French Malbec dot com

I try not to go on too much about the shortcomings of French wine marketing, because there are plenty of them, I don't pretend to know the whole story, and I don't wish this to become a single-issue blog. So it's especially exciting whenever there are signs of things being done a bit differently. I have in mind this site, French Malbec, which seems to be a central resource for the Malbecs of the South West and a forthcoming festival rather than for French Malbec as a whole (by the by, we're expecting a few cases of the Malbec from Guy Allion in the Loire Valley that I mentioned recently), but which is many of the things other similar sites and initiatives are not. It's clearly laid out, totally tagtastic and RSS-laden, not pompous, not parochial, it is up and running where it claims to be, and it's in English. The wines of SW France are pretty bright on my radar, and following the successful visit to Cork of Clos Triguedina's Jean Raymond Clarenc last year, a few more of our customers are enjoying the hearty, meat-loving reds of Cahors. But today I'm very impressed with ReSMO, who came up with the malbecdays site, and have also helped Chateau Haut-Brion and Chateau Palmer down the slip road to the information superhighway. I just don't know why such questions as

Should you build the site you want or the one your visitors expect?

should seem so extraordinary coming from a country where there are plenty of IT folk and people in general aren't too afraid of philosophical six-markers. But if more of those making great wine or those they pay to sell it got with the ReSMO program, everyone would be a lot better off.