I know it’s been like, forever (sorry about that) since my last wine tasting.  No! i haven’t dropped off the planet or been turned off of wine.  In fact, I am enjoying a wine right now.  The trouble is that the time that it takes to actually produce an episode is much longer than most think.  So to not seem like a jerk, i will explain where most of the time goes.

The actual episode doesn’t take much more than however long it actually is.  I really only spend about 10 or 15 minutes cleaning up the set and setting up the camera.  then 15 – 30 minutes for the actual episode.  Then comes the long part, conversion.  well the truth is first i have to transfer the episode to my computer, but that doesn’t take very long, maybe 10 or 15 minutes.  But after that, I have to convert to the ipod format as well as encode the file to a much smaller size (so that I can upload it to viddler). Encoding usually takes a couple of hours, probably around 4 hours for both files to be created.

Lately, our internet here has become an absolute joke.  What I mean by this is that I am unable to transfer any substantial amount of data in a reasonable amount of time.  Both ipod and viddler files need to be transferred from my home computer, and that usually totals to about 100 MB.  With our current internet service (if you can call it a service), this would take several days to complete, which is unacceptable and obviously a very large burden for me to deal with.  This definitely does not mean the end of WineMeTV, simply that I must put the show on hiatus.  I may in fact attempt to upload an episode sometime soon, but I have no guarantees how long things will take.

I just wanted to inform everyone, because I really enjoy doing these shows.  This issue won’t last forever, either the problem will be fixed (cough cough, shaw internet) or we will simply find a new provider of services.

In the mean time, please enjoy some wine on your own, and I’ll let you know as soon as I am back to recording episodes.

This one took a while to get posted, and I’ll tell you why.  Lately we have been experiencing some troubling problems with our internet.  According to several forum posts at dslreports.com I can see that my house is not singled out, it would appear rather that shaw is employing some new high tech packet shaping (not really) and it severely cripples our internet bandwidth.  This is obviously very frustrating, because even though they are doing this to crack down on internet piracy, they are inadvertently crippling legitimate internet usage.  In the end, I have found some loop holes that allow me to get by for the time being, but a long term solution remains to be found.

Enough about that, onto the wine.  This episode I taste a little more expensive Californian white produced with the Chenin Blanc grape.  It was quite tart, so much so that it had my eyes watering a little near the end of the episode.  Now don’t take this the wrong way, it’s not as though the wine is unbearably tart, the wine just caught me off guard.  This morning I had some unsweetened grapefruit juice (which I really really like, seriously, best juice ever!) and it reminded me a little of the level of tartness that the wine was bringing.  I also noticed last night (when i had a glass that had decanted a little longer) that the aroma had a slight dampness component to it, which i enjoyed.

I know I said I was going to try and reduce the time of these episodes, but this one still creeped in at 15 and a half minutes.  I’ll try better next time to make the video a little less talk.  Another idea I had recently is to get the wine tasted in the first 5 minutes, and then follow up with stories, side notes, and whatever else is on my mind.  We’ll see what I come up with next time.  Enjoy the episode.

Another episode ready for you all to watch.  Today (as well as next time) I deal with the white variety of californian wines.  I also tried some cheese with this wine, something that I plan on continuing to do in future episodes.  I totally forgot to show the bottle (again) so I posted up an image here like I did for episode three.  The cheese really was surprisingly good after sipping the wine, I recommend that everyone give this a try.