It’s all tumble-weed around here at the moment – the shock and surprise at finally finishing typing the Summer report meant that my body decided it was a good time to catch a cold! Probably just as well, as aided by neighbours and friends I only seem to have left one bottle each of the Gambal 06 | 07 | 08 bourgognes – now how did that happen? – I’m not planning to go back until harvest too. Quel cauchemar!!

Clearly no drinking around here for a a few days, so first, maybe a little Beaujolais 2009, then maybe you can learn something about Burgundy from Jamie Goode and his barking dog!

Occasional contributor Ray Walker earns some good exposure…

I just checked, but it’s not April 1st.

I considered it superfluous before – but let me know – should Burgundy-Report have it’s own forum? On second thoughts I might have to do more work – a lingering death for wine-bulletin boards? Well given the reach of that site, comment will now be all the poorer for erp members (subscribers); passing winemakers and ‘experts’ in general will no longer be able to contribute. Comment and info will certainly be diminshed for the subscribers by this, though perhaps other sites will be strengthened…

Please note that the Bulletin Board will be closed until Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at approximately 6:00 p.m. EDT in order to convert the forum to subscriber-only access. Please note the statement released by eRobertParker.com today:

—————– Back in November, 2001, we launched eRobertParker.com with the goal of creating the world’s best wine information site. Our objective was simple. We wanted to provide independent reviews of the best wines in the world and encourage open discussion of them to the benefit of the participants. Toward that end, we invited Mark Squires to bring his Wine Talk Bulletin Board over to the site and offered it openly and freely to all, subsidized by our subscription revenues. Virtually overnight the board became the Internet’s premier forum for wine discussion. It has grown dramatically in size and stature as the population of wine lovers grew. At the outset, we asked Mark to maintain his philosophy of insisting on real names and email addresses. This approach sought civilized, non-commercial discussion of wine. Over the years the Internet and the board have changed. Supervising the huge volume of posts has become increasingly time consuming and expensive. At the same time, we’ve noted that the subscriber-only forums we created some time back are increasingly popular and much easier to manage. Moreover, we’re committed to providing even more functionality and greater coverage of wines for our subscribers in the near future. This will require us to spend wisely. We are a small company with limited resources and, after months of deliberation, we’ve come to the conclusion that it is in the best interest of the people who count most – our subscribers – that we change our policy with regard to the bulletin board. On April 27, the entire Mark Squires’ Bulletin Board on eRobertParker.com will become a subscriber-only forum, open only to subscribers of Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate or eRobertParker.com. A notice to our print subscribers on how to continue/gain access to the subscriber-only board was sent with the April print edition. Once an eRobertParker.com subscriber is logged onto the site they can access the BB but they must logon to it in order to post. Change is always difficult but, like this action, often necessary. We are sorry to say goodbye to those posters to Mark Squires’ Bulletin Board who are not subscribers, and who have made valuable contributions. We will miss you, but our overwhelming goal is more focused support and assistance to our subscribers, who are our bloodline of support and make all the fascinating features of the bulletin board possible. We look forward to better serving our loyal subscribers through a more focused effort on them. As always, we wish each and every one of you all the best in wine and life.

Maybe it’s back to the paywall debate or perhaps the erp winos were just too tough to handle. Anyway wasn’t it clever of them to shut everything without warning, so that I can’t delete all my old posts!

I’ve been following the debate about ‘paywalls’; the knight on a white charger (for the newspaper-centric generation/workers) seems to be Rupert Murdoch who’s British titles the Times and Sunday Times will, in June, be put behind a paywall, joining his business title, the Wall Street Journal, which has operated for a while in such a manner.

Rupert is mad that search engines (for instance) can aggregate his content and splurge it out wherever they (or the end reader) may be – and all for free. How is a newspaper to survive? Well I’m not sure a newspaper can remain economically viable in the current environment, so let’s for now say ‘news organisation’. Even then it is tough – good journalists are expensive. Look at the BBC graphic to the right and you can see that they spend £122 million on websites, another £61 million on the BBC News 24 channel, and it’s any-one’s guess how much of the large £1393 million piece of the cake goes towards news-gathering and journalism in general – importantly (other than for a few Brits who pay a licence fee) it is completely free to the global web audience.

It’s no wonder then that while father Murdoch is targeting the online giants, his son is greasing the palms of politicians in order to get the BBC onto a significantly shorter leash. That’s rather ‘proactive’ targeting of their perceived competition.

So the Murdochs expect that we should pay a fee to ‘read their newspaper’ online. But is that still a newspaper-centric view?

Clearly if you buy a newspaper you read a significant proportion of the content that you’ve paid for – maybe it makes us more well-rounded individuals! But personally I buy a newspaper only 2 or 3 times per year, I gain my news from the BBC, Times, Guardian, NY Times, Economist, Google News etc., etc., i.e. websites, and importantly I tend to look at the entry-page, cherry-pick the stories of interest then move to the next site. Let’s call it news-browsing. So why would I pay for the whole of the Times website, when I might read only 3 or 4 stories per day? The correct answer is – I wouldn’t, it’s just one less site that I’ll visit in a day.

Of-course that remains the case only while I have other options; if the BBC is reigned in and other ‘news-providers’ follow the Murdoch gambit, then eventually I must acquiesce. The problem for the Murdochs today is that a significant energy barrier must be overcome to get somebody to pay online, and (from my perspective) it’s still the newspaper model where I pay for all content even if I don’t read it. They might prefer the cross-subsidising model, but I prefer, as a consumer, to pay for what I read – if I have to pay – and of-course where the Times’ competitors see strategic advantage from remaining free (assuming advertising or whatever business models keep their heads above water) I’m probably not paying 😉

As of today am travelling in Burgundy for a few days – clearly that will be tough! But I thought I should leave you with this link; I’ve been enjoying the pics on my desktop (you need screen capture software) for weeks now – it’s almost a pleasure to switch on my work desktop.

Not all of them have a ‘watermark’ – not yet anyway 😉

http://www.panogeo.fr/ – enjoy….