Wine writing update

Steve Shipley — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 23:08:19 +0000

First and foremost, SAZ in the Cellar is a wine resource site. It is my intent to blog about wine, share ideas on enjoying and appreciating wine, and provide links to other resources on wine. I believe my upcoming book, Wine Sense(s), fits into that concept. Therefore, I will be providing the occasional update on the status of Wine Senses(s) and post on other wine writing. I will also provide reviews and links to other wine blogs and books that I find useful and expect you will enjoy to broaden your wine reading. Over time, the Resources page and sub-pages on this website will provide references to other wine blogs and books, and wine-related products and services that hopefully will be of interest.

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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Wine blogging or wine book writing?

Steve Shipley — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 09:31:00 +0000

Many people have asked why I have not been releasing as many blog posts in the last few months. I used to post about 10 – 15 per month, but have only posted twice now in the last month. I apologize for that and need to get more diligent. But there is good cause as I have been very focused on getting my first wine book published. This has been a far larger effort than my previous book Still Stupid at Sixty which I wrote under the pseudonym, Blake Stevens. It was a great experience and I learned a lot about the electronic publishing industry. But that was a tale that I needed to write, not a book that I hope influences a much larger audience.

I have written about 300 pages so far and expect the wine book will end up between 350 – 375 pages. I am putting a heavy-duty effort into finalizing my research and restructuring the book to make it more readable and accessible. I am really excited about the book and hope it reaches a wide audience that will enjoy and benefit from it. My last book was only published in electronic format and limited to Kindle mobi format (which has about 90% of sales for authors electronically). My wine book will be published both electronically (in a number of different formats) and in printed form and will have a number of photographs. It will also have video links using QR Codes. The photography and video components adds a great deal of work to the effort, but is well worth it.

My last book was a personal tale so I did not need to do any research or citation of references. My wine book will have a substantial bibliography and set of footnotes and endnotes. This is another dimension of why the wine book requires much more effort than my first book did.

Note taking in Evernote

I had been writing the book in Word, but have now converted the Work In Process (WIP) to Scrivener which is an authoring management system. I am also using Evernote for collecting research and clipping notes. Both are brilliant applications which have really increased my productivity. I review my sources, enter comments into Evernote on my iPad (see picture), then cut and paste into the correct section in Scrivener. This has really helped me to improve the organization and structure of the book. It has also provided me a vehicle to do much more electronically instead of working with paper to-do lists and a multitude of different files, notebooks, Post-It tabs, margin writing, etc. Additionally, I am learning HTML and CSS to be able to better understand and control the final output of the books even though I will have a professional designer work with me to accomplish that.

However, all of the book writing and coming up to speed with new applications (great as they are!) on top of working a full-time job has limited my desire and ability to blog, and for that I apologize. I am flattered that a number of people have been querying my whereabouts and look forward to my posts! And I want to let you know that I will be blogging much more over the next month again. I will do limited writing on my wine book, but much reading and research and restructuring of the book before I get into doing a significant rewrite in about four to six weeks time. This will leave more energy over the next month for blogging. Plus I will extract a number of the basic concepts from the book and use those to create blog posts and to start to introduce you to the book.

Thank you so much for your support! I really appreciate it and hope you will become as interested in my wine book as you are my wine blog. I will release some ‘teasers’ along the way as each section of the book is further developed.

We had a tremendous time in the Hunter Valley, meeting with some wine makers and cellar door friends, and also meeting some new great chefs around the region. It was so wonderful to have two solid weeks of vacation to do a major restructuring of the wine book, but my blogging has suffered due to my dedication and focus to the book. I will try to keep both better balanced while I am finishing off the book. I promise each of my three blogs will receive more attention.

Thanks again for your support and interest, and keep drinking well!

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Wine writing update

Wine blogging or wine book writing?