The Wine Economist first appeared on May 29, 2007, with a report called “Bottling the 2005 at Fielding Hills Winery,” which compared the volunteer bottling line to Adam Smith’s famous pin factory. Incredibly, The Wine Economist is still publishing its weekly newsletter after all these years and last week’s post was the 1000th in the series.

The  Wine Economist has averaged about 1000 words per column or 50,000 words per year, which is roughly equivalent to about two full-length books every three years.

The book comparison is relevant because we have often used the weekly columns to work out ideas that eventually reappeared in the five wine business books that we have written over this time span.

The original idea was simply to take advantage of the blog format to work out ideas in public and get feedback from a broad group including consumers, industry professionals, and other academics. This worked better than I might have expected.

It would be fair to say that I didn’t know what I was doing when I started down this path. For example, I used to say that The Wine Economist wasn’t a blog because its articles are too long and it only appears about once a week. Hardly what you’d expect from a traditional web-log (a.k.a. blog). But then it received the Gourmand International award for Best Wine Blog, so I guess that is what it is.

In the same way, I used to say that I am not a wine writer, just an economist who writes about the wine business. But then one of my books received the Gourmand international award for Best Wine Writing.  I don’t know what to say.

Looking ahead, there is a lot of work left to be done and Sue and I are looking forward to more adventures and the opportunity to meet and get to know interesting people. The wine world is always growing, shifting, changing. We are excited to see where the next 100, 500, or maybe 1000 Wine Economist articles take us.

Cheers to our readers. And thanks!