine blog” and was presented with 225,000,000 results after an excruciating wait of almost 0.39 seconds.

Believing the actual number of wine bloggers probably falls somewhere between 913 and 225,000,000, I turned to the Wine Bloggers Conference website for confirmation. This intrepid group makes a valiant effort to keep a current record and as of June 2015 they listed 1657 blogsites dedicated to all things wine, which it turns out, is also the total number of people who read wine blogs.

Yes, apparently only wine bloggers read wine blogs. No one else on Earth has the slightest interest in what we have to say. Studies show that even wine bloggers could care less about the ramblings of their fellow wine bloggers. Apparently wine bloggers only read wine blogs so that they can lavish awards on one another.

So thank you wine blog community and Excel Wines, for giving me this prestigious award for doing something that I love, for something that gives my life meaning, for something I’d gladly do for free, for something …

Wait a minute, I do do this for free!

Nevermind.