It is only fitting that I publish this post on the last day of 2024 to tell you what happened with Texas Wine Lover during 2024. This year was incredibly busy for us as the Texas wine industry continues to get more recognition worldwide and Texas Wine Lover is right there helping to promote it.
We came out with the Texas Wine Lover mobile app two years ago this month and the popularity of the app has consistently received more downloads every week. As I write this today, since the launch of the app, there has been 4,360 iOS and 1,000 Android downloads. That’s over 5,000 individual people learning more about the Texas wine industry!
If you haven’t already downloaded the app, please do so now. If you are on your smartphone, the link in the previous sentence should direct you to your correct app store so it can be downloaded. We would appreciate for you to take a couple of minutes and please leave a rating and review. The more ratings and reviews the app gets, the higher it rises in the search results, which in turn means more exposure to Texas wine. Even if you have downloaded the app already, you can still go back and give a review.
The most popular features of the website Guide and mobile app are, of course, finding where all the Texas wineries are. But beyond that, events are very popular at wineries whether it be listening to live music, attending wine education, or other types of events. Wineries who have claimed their listing in the website Guide and mobile app can add their events, and this in turn helps the rest of us find those events to attend. Once you find the wineries to attend, you then use the custom planning feature in the mobile app to Plan Your Trip. When you’re ready to go, the app can even give you directions!
To give you some information about the winery listings on the website Guide and mobile app, we are currently listing 522 wineries and tasting rooms. Out of those 522 wineries, 309 wineries and tasting rooms (59%) have claimed their listings. That means they now have ownership of those listings and can keep them updated with their days/hours open, add photos, and add events. If you are not seeing a winery’s listing updated, please let them know.
Here are other highlights for 2024 for Texas Wine Lover:
- There were nine writers who wrote at least one blog post in 2024. You can find most of those writers in our very active Facebook group Texas Wine Friends which has a very engaged audience of both wine industry and consumers. Cynthia Spanhel joined the writing team in 2024, and we look forward to more of her posts in 2025.
- Even though the concentration of my work this year has been primarily on the website Guide and mobile app, the Texas Wine Lover team ended up writing 191 blog posts in 2024. We will always be writing about our visits to Texas wineries plus other important Texas wine news and events.
- Often there is news that might not need a lot of words for a blog post. Since the inception of Texas Wine Lover, the header of the website has said “The premier website for Texas wine news and information.” To help that statement, we now have a special News Flash page where the information we learn can be seen. If you hear of something new that you think others may be interested in, please let me know.
- We wrote our first Winemaker Profile in February 2014 and since then there were only two months at the beginning where a profile was not published. Other than that, every month since 2014 we have had a featured winemaker. That’s over 129 winemakers! We started publishing a Grower Profile in 2023 and every month there has also been a Grower Profile.
- 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. This year we created a special Wine Competition Results page to help you find all the wine competition results we have published. Four of the Texas Wine Lover writers including myself helped judge some of these competitions in 2024.
- To help get all the wine lovers together so we can all know each other better, we coordinated two events at Siboney Cellars and Airis’Ele Vineyards. I am sure there will be more in 2025, and the best way to learn about them is to join our Texas Wine Friends Facebook group.
- More Texas wine trails joined the website Guide and mobile app, and they have a listing in the Trails/Trips menu item in the mobile app. Some wine trails also have their Passport events listed there, so please help support the wine trails and their group of wineries.
- Texas Wine Jam held its popular wine festival again this year. Texas Wine Lover was a sponsor and special Trips were created in the mobile app for each day that showed all the wineries pouring wine on that day along with the wines they were pouring including any special prices.
- I want to thank the advertisers who partnered with Texas Wine Lover in 2024 as we helped those advertisers showcase their businesses and bring their way more business. Texas Wine Lover is not free to create and maintain, so the advertisers are very instrumental in helping to keep bringing Texas Wine Lover to you. Please support our advertisers!
- Social media numbers for Texas Wine Lover are currently as follows as I write this: 13,073 Facebook Followers (all organic [that means we did not pay for any follows)]) for our Facebook page, 7,155 members of the very active Facebook group, 5,238 X/Twitter followers, and 6,157 followers on Instagram. Our email subscriber list has continually grown. Have you subscribed to our mailing list yet to get our weekly newsletter?
We are not just sitting around, as even this holiday season, I have been working with developers on the website and mobile app. There are a lot of menu items to the numerous references on the website, so we added some shortcut buttons on the website’s home page to the most popular features to help you find them easier.
To make it easier for you to find Events in your area, we also worked with the mobile app team and added a Region filter, just like on the Wineries list, so you can select from the five different regions we use.
You may have seen some Texas Wine Lover advertising recently on social media as we continue to let everyone know about Texas wine and the features we have to help them find wineries and wine.
I am sure there is something we did in 2024 that I am forgetting right now as there was a lot. I want to thank all of Texas Wine Lover’s followers and all of the Texas wine industry for your support in 2024. It takes a lot of commitment and work to bring you all the Texas wine news and information, but we look forward to doing the same in 2025. Here’s to you for a healthy and happy wine-filled 2025! Cheers!
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