We hope to help you find wines you will enjoy, as well as find new grapes and blends to try.

1) If you see a review here, you know the wine is *big* — feels big in the mouth and has lots of flavor — and that we’re enthusiastic about it.

2) We focus on the grapes and blends that deserve more attention than they get.

3) We focus more on the overall experience of drinking a wine, not just points and tasting notes.

We hope that if you search for a wine and our review comes up, you will have enough information to make a good decision about whether to buy it.

You could be: 1) researching wines to buy in the future; 2) looking for new grapes and blends to try; 3) looking at bottles on a store shelf; 4) looking at a wine list at a restaurant.

We’ll also typically include links to the wine maker’s website, and to help find a place to buy the wine. We hope to interview many wine makers and suggest winery tours, so we’ll also link off to those articles.

Just to be clear, there are many other perfectly good approaches to writing wine reviews.

Writing up your tasting notes is useful, and publishing them is a fine thing to do. We get together and taste wine and write up our notes and discuss the flavors. It’s a lot of fun, and helps us learn.

Writing up wine pairings is useful… except that Great Big Reds mostly all go great with the same kinds of foods. We eat a lot of spicy foods and sometimes indulge in a steak.

Here’s an extreme (epic?) example of pairing-blogging from Crushed Grape Chronicles. That’s a good article. In fact, next time I find myself in a famous Parisian bistro looking at oysters in salt water, I’m sure I’ll check the wine list for picpoul.

If you think about a wine review, the description of the wine can be quite short. What goes around the description so that you have an article, not a paragraph? I stumbled across this syrah review, in which the author seemed to channel the wild spirit of syrah. Don’t worry: no scantily-clad selfies at GreatBigReds.com. (Question, though: if she’s channeling syrah so beautifully, what’s up with gamay?)

@SLBriscoe is developing her style, with engaging tasting notes. Here’s a mourvedre review.

Note: Team Great Big Reds will attend the Wine Bloggers Conference (#WBC17) in Santa Rosa in November. We’re getting a “Citizen Wine Blogger” discount to attend, in exchange for which we agreed to write at least three posts mentioning the conference.

In fact, we’re also just getting this website going, and needed to think through what we would like to do in our reviews. We looked at a wide variety of wine blogs. We hope this post — what we focus on, plus other possible approaches — can add at least a little to the conversation about wine blogging.