True to our mission, there have been 433 posts featuring Washington State wines and 367 posts that gave you at least one great QPR (5 bangs for your buck) wine.

Our audience has continued to grow as we not only have hundreds of email subscribers and RSS subscribers, but almost 3,000 Facebook likes and 3,500+ Twitter followers as well as a presence on Open Wine Consortium and LinkedIn.

We’ve had 117 A Wine For Tonight posts recommending a very good wine that sells for $15 or less and is widely available. Last month, we hosted our 102nd Wine Tasting Dinner, where we taste and report on six wines with a common theme that are blind tasted with one of LaGayle’s fabulous meals.

For you to get the most effective and efficient use of the info from these 1,000 posts, let me call your special attention to the “Search” box in the upper right hand corner of the Wine Peeps homepage, and the listing of “Categories” a little further down the right side of the homepage. Both of those features offer great ways to find all of our posts on a specific topic.

We are always looking for ways to improve what we do on Wine Peeps. Please tell us how you believe we can do a better job of giving you the info you want on wine, especially great QPR wines and wines from Washington State.

Cheers!

(Photo by MGM_Photos)

Wine Peeps: Celebrating our 1,000th Post was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

In addition to my continued wine writing here at Wine Peeps and for other wine publications, I am pleased to announce that I am now the Wine Consultant for Shuttle Express. Shuttle Express has been offering wine tours since 2008, but my task is to help improve and expand the wine tour program.

As a champion of Washington wine, I look forward to helping more people Experience Washington Wine! While we plan to expand our offerings to other areas in the future, today our wine tours focus on Woodinville Wine Country. Woodinville is a must-visit destination in Washington wine country. Home of the state’s oldest, largest, and most well-known wineries, Chateau Ste. Michelle and Columbia Winery, the Woodinville area is also home to over 90 wineries and tasting rooms, with new ones opening all of the time. Woodinville now boasts the second largest concentration of Washington wineries after Walla Walla and is located just 17 miles northeast of Seattle. In addition to the many wineries that are actually located in Woodinville, many wineries located in other parts of the state have opened tasting rooms there which now makes Woodinville Wine Country representative of the entire Washington wine industry.

Whether you live in Seattle and are looking for a fun outing or are entertaining out-of-town guests or clients, or you are visiting the Seattle area for vacation or work or to take an Alaskan cruise, we hope you will consider booking a tour to truly Experience Washington Wine with Shuttle Express. Arrange a private tour anytime or enjoy our Saturday public tour to Woodinville. And, rest assured, you will not be touring wine country in an airport shuttle van. Rather, you will be able to relax and enjoy the ride in one of our luxury vehicles, which includes limos, limo vans, and limo coaches with “U” shaped seating, among others.

While we are proud of our current wine tour offerings, we welcome your suggestions and ideas as we expand our wine tour program. What would you like to see offered on the tours? What days and times would you like to see tours available? Which wineries would you like to see as stops on the tours?

For you winery owners and tasting room managers, if you are interested in having your winery be a stop on one of our tours, please let me know. We look forward to partnering with you to make our tours beneficial for all parties involved, wineries, guests, and Shuttle Express.

If you have ideas, questions, or would like further information about the Experience Washington Wine with Shuttle Express tour program, please leave a comment or contact me directly: kori at winepeeps dot com.

For more frequent updates about Shuttle Express, please “like” us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Cheers!

Experience Washington Wine with Shuttle Express was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

The Wine Peeps app, created in partnership with MotherApp, allows you to easily scroll through and read our recent posts as well as my Twitter feed. And if you enjoy the post and/or would like to share it, the app makes it easy to mark it as a favorite for quick future reference or to share it with others via email, Twitter, or Facebook.

We hope you’ll check the app out and let us know what you think. And, if you like it, we would appreciate it if you would also post a positive review in iTunes.

Cheers!

Wine Peeps iPhone App Released was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

* Wine blog ratings are standardized composite logarithmic scores based on multiple relative link popularity rankings from three top search engines and Technorati, as well as Google page rank scores. As such, they are general quantitative ratings of popularity and do not measure quality of content or frequency of updates. This page last updated: September 15, 2009

For us at Wine Peeps to be mentioned alongside such well-established luminaries of the wine blogosphere as Tom Wark of Fermentation, Alder Yarrow of Vinography, Tyler Colman of Dr. Vino, and Eric Asimov of The Pour is very gratifying, yet at the same time very humbling.

You can be assured that we will continue to do our best to justify this lofty status in the wine blog world. Cheers!

100 Top Wine Blogs: Wine Peeps Ranks #6 was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

In January, I joined Twitter and have been tweeting regularly ever since. Twitter has been an excellent way to engage in the wine blogging community as well as interact with readers and fellow wine lovers in an informal atmosphere (in short, 140 character messages). In addition to tweets announcing new Wine Peeps blog posts, I tweet about other wine-related things that I am doing or that are on my mind as well as random non-wine things from time to time just to keep things interesting. If you are on Twitter, please Follow Me if you are not already.

We recently created a new Wine Peeps page on Facebook as yet another avenue to connect with our readers and create a sense of community. While we do import our posts and occasionally post a status update that is the same as something I’ve tweeted, we are also asking questions and sharing other things on Facebook that we are not posting elsewhere. Over the weekend, we passed 100 fans and were able to get our own vanity URL, http://www.facebook.com/winepeeps. Many thanks to all of you who are already fans! For those of you who are not fans yet, we encourage you to join us and Become a Fan. And we hope that all of you will tell your friends about us.

In addition to Twitter and Facebook, I am also on a couple of other social networking sites. I invite you to Friend Me on OpenWine Consortium and LinkedIn, too.

Obviously, we hope that you will visit Wine Peeps directly and comment on our posts here; however, we welcome the opportunity to connect on any or all of these social networking sites as well.

Wine Peeps News: New Facebook Page was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Redesigned Site

We launched the new site tonight and think we have all of the bugs out, but please take a look around and let us know if anything looks amiss. Many thanks to my wonderful husband Colby (our Wine Peeps tech guy) for all his hard work in getting the new site up and running.

After a year of working hard to build up interesting, competent content, we thought that it was time to spruce up the look and feel of Wine Peeps. The changes are purely cosmetic, though; all of our content remains intact. You will still be able to search, browse categories, read older posts, and visit our tabbed pages for additional information.

I’d like to highlight a few of the changes we’ve made:

• Recent Posts and Recent Comments – We added the Recent Posts and Recent Comments sections on the left to give you a quick snapshot of recent Wine Peeps activity.
• Tell a Friend – We added the Tell a Friend button to the end of each post so that you can quickly and easily share the post via email or by posting it to Facebook, Twitter, or another social networking or bookmarking site.
• Subscribe to Updates – We have made our Subscribe to Updates via RSS and Email more prominent on the right and hopefully easier to use.
• Follow/Friend Me – We added this section on the right so that you can easily follow or friend me on several social networking sites. More on those below.
• Avatars in Comments – Now you have the ability to personalize your comments with an avatar (a picture or symbol that represents you). If you do not already have a personalized avatar and would like one, you can go to Gravatar to sign up. When you leave a comment on Wine Peeps with the same email address that you’ve registered with Gravatar, your avatar will automatically appear.

As time goes on, we will be doing additional tweaking and possibly adding even more new features. We hope that you like what we’ve done and will continue to come back as well as tell your friends about us.

New Logo

As we began discussing ideas for our site redesign, we felt that our first priority was to develop a Wine Peeps logo so that readers would have a visual image to associate with us. Many thanks to our good friend Ross Heeter for the fabulous new logo.

Twitter

Recently, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. I had been observing Twitter from a distance over the past year but after attending the Wine Bloggers Conference last October and seeing how many Twitter devotees are out there, I felt that it was time to get on board. Twitter is an excellent way to engage in the wine blogging community as well as interact with readers and fellow wine lovers in an informal atmosphere (in short, 140 character messages). In addition to tweets announcing new Wine Peeps blog posts, I will be tweeting about other wine-related things that I am doing or that are on my mind. It will allow me to share about wines that I am drinking that may not make it into a formal blog post or ones that may appear in a post down the road. I’ll also tweet about random non-wine things from time to time just to keep things interesting, but I’ll do my best not to bore you with trivial things like “I’m off to wash my hair now.” If you are already on Twitter or if I’ve enticed you to sign up, please Follow Me.

And More

In addition to Twitter, I am also on a couple other social networking sites. I invite you to Friend Me on OpenWine Consortium and LinkedIn as well.

Please let us know what you think of our new site. Whether you love it, hate it, or fall somewhere in between, please leave a comment below or send us a message via our Contact Us form. We’d love to know what you like as well as what needs improvement so that we can continue to make Wine Peeps better and better.

Wine Peeps News: Redesigned Site, New Logo, Twitter, and More was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.