Grape Wall been on a somewhat involuntary sabbatical in recent months. While I have sent out some China wine newsletters (sign up here with your email address), visitors to this site will have noticed an, uh, absence of posts.
That’s due to two factors.
One, I am crap at technology. After mucking up the back end of this site, and trying a hundred or so fixes, I went through the painful process of moving it from a friend’s server account to my own, which is about as fun as putting together a space shuttle from spare parts.
Two, I have been busy. I had a bunch of projects to finish toward the end of the year, spent an unexpectedly huge amount of time on our month-long Maovember charity campaign, and took a long-overdue Christmas break at home before returning to Beijing and rushing to get work done ahead of the Chinese New Year holidays.
No excuses, just explanations.
Anyway, it looks like the site is, as of this morning, fully accessible. And that means I’ll not only again be posting on happenings in the China wine scene but also catching up on lots of news, including on the Ningxia Wine Challenge and its USD30,000 in prizes (see collage above), trips to Argentina and South Africa (with an eye toward the China market) and dozens of Chinese wine tastings in which I’ve been involved these past several months (with consumers, distributors, restaurant managers and more). I’ll also have the results of the 2014 Grape Wall Challenge, held in December in Beijing at Temple (see collage below), where we asked Chinese consumers to judge wines that retail for less than rmb100.
This site still has some problems, and I’ll be doing some tweaking in coming weeks, but at least its heart is beating again.
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Bravo!