Update re Don Rice's Loire Wine bibliography url

Hi Robin and all, yes I'm still alive!

For a number of years now I've been putting together a bibliography of Loire Valley viticulture texts - using my old aol account as host for the pages. But now that aol has discontinued its ftp hosting, I've had to move the site to a new web address.

For years now Robin has kindly published a link to this work-in-progress on the Wine Lover's Page/Favorite Wine Links. As of last week however, the listed url has stopped working, so for those among you who are interested in Loire viticulture history and texts I hope you won't mind if I post the new address here:

http://homepage.mac.com/donrice1/bib/bibintro.html

Cheers,
Don Rice
New York City

[David M. Bueker]

Thanks for the update Don!

[Robin Garr]

Hey, Don, it's good to see you!

To be honest, while our links pages were once an important part of the site's "portal" aspect, links lists have become a much lower priority because of two Google-related issues: On the plus side, Google has become so mature that it's generally easier to find your current link with a well-tuned Google search than by going to any links page; on the negative side, so many sites now exist primarily to lure Google AdSense hits that it's much harder to distinguish between the legitimate and the faux in making a quality links list. Bottom line, maintaining a quality list of links is now much more difficult and much less rewarding.

But all that being said, I'll dig into the database this week and find and change your URL. Good links never HURT!

Hope you'll hang around and talk wine with us now and then ... last I heard, you found a growing family was taking over from wine yakity yak in your life, right?

Good to hear from you Robin!

That's right, we've got 9 and 7 year old boys now - time has flown. But I'm back now, at least a little bit, into the internet wine culture.
I remember well all the good times we had together back in the day - the Apterfests, Nicefests, Minettafests, the LaurelGlen vertical... I still see Dave Sit about once a year along with a few other Compuserve oldtimers. Still a strong bond there.

Re the subject at hand, I'm excited about how the emergence of GoogleBooks, Gallica and other online text sources will enhance our ability to access important viticulture texts, eventually making a reference library freely accessible to anyone.

So with this in mind I've started adding links to the original scanned publications, adding figures and more annotation, and trying to make the work as readable as possible (the bilingual nature being the one rough spot) with the ultimate goal of creating a Loire viticulture resource from which scholars as well as casual readers can branch out to do their own exploring whenever something catches their interest.

My, all this reading makes one thirsty...

Happy election day,
Don