A Quick Look Back... and Ahead to 2025

A few reflections but mostly how I'm going to evolve the Cork Report in 2025

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From my humble beginnings as a blogger twenty-plus years ago, I’ve always wanted to change things up and try new things — even if it means failing along the way. From a personal blog, to a team blog with more than a dozen contributors, back to a personal blog, failing terribly at podcasting, then to Substack, to adding an editorial calendar…. you get the idea. Throughout all of those iterations, I got married, had kids, added additional responsibilities at my day job, and watched those kids grow up (my oldest is graduating from high school in June) — all which impacted how much time I had to dedicate to this more-than-a-hobby.

Many of you have been here through much or even all of that — so thank you.

I have high standards for the type of content I produce for The Cork Report. I didn’t quite live up to those standards in 2024 — especially in the past several months. Having a high school senior and not wanting to miss anything he’s doing for the last time will do that, I guess.

Still, I want to write as much as I can with the time I have to devote to it. And I want to focus on what is great about East Coast wine. I want to bring you the best of the best of the best — and in a meaningful way.

To help with that focus, I’m going to make some small tweaks and some plans for 2025:

• A single “Wine of the Week” will replace multiple “Drink This” each week. Roughly one wine per week will get the full review treatment. The rest will be published in the “Tasting Table” posts that I do periodically. This is just a matter of writing volume for me.

• Reviews for wines that score 85 or below will no longer be published. Almost from the beginning, I’ve wanted to be as comprehensive as someone doing this part time could be. I wanted to warn readers about the bad wines as much as I wanted to point them to the good stuff. Now I will focus on the good. Everything will still be tasted over three days, but only 86+ point wines will be written about in these pages.

• I’m adding year-end awards. You know that I don’t typically do the types of stories that everyone else does, but to further highlight what I consider the “best,” I’m going to do join the “Best [CATEGORY] of 2025” parade a year from now. I actually had a Winery of 2024 chosen in my mind, but never got everything pulled together to announce it. Apologies to that winery.

• Introducing “The East Coast Elite” — an classification of eastern wine. That’s just a working title, but I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years and I’ve toyed with the idea of tiers/growths/cru levels for many years. This is the year that I introduce a list that highlights the producers that I think deserve it. Expect much more on this soon, including the criteria that will guide my selections. I’m sure they’ll piss off plenty of people.

• I’m not giving up on audio — or even video — either. I’m an avid podcast listener and lately I find myself watching video podcasts too. I have next to no experience in video editing, but as long as you don’t expect perfectly polished video and audio from me, I can see some benefits to periodic subscriber-only episodes. Solo rants and guest interviews. No promises, but it’s always bubbling just beneath the surface.

Thank you, again, for coming along on this journey with me. Despite a focus on the greatness of Eastern wine, you’re still going to get the same independent, honest commentary that you come here for. That’ll never change.

Happy New Year!

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*sample submitted by winery