Well, someone at wine.com should be fired by now.  Alder at Vinography broke the story (which was originally published in the Wine Market Report - 8k download here) to the blogosphere a couple of days ago.  Get this:  wine.com organized a sting operation in Washington state, in which wine.com – or stooges thereof – ordered wines from 29 different online wine retailers that could not legally ship to Washington, and then they turned the names of the law-breaking retailers in to state authorities.

Ironically enough, Washington prosecutors have no jurisdiction over out-of-state retailers who ship to Washington despite stupid protectionist wine laws that prohibit such activity.  The only people who could be in legal trouble from Washington state authorities would be people who actually ordered the wine, breaking the law while actually in Washington state!  Wut?

No company with this much of a rat-like approach to business, coupled with a severe lack of cognitive processing ability, should be allowed to have a link on this site.  Wine Scamp is no place for snitches, nor for tattle-tales.  So I’ve taken their ad off the site, and I hope you’ll join me in a boycott of wine.com for here on out.  Mostly for being morons, and then also for being wine law vigilantes.  Oops, I repeated myself.

I must join Tom Wark in directing your attention to the supreme response to wine.com’s perfidy, that of Emily and Stephan at Winemonger.com — it’s both brilliant and hilarious — located near the end of the comments to the post on Vinography.

… and we’re back. Happy New Year to all!

The best news I’ve heard so far this year is that Dr. Debs at Good Wine Under $20 is founding a Wine Book Club. Similar to Wine Blogging Wednesday, this club will have rotating hosts and all of you, regardless of whether you have blog or not, can participate. Even you guys all the way in the back, there. It’s true!

What’s that? You’re a slow reader? Pish-posh. The Wine Book Club meets every other month, so that you can read with all the slowness you wish to cram in to 60 days. Not interested in joining any club that would have you as a member? You can check out the other joiners by looking at the Facebook group, or on a nifty site I didn’t know about before called Shelfari.

The first title, which will be discussed on Tuesday, February 26, is Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy, by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch. Read a description of the book and get more details about how to participate over at the first site to host the club, and one of my favorite wine blogs, McDuff’s Food and Wine Trail.

One of the things I love about the book club that I’ve been a member of for two years now is that it frequently takes me out of my reading comfort zone. I get very comfortable in my reading ruts, too, so it’s good for me. The books we read in the PC Book Club (PC= pretentious c**t; Dana will have to tell you that story someday) don’t blow my mind every single time, but I love getting pushed out of my personal cannon, and I really enjoy discussing books with other people. Plus the ladiez in my group are dope, yo.

Here’s my confession, though: I suck ass at reading non-fiction. Big Ass. So a Wine Book Club, though exciting to me from a wine perspective, also provides a healthy challenge to my reading inclinations. Talk about out of the rut – I’m off-roading it here!

That being said, I’ve browsed through Vino Italiano in years past, and found it exceptionally readable for a non-fictional book on regional wine. It’s full of information about food (cookbooks being one of the few non-fictional genres I can peruse for hours – another is dictionaries, what can you do?) and folklore, as I recall, and I’m looking forward to reading it in full. You’ll stick with me to the bitter end, right? Good.

Are you one of those people who prefers non-fiction to fiction? Or do you pine for a good story, like me? Share with the group via your comment, even those in the back of the room!

My friend Gabrielle at Eternal Vigilance awarded me a Community Blogger Award, invented by Red Sultana to celebrate those in the blogosphere that “reach out and makes the blogger community a better one.” Nice!

When I decided to jump into the fray of wine blogging (fray! ha! if anything resembled the word less…), I felt that I was so quickly and generously welcomed into the “fold,” and I will always be truly grateful for that.

Tom Wark at Fermentation was kind enough to write about me very early on, directing a lot of new traffic my way; he also Does Great Things with his promotion of wine bloggers via his Bloggerview series.

Dr. Debs at Good Wine Under $20 and Jill at Domaine 547 both commented early, often and encouragingly. Plus, Jill invented Women’s Wine Blogging Celebration Day, known to 99.999% of the world’s population as October 11.

Finally, Lenn Thompson at Lenndevours has been truly instrumental in bringing all us wine bloggers together in our monthly wine tasting, Wine Blogging Wednesday. May this tradition never fade: it’s a wonderfully inclusive event, and super-fun on top of it!

I would like to confer upon all of these great people a Community Blogger Award: they make the wine blogosphere a better place to be, for everyone.