After writing my article about Decanting Wine, in which I explained why to decant wine, a few good questions were asked.  Combined, these questions essentially led to one big question.  How do I know how old a wine is and how long to decant it?  That certainly is a big question, and while there is some common sense involved here, this is where experience starts to count.

When I first started getting into wine, it wasn't my fault.  It certainly wasn't my parents fault either.  They believed wine in a box was all they needed to satisfy friends and family.  That is what I grew up drinking, or should I say, not drinking!  Wine from a box tasted green, acidic, and just plain bad.  In today's world, these wines would be rated well below 80 points and would be considered to have many flaws that warrant such a bad score.

Since the VinoCellar.com Wine Forums have been updated, I've been hard at work making improvements to the site.  While there are still a few larger hurdles to get over, I'm definitely making some great progress based on feedback from users in the Feedback Center.  Anytime a user makes a suggestion it is logged for public display.  Other users can then vote for the suggestion, whether they like the idea and think I should spend time on it, or whether they don't like the idea.  The thought being, I will spend more time on suggestions with more positive (or thumbs up) votes. 

While I may sometimes go for the quick win and quickly implement a feature or suggestion someone has made, such as Edit Capability in the forums or Spell Checking, I will try to spend the bulk of my time on the bug fixes and feature improvements that matter most to the most users.  I unfortunately can't do everything suggested, and some items I won't do because they might go against the vision I have for Vinocellar, but overall, I'll be doing my best.

At the time of this writing, a couple popular items in the Feedback Center are to fix the user titles based on the amount of posts a person has, and to fix the post counts for everyone.  This is definitely high on the priority list and will be fixed soon.

Keep that feedback coming everyone! 

Vinocellar.com has just gone through a major upgrade.  As you'll notice the entire site looks a lot different.  The forums are now part of the main website and integrated very tightly.  There is a new Private Messaging system, and some old useless features like the GoogleMaps tab is gone. 

Is all this change good?  In the long run... Yes! Definitely!  I realize however there is still some work to do.... there are some usability issues, a couple bugs here and there, and the site honestly is pretty drab, but over the next few days and weeks I'm going to keep updating the site based on your feedback in the Feedback Center. 

Once the forums are running smoothly and everyone is logged in and happy with the change, I'll then begin to implement some new free features.  Finally.... after four years, I'm getting to the good stuff.  I've even modified my work hours during the week so I can spend more time working on Vinocellar.  It's amazing what a trip to Sonoma will do to a person. 

In closing, thank you all for being a part of Vinocellar, and thanks for your patience during this transition period!  I'm working hard to make sure it's a place you want to stay!