The Third Annual Awbbies

The envelope please. And the wiener is…

Did you know there are awards given to wine bloggers? Neither did I. Not only that, the AWBAs (American Wine Bloggers Awards) are already in their third year. Wow. What’s more shocking, I wasn’t even nominated. What’s up with that?

The gent behind these awards is Tom Wark, and you can visit him, and vote at his Website. Although, the deadline is tonight. But even if you’re too late to vote, it’s a good site for one stop blog shopping (I mean, you’ve already got this one, why go anywhere else, but…).

The site gave me a chance to catch up on other blogs, for, y’know, contrast, compare, see where I stand in relationship with all the other losers who can’t find a job…errr, I mean, with other like-minded, really intelligent people, who just want so much to share their tremendous wealth of information.

One thing I notice is I really suck at graphics. Well, more to the point, I don’t have graphics.

There’s one weird site for instance, that’s all images. Instead of reviewing wines with words, they just have an image, usually provocative, expressive of a particular wine. It reminded me of my late, and widely lamented newsletter, the Wine Iconoclast, where once I did wine reviews in Interpretive Dance. That went over really well.

So I’m going to start cooking up some graphics.

In the meantime, I’ll have to rely on words. I have in front of me a lovely little wine, the Francois Chidaine, 2007 Val de Loire Touraine Sauvignon, $13 (Whole Foods). Wonderfully, classic, French Sauvignon Blanc. Grapefruit nose, bit grassy, great whistle-clean texture, lean, crisp, and a great food wine, especially with…

But wait, you know how us SOWWs (Society Of Wine Writers) are always going on about great food/wine matches. Well, what about the opposite? The nightmare matches. For instance, I’m drinking this lovely wine, and I decide to have a couple bites of the luscious, decadent, triple cream Castello Blue, and ick! It was like sucking on month-old garbage.

How can two things, lovely by themselves, be so hideous together? A match made in Hell.

But the good news is, if such bad matches do exist, then -applying the rule of inversion- great matches must also exist, and it therefore falls to us SOWWs to steer readers, not always towards, but occasionally away from certain food wine matches.

A task which should certainly earn me an Awbby next year.