El Bloggo Torcido - Twisted Oak Winery

Shooting the Designer

As may have been intimated in previous posts, El Jefe has been immersed in porting Twisted Oak's web site (and some of its operating software) to a new provider. There hasn't been a lot of time to smell the flowers (which, by the way, are lovely right now!) or post to a blog.

Everyone who has ever written about blogging has been right - this IS hard to keep up with. Once in a while you need to step away and get your muse back - I finally found mine in Fermento's bottom desk drawer. No idea how it got there, and of course he denies everything...

Anyway, now it is time to "shoot the designer" (not really, Will! it's just an expression!) and get the web site out to the world. It will still be rough around the edges, it will be red, and the content will look suspiciously familiar to some of you, but in the long run I'll be able to do more and spend less time on it - mostly, more time to think up weird %@#$!

So, starting now (or it better be very soon!) twistedoak.com will be lost for a while before your DNS finds it again at a new server. Until then, Rest Assured that El Bloggo Torcido will be On The Air with Live Updates, along with a few other posts attempting to catch up with the events of the past month.

That Whole "Tag-It" Thing

I realized this morning I had the perfect list of tag-ees, so here goes (I need a "bwa ha ha" soundtrack):

• Josh "I Have Two Lives" at Pinotblogger
• Marshall "The Entranced" at the WineQ Blog
• Brian "PJ" at the Small Business Blog of the Day
• "Dirty Man" Jason at the WineLog.net Blog
• Ryan "The Searcher" at the CalWineries Blog

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to tell us "why you blog?"

This post will self-destruct in ten seconds - good luck!

Why Would Jefe Blog?

It's truly astonishing the kinds of things that come out to play when a new technology takes off, and blogging is no different. Russ over at Winehiker has tagged me before but I didn't come out to play. (I think he thinks I don't have enough work to do. Why would he think that?) I've mulled this one over for a few days, however, and I think I could actually play with this one!

The "tag" (or "meme" as some call it, but I do not think that word means what they think it means...) Russ whacked me with is "Why Do You Blog?" I've been doing EBT for almost a year now (!) - the reasons that any business should blog seem so incredibly obvious to me. On the other hand, how many wineries actually blog? Not many...

Fundamentally, I write (really, produce) El Bloggo Torcido because then I get to take pictures of hot women doing weird things with rubber chickens to communicate with a potentially large audience about my winery. What more do I want?

Back before I started this, I was poking around looking for ways to kick start ecommerce on the Twisted Oak Winery web site. I wasn't having a lot of luck; there just weren't many low-cost ecommerce solutions out that could correctly calculate a mixed case discount. So, I'm poking and poking and drinking wine I don't quite remember how, but I stumbled into the Small Business Blog of the Day and the Winery Web Site Report. At the time the SBBD was doing a week long special on Winery Blogs, and I was 1) blown away by all the attention these wineries were getting; and 2) wishing Twisted Oak could get some of that action!

(I was going to save this for the anniversary post in a couple weeks... but both SBBD and WWSR have been huge sources of guidance to me in the past year. El Bloggo Torcido would not be what it is today without what I learned from those two blogs. Thanks Brian and Mike!)

The blog platform itself is a plus too. I could design a traditional web site and display pictures and tell stories - but the blog makes it so easy, allowing me to focus on the words and less on "<p>". And then there's the comments...!

So it's basically about the babes getting attention for your business. And we have gotten some great attention and made some great friends - some of whom we even got to meet. Some of these new friendships have started out kind of rocky (I have pretty much forgiven Marshall for pushing me off a cliff at Pinotblogger's winery in Second Life - pretty much) but they have sometimes led to some fun events and interesting relationships - er, between businesses of course.

At this point I'm turning in my homework so late that I probably should pass on trying to find a wine blogger who hasn't yet been tagged - but if you haven't and you WANT to get shagged be tagged, drop me a note or comment!

(UPDATE: I woke up this morning (da DAA da dum) and got with the program - see next post!)

Rainy Saturday

It's always cool to see people come out to taste wine and enjoy life even on a cold rainy day. Even the blustery weather couldn't keep these four from enjoying a picnic on our patio. I'm sure it was the wine. Or the hat...

A Peek Under the Covers...

I was going to title this "Something's Coming..." - either way, people with filthy minds were going to get the wrong idea... which is probably our entire readership!

Anyway, here is a snippet. You'll get to see the rest soon!

Help with pronunsee-a-shun

It has been pretty hectic here at Las Bodegas Torcidas, and it has been difficult to break away to the fun of blogging. That's why I especially appreciate the diversion offered by this question from Brian in Southern California:

"If I'm at a fine eating joint and want to order , How do I pronounce it? Thanks! -Brian"

Thank YOU Brian, it's a great question!

At most fine eating joints we encourage you to simply ask for it by name, as in:

"Gimme some of this fine
And please do step on it!"

If that seems inappropriate, you could simply ask for "the Twisted Oak potty mouth white, please" and be on safe ground.

Or you could do what most of us do anyway at the finest of joints (especially the fine French joints) - just point at the menu and say "I'll have THAT!"

Thanks for asking! - j

ps: watch out for the "sweetbreads" - they're not what you think... though they would pair nicely with the

The Afternoon Knows...

...what the Morning Only Suspects. A Swedish proverb shared with us by Jeanne. Somehow, it seems to apply to what we are doing here. Enjoy!

Whoa-o! Radio!

Sneak a peek to the right hand sidebar there and you will see a little player controller thingy that looks something like this:

Click on the little right-arrow doohickey and you can hear our first-ever radio ad, which is currently being heard on local FM radio stations KKBN 93.5 and Star 92.7.

You might be tempted to think the copy for this ad came out of our own Twisted orifices, but no: it was written and recorded by station personnel!

(By the way, these stations run a web site called MyMotherLode which is a great resource for local info and news. I'd like to thank them for being open minded enough to allow me to share this commercial with you on the internet - enjoy!)