But the focus of my blog posts will continue to be on wine tasting and enjoyment.  We will review wines, match wines with food and also provide useful tips for buying wine, storing wine and most importantly, drinking wine.  These ideas are being consolidated into the book and should provide you with a great read in the coming months.  I have found that in blogging about wine and then researching and writing a book on wine that I learned a great deal – much more so than just by drinking wine.  I feel a responsibility to ensure what I communicate and share to be accurate and well articulated.  I feel a responsibility to provide insight and make your reading of my writing worth your investment in time.

I am targeting Wine Sense(s) to be available around the end of 2013 and am working hard to meet that self-imposed deadline.  Yet, I won’t do anything to rush publication if it compromises quality and your reading experience.  I am finding that it is taking much more effort and underlying technology support than writing and publishing my first book, Still Stupid at Sixty (published under the pseudonym, Blake Stevens).  Wine Sense(s) has required much more in terms of structure, research, citation and photography.  I expect the entire effort to be about twenty times the effort it took to write Still Stupid at Sixty.

I have read about twenty books on wine over the last several years and learned a great deal. The have fallen into general categories of:

• Wine tasting and appreciation
• Wine and philosophy
• Wine making
• Wine lifestyle and history
• Specialty wine books (such as on wine language and grape varietals)

Through reading all those books, I learned a great deal and when combined with continued practice tasting wine, I continued to enhance my wine tasting enjoyment further.  Yet, I looked back and felt there could have been a better and far more efficient way to improve my skills and enjoyment.  Wine Sense(s) is about how to improve wine tasting and appreciation.  It discusses how wine tasting works through our senses and how to improve those experiences.  It also provides (hopefully) solid insights and ideas on buying, storing, serving and drinking wine.  I believe Wine Sense(s) will broadly be of interest to people who are new to or moderately experienced in wine drinking and want to improve their tasting experiences and enjoyment.   My aspiration for Wine Sense(s) is to be a more approachable book than Emile Peynaud‘s classic, The Taste of Wine: The Art and Science of Wine Appreciation.  Peynaud‘s book is the best book I have read on wine appreciation, but when I started it several years ago, it was difficult to digest (even though it is beautifully written and translated form the original French into English).  Wine Sense(s) is meant to be the book you read first.

I will keep you posted of expected publication date for Wine Sense(s) as we move forward.  Now back to writing on wine!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013.  Steve Shipley
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Twitter:  Steve Shipley @shipleyaust;   InkIT Publishing @inkitpub

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Pinterest is a ‘pin board’ or scrap book where you pin pictures into various albums.  My bride loves to pin great looking guys (even though I have not been able to find my picture there yet!), her cooking recipes and other things.  I have created two wine boards, one for ‘Wine Labels’ and the other for ‘Wine Humor.’  As I find new wine labels and humorous posts on wine, I save and then pin them in Pinterest.  (I also have a few other non-wine boards.)

I like the concept in that I can find a home and quickly add related items if they are a picture of some sort.  I have about 25 Wine Labels and about 40 Wine Humor pins so far and it grows every week.  And it is possible if you have a picture in a blog post or an article that you can actually pin the blog post by attaching it to the picture you are pinning.  Therefore, it can be used as another channel to introduce people to your blogging.  Each board and each picture can also be captioned.

Feel free to follow me on Pinterest if you like.  Or just check in every now and then to have a wine laugh or see what new labels I have added.  Many of the labels are of wines I have recently drank or have drunk previously and want to remember.  I also plan on starting a board on ‘Wine Decanters’ and ‘Other Wine Paraphernalia’ very soon, maybe as soon as this weekend.

I am less interested in building a following for Pinterest than I am for other aspects of social media I use, but it is fun and and an easy way to share new dimensions of the wine lifestyle.

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