Soon after I began this blog, I posted an admiring, slightly eccentric review of a bottle of St. Véran I'd purchased at 11ème caviste Au Nouveau Nez. In researching the bottle's background I discovered that the vigneron who made the wine, Isabelle Perraud of Domaine des Côtes de la Molière, maintained a very engaging blog of her own, about her experiences winemaking in the Mâcon and northern Beaujolais. So it was that in the course of the same day I became online acquaintances with Isabelle, and also her friend / fellow blogger Iris Rutz-Rudel, of Domaine Lisson in the Languedoc.
In my market-minded American naivété, I initially assumed there must be loads of readable French winemaker blogs, since it's a low-cost / high-impact way to build an audience and attract attention to one's product. Later, in the course of my other job, I came to realise that a significant proportion of Parisians over 30 possess no familiarity with computers whatsoever - and this is to say nothing of provincial winemakers in remote regions, or the challenges posed by html and the various blog platforms, which, as this site's layout will attest, I myself have yet to master.*
Also, to blog well requires that one be relatively articulate and expressive to begin with, regardless of the subject matter. That these qualities might be found in a wine is no indicator of whether the wine's maker has anything more to say about its production than, 'C'était dur, mais c'est bon.'
With these points in mind, it was just amusing, and not especially surprising, to see that a recent tasting themed around the wines of vigneron-bloggers at 2ème natural wine bistro l'Hedoniste was slated to include the wines of both Isabelle and Iris. It's still a very small world out there on the world wide web.
