If you are heading to California any time soon, be sure to check out the California Winehiker’s Blog – It’s a Wine Blog. Here you are going to find a blog that blends both the love for outdoors and the love for wine culture in one handy spot. The goal at Winehikers is to provide their guests, who they esteem as treasured, with wine country experiences resulting in sensory satisfaction, rekindled vigor, and indelible memories. This is a blog about wine and hiking, the winehiking blog. The blog isn’t about just that however, you will find a wealth of information on tours, California wine country, and information on the Top 20 Wines. Take a sip of any of their recent bloggeries to get the true taste of the blog: Saturday Sippin’, For all you Vayniacs who don’t stay up late, Freewheelin Friday Links, Cabernet in July, Thirsty Thursday Links, Opening new doors in Winemaking, Gary Vaynerchuk Going Big-Time Tomorrow Night, Cougar, and Just one Week Left to Win that Bottle of Dominus.
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The navigation system on this blog is very easy. Posts are left marginalized with black text on white background, and there is a very appealing ‘vineyard feel’ green border around the blog with an attractive vineyard header. There is a right sided navigation bar that contains Winehiking information; a Case of Wine Contest; Subscription information; Testimonials for the site; Upcoming Tours information; Archives menu; as well as other food, wine, and hiking blogs. You will also find here the Categories menu that contains categories incuding Grape squeezins, Tasting notes, Tasting venues, Technical Stuff, Wine Reviews, and Winehikers trails. If you are a wine lover, or just a hiking lover, there is a wealth of information for you right on this site. And if nothing else, the active readership alone makes this blog a very credible read for its niche.
This blog gets a 3.4/5 from me. I would like to see a few things added. I think relevant pictures would give this blog a little more punch, and a recent posts menu would also add ease of navigation to the blog’s organization. I find there is a little too much ‘blogvertising’ in each post. Each post contains appeals for emailing, digging, commenting, voting for, subscribe to, all for this particular blog. I see the point and hope this method is working for the blogger, but as a reader I find this content in every single post extremely distracting and it takes away from the blog content. I find the content itself to be excellently written and with the personal voice that readers of blogs tend to enjoy. These suggestions are offered simply to improve what is already a very good blog. Overall I think the uniqueness of the blog, and its daily content are going to serve the ultimate purpose for the blog which is a strong following and inevitable success.
-Chrissie