2021 Texas Wine Lover Year in Review

Another year is ending so that means it’s another time for my annual year in review. 2020 brought on new things like the pandemic and we all thought 2021 would be the end of it, but we discovered that wasn’t true.

We did start seeing some easing up during the beginning of the year as Texas wineries started opening up again without all the restrictions given by the Texas governor. We had some posts about the mask mandate that eventually eased up throughout the year. Virtual tastings still proved to be popular and Texas Fine Wine continued their virtual tastings all year.

Here are some highlights of 2021 for Texas Wine Lover:

• We had nine writers who wrote at least one blog post in 2021. Those writers came from Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, Fredericksburg, Houston, and more covering the state.
• 2021 was quieter in blog posts because of the pandemic but we still published at least one post every week and ended up writing 112 posts.
• Texas Wine Lover continues to be the only website to bring you all the major wine competition results with Texas wineries being filtered out from the results. Thankfully, the wine competitions started again in 2021 and I judged the most wine competitions in one year than I ever have including one in upstate New York.
• We still continued the monthly winemaker feature. I just looked and cannot believe the first winemaker profile was published in January 2014 and we have published one every month. I am looking for Texas winemakers to be featured in 2022 so if you are a winemaker who has not been or you know a winemaker who hasn’t been, please contact me.
• Wine festivals also were hurt greatly during the pandemic. Our list of Texas wine festivals under the Fun Stuff menu on the website was still a challenge trying to keep up with because of multiple changes due to the pandemic, but people enjoyed getting out again. I will be working on the 2022 wine festival list soon. I have already had some wine festival coordinators contact me on next year’s plans, so if you haven’t told me yet, please let me know and we’ll get your wine festival added to the list.
• Advertisers continued supporting Texas Wine Lover and we helped them to let consumers know about them. Please look at the direct ads on the website and please support our advertisers!
• Social media numbers for Texas Wine Lover are currently as follows as I write this: 10,812 Facebook Likes (all organic [that means we did not pay for any Likes unlike some other Facebook pages]) for our Facebook page, 4,515 members of the very active Facebook group, 4,818 Twitter followers, and 4,169 followers on Instagram. Our email subscriber list has continually grown. Have you subscribed to our mailing list yet?

A very popular feature of the Texas Wine Lover website is the winery map where everyone can find Texas wineries to visit on a map. There is also a winery list where you can filter by certain criteria. The end result of those two areas gets you to a specific page, one page for each winery. On that page we list basic data about each winery including every blog post we have written about that winery.

I haven’t announced it yet, so this is the first time you are hearing we have now added the business days and hours for each winery on their winery page. How cool is that? We will be enhancing the filter soon so if you want to know, for example, what wineries are open in Fredericksburg on Monday when you are there, you will now be able to find out.

The enhancing of the winery detail pages was essential due to another feature I am pre-announcing here for the first time. I have been quieter writing since August because I am working with developers to create a Texas Wine Lover mobile app featuring the data from the Texas Wine Lover winery map and list! There will be more data about each winery available in the app than currently exists along with some cool features for only you.

I have a personal background in software development (I am currently a software program manager) but I never realized it would be this hard to have an app created! The app is coming along, and we will have plenty of opportunities for businesses to participate where we can help consumers find them. The app for both Android and iOS will be available in 2022!

It looks to be an exciting 2022. Cheers!