I am getting ready to leave one of my favorite cities in the world: Bruges (Brugge), Belgium and I thought I should take a bit of time to close out the first phase of our monthly challenge. All the posts that have been submitted are below, we ended up with nine ten, which is not bad, I guess for the first go around.

Brugge

As for the next step, here is what I propose: We vote on the best post. Why vote? Why not? It is not the competitive aspect of voting that I think is of benefit here (although if it encourages us to really be at our best when writing, I am all for it), but rather the judging aspect of voting. In other words, I think while reading the posts to determine which we think is the best, we also examine what we consider to be good writing. This, in turn, helps us to become more aware ourselves.

If that makes any sense.

It is not an overly complex process that I propose and anyone can vote, whether you contributed a post or not. Simply send me your top three favorite posts to jeff (at) thedrunkencyclist.com (by the way, it is very easy and free to set up an email account using your domain name–let me know if you want more info). Just a couple of “rules”:

1. Use whatever criteria you like to determine your top three.
2. Don’t vote for yourself if you wrote a post.
3. The “winner” will host the next monthly challenge, which includes selecting the topic.
4. You can’t vote for the host (which this time is me).
5. All votes are due by July 15th.

Let me know if you are completely against the voting thing, but I think it could be fun and informative.

Here are the “submissions”:

The Armchair Sommelier

The Drunken Cyclist

Duff’s Wines

The Food and Wine Hedonist

Food Wine Click

Oenophilogical

Talk-a-Vino

The Winegetter

The Wine Raconteur

Twelve Dollar Taste Buds