Yep, this very day, on Dec. 3, 2006, I launched BiggerThanYourHead, and now it’s 950 posts and 2,161,609 visits later (according to Blue Host, the counting service I subscribe to), about the population of Houston or Managua. Much has changed in the world of blogging about wine in five years, mainly that there are about a hundred times more people doing this than there were then. I mean in the United States of America; worldwide, who knows? It boggles the mind. The majority of these bloggers perform their services and make their observations casually, off-the-cuff, for fun, as is true with any kind of blogging, but there’s a core that takes writing about wine and the industry, making reviews and commentary, quite seriously, a factor that leads to another change, and that is that wine-bloggers seem to be taken more seriously by the wine and marketing industries than they were five years ago. Do we make a difference? I don’t know. I do know that I’ll keep doing this until I can’t or until it seems superfluous. Thanks to all you readers for your support and your responses, for your votes in the annual American Wine Blog Awards (which gave me the award for Best Wine Reviews in 2009 and 2010) and for your enthusiasm. I’ll keep writing; you keep drinking. In moderation, of course.

Splendid fifth anniversary image from bostonuncorked.com.