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It has long been rumored that the few rows of vines at the entrance to Chateau Ste. Michelle in Woodinville, Wash., were required so the winery could be called a "chateau."
PROSSER -- Construction is expected to start soon on the next phase of what backers say will be the state's premier educational and promotional center for Washington's wines and food products.
The next time you log onto Wine Press Northwest's Web site - winepressnw.com - I hope you'll notice a few changes.
In July, we gave the site an overhaul, including a redesign, a new publishing system, new tools and a new emphasis.
We launched winepressnw.com in April 1998, the same month we debuted Wine Press Northwest. Back then, life and Web designs were simpler. The site included our magazine content and little else. In 1999, we launched our now-popular Pacific Northwest Wine of the Week e-mail newsletter. It was a simple text e-mail, and we never thought to include any of that on the site.
In 2003, we put the site through several big changes. First was a redesign to make it appear that a first-grader didn't design it. We also de-emphasized presenting the stories by magazine issue (Summer, Fall, etc.) and more by category (Oregon, Washington, etc.).
Key to the project was a custom-built, searchable database that would hold our wine reviews, as well as wineries and wine shops from throughout the Northwest. Even by 2003, searchable databases such as what we envisioned were not easy to create or maintain. The programmer who built it did not know a lot about wine, but he had an idea of what we wanted to accomplish and created a fine tool. Unfortunately, this was before Web 2.0 was all the buzz, and it didn't have any tools that allowed Web site visitors such as you to help keep the site updated. Additionally, adding reviews and maintaining the information was arduous and time consuming. Most importantly, the user experience was less than optimal.
Additionally, we learned that a lot of visitors wanted stories organized by magazine issue rather than by subject matter.
Since 2003, blogs, forums and other tools that provide a way for visitors to interact have become all the rage.
In 2005, we installed our Wine Press Northwest forum at community.winepressnw.com, using an open-source publishing system called Drupal. In April 2006, I used it to launch my blog, The Wine Knows. The look and feel of this site was completely different than the rest of the site (and remains so today). In the past two-and-a-half years, thousands of people visit the blog and dozens of regulars not only comment on my missives but also use the site's forum tools to start conversations with others.
In December 2006, we launched the Northwest Winecast, a weekly video show about Northwest wine. It is available on YouTube.com as well as winepressnw.com. Each week, we visit with winemakers, chefs, sommeliers, grape growers and wine merchants.
The publishing system we started to use in 2003 was being phased out by our parent company beginning in late 2006. By this spring, a lot of programming folks were pushing me pretty hard to migrate to the new system so they could retire the servers. The new publishing system is really slick, handling stories, photos, audio files, video and other rich media beautifully. However, we still didn't have a good database solution, and I was determined to provide readers with a way to search wine reviews, wineries and wine shops. I looked at some public solutions such as Google Base and Freebase, but neither quite functioned the way I hoped. At the point of despair, I came across an Atlanta company that specialized in working with media companies to provide easy-to-use and inexpensive searchable databases. All I needed to do was organize all my data into a comma-delimited format (such as a spreadsheet).
I saw the light and got to work. Converting our off-line databases for wine shops and wineries was easy. In fact, I put them into Google Docs and shared them so my blog readers could see if I was missing any of their favorite merchants or wine shops. If I was, they could submit the information via a form that would go straight into the database, which I could then easily update.
The wine reviews were more difficult because they were all text files. I figured out how to format them so I could get them into a spreadsheet easily. However, each issue's wine reviews would take up to four hours to enter. Multiply that by 40 issues and you could see the task I faced. As I write this, I have just two issues left to enter, which should be complete by the time you read this. That's more than 8,000 reviews of wines from Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Idaho.
The searchable databases are the big new features on the site, but you'll notice a lot more. We're highlighting our weekly video wine show, and we've added some advertising positions (nothing obnoxious, I assure you). We're now in the process of organizing our magazine content two different ways: by issue and by subject. Thus, if you want to read the Summer 2008 issue online, you can find all the stories; and if you want to read all of Braiden Rex-Johnson's columns, you can do that, too. Adding in 10 years' worth of stories is taking some time, but we're diligently working on that.
We've also added commenting, so you can leave your thoughts about any story on the site. We'll continue to add more features, such as mapping and other interactive tools, as we move forward.
Take some time looking at the site and let me know what you think.
Wine Press Northwest is pleased to be able to offer its users the opportunity to make comments and hold conversations online. However, the interactive nature of the internet makes it impracticable for our staff to monitor each and every posting.
Since WinePressNW.com does not control user submitted statements, we cannot promise that readers will not occasionally find offensive or inaccurate comments posted on our website. In addition, we remind anyone interested in making an online comment that responsibility for statements posted lies with the person submitting the comment, not Wine Press Northwest.
If you find a comment offensive, clicking on exclamation icon will flag the comment for review by the administrators, we are counting on the good judgment of all our readers to help us.
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