2022 Texas Wine Lover Year in Review

It’s that time at the end of the year when I tell what happened during the year with Texas Wine Lover. Without a doubt, the big news for 2022 was the redesign of the website, the addition of the Guide along with the Plan Your Trip feature, and the Texas Wine Lover® mobile app.

I looked at last year’s Year in Review post and I preannounced the mobile app we were working on. That mobile app was the first version we attempted. The company hired was incapable of creating it, so we had to scrap everything, and start from scratch again. Instead of doing just a mobile app though, that’s when we realized to do it right, we had to redesign the website and also add a Guide to display Texas winery information along with local businesses. All that data then gets sent to the mobile app. Look for an upcoming post with more behind-the-scenes detail.

I did say in last year’s Year in Review post that “The app for both Android and iOS will be available in 2022!” Even though I had to pivot (it seems lots of businesses pivot these days), we accomplished my statement when everything was launched on December 16^th!

Please be sure to check out the Guide with all the data plus more than the mobile app. Then go to your app store (Apple or Android) and download the app. Search for “texas wine lover” today. I say today because the more ratings and reviews the app gets, the higher it rises in the search results, so eventually, someone searching for just “texas wine” will find it. So, please download, give a 5-star rating, and please write a short review. Let’s show the other states in the U.S. that we are proud of our Texas wine and we have a mobile app to prove that!

Looking again at last year’s Year in Review post, I announced how the winery pages on the website now showed open business days and hours. I didn’t forget that and we made sure the new Guide and mobile app had even more information! Now you can do a search on wineries and filter on particular days that are open. In the search results in the Guide, there are buttons now that will announce whether that winery is currently open, soon to open, soon to close, etc. Now for example, if I am in Fredericksburg on a Monday, I can easily see what wineries will be open so I can visit them. How cool is that?

Here are other highlights for 2022 for Texas Wine Lover:

• There were 11 writers who wrote at least one blog post in 2022. Wow! Those are writers from all over the state so we can cover the Texas wine industry better.
• Speaking of writers, we added four new writers to the Texas Wine Lover team giving even better coverage. Welcome Neal Addy, Laurinda Thomas, Amie Nemec, and Eric Sigmund to the team!
• The Texas Wine Lover team ended up writing 177 blog posts in 2022. That is 58% more blog posts than we wrote in 2021!
• We still continue to be the only website to bring you all the major wine competition results with Texas wineries being filtered out from the results. Texas wineries did fantastic getting medals in international wine competitions in 2022. I judged four wine competitions in 2022 and it was nice to see other Texas Wine Lover writers judging too.
• The monthly winemaker feature continued every month in 2022. Since we started doing the monthly winemaker feature in 2014, we have now featured 104 Texas winemakers over the years! And we’ll continue to do more next year. Please let any Texas winemakers who have not been featured yet to in contact with me.
• The Texas wine festivals list has always proved popular and festivals were popular again in 2022. We will be working soon on the 2023 wine festival, so if you are affiliated with a wine festival, please send us the information!
• I want to thank the advertisers who partnered with Texas Wine Lover in 2022 as we helped those advertisers showcase their businesses. They were instrumental in helping to fund the website redesign and mobile app work. Please support our advertisers!
• Social media numbers for Texas Wine Lover are currently as follows as I write this: 12,073 Facebook (Followers are the new Facebook Likes) (all organic [that means we did not pay for any unlike some other Facebook pages]) for our Facebook page, 5,285 members of the very active Facebook group, 4,865 Twitter followers, and 4,623 followers on Instagram. Our email subscriber list has continually grown. Have you subscribed to our mailing list yet?

It was a tiring 2022 year with all the development and writing Texas Wine Lover did, but we are relaxing during the holidays and getting ready for a stronger 2023! Cheers!