Welcome to Laurie Daniel on Wine. It’s been a long time in the making.

Yes, I’m late to the game. I’ve been working in the old media – print – because that’s where I was making my income. You may have read my wine writing online because my various employers would post it there. But I decided it was time to take control of my online footprint. Thanks for checking me out.

Let me start by telling you a little bit about me. I grew up in a wine-deprived family. We lived in the Midwest, but our roots were in Kentucky and the beverage of choice was bourbon. That, and the occasional beer on a hot summer weekend. Wine was such a non-factor in my family that when my parents were married, they got iced tea glasses in their crystal pattern, but no wine glasses.

That gradually started to change when I was in high school. My aunt discovered off-dry German riesling and got my mother to try it. After that, wine started showing up occasionally on the dinner table, and I was sometimes offered a small glass.

When I reached legal drinking age and left college, I moved east, to the Baltimore area, where most of the decent wine in those days (I guess I’m dating myself) was French. But the wine that changed my life was a 1974 Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

The wine was served at a food editors’ conference in 1979 in Washington, D.C., and everyone at the table was talking about it. I was amazed at the depth and complexity of flavor. I started shopping for California wines.

So when I moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1980, I began to explore California wines in earnest. The best way to learn about wine is to taste a lot of wine, and I pursued the task with a passion, attending wine tastings, visiting wineries and buying wine to consume at home. My collection grew rapidly.

Even though I was drinking a lot of wine and talking about it incessantly, it remained a hobby. In real life, I was editing first national and then local news at the San Jose Mercury News. But after moving to the features department, I took my first tentative steps as an occasional wine writer. My obsession had finally become a career path. That was more than 20 years ago.

Since then, I’ve written about wine for newspapers, magazines and online publications. My work has appeared in publications ranging from consumer magazines like Food & Wine and Wine Country Living to trade publications like Wines & Vines and Beverage Dynamics. But my longest-running gig was a regular wine column in the San Jose Mercury News and, more recently, its sister publications in the Bay Area News Group. (To jump-start this site, I’ve included a few pieces that appeared in the newspapers last year.)

Most newspapers, however, are struggling, and my column recently fell victim to ongoing cutbacks. It will end soon.

I’ve been reading recently that the wine blog is dead. (Great timing on my part, right?) That’s such a blanket statement that I doubt it’s true, although I do agree there has been and will continue to be a winnowing among wine blogs that people actually want to read because the writers have something relevant to say. I hope you’ll find that my writing is not only relevant, but also educational and entertaining.

Cheers!