Awards, schmawards. We hate wine awards. The number of press releases we get each week telling us that some winery or another is receiving a new award for their latest wine is enough virtual email to destroy a virtual forest of trees! Do I care about any of these? No. Does someone care? I would assume so, but wine writers would rather taste the wine themselves before they give their final mark of approval. Plus, we tend to be highly suspicious of awards that come from wine committees that we’ve never heard of, or from a large tasting that “conquer” 1,000,000,000+ wines at once. Picking out one or two decent wines in such a large and expansive group is like walking into a football stadium and randomly selecting two individuals as “good people” and dismissing the rest as unworthy. Silly.

So today, we’re going to announce an award that we think is worth paying attention to, as it will benefit both the consumer and the winery. It’s also an award that any winery can win, with the most minimal of requirements – at least in the first stage.

The Catavino Iberian Winery Blog Awards is an award for wineries who are taking the internet seriously. For now, you only need to meet a few basic requirements; but in the future, we hope to list some more defined parameters so that we may acknowledge Iberian wineries who are willing market their wines a little differently.

Currently, we’ll list any winery located in Spain or Portugal, who meet the following standards, under the category Iberian Winery News on the right hand side of the page:

1. You need a blog. That’s it. Though your blog in what ever language it is written in must have an RSS feed that is easily discoverable, and must have comments enabled. Without these to things you are not by (our) definition a blog.

That’s it! If your winery who has a blog, and your wine is made in either Spain or Portugal, you win a free link from our homepage to your blog!! Simple as that. In addition, your blog will be added to a widget in the sidebar with your latest posts. Pretty easy. Of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, we must admit that several of these blogs were created, and are managed, by Catavino. And if we’re lucky, so will the many more in the near future. Therefore, it’s only fair that when we do finally impose a series of parameters for the Iberian blog awards, we’ll be asking independent journalists, programmers and wine enthusiasts to contribute to the judging process.

We are proud to be living in a region that is starting to understand the internet. It’s a slow process, but one that is inevitable. And you can either bury your head in the sand, and try to ignore it, or you can embrace it and utilize it for your own benefit!

If you are a winery with a blog and not currently listed in our sidebar, then send us an email with your blog’s address and RSS feed, and we’ll make sure to add you in!

Cheers,

Ryan and Gabriella Opaz