In keeping with the theme for the month, February was a virtual love-in for Curious Wines! We’ll be playing Stairway to Heaven on endless repeat and passing out the joss sticks any minute now.

Wine reviewer Blake Creedon made our month (and possibly our year) when Curious Wines got full fun of his weekly column, Grapevine, in the Irish Examiner. His glowing write up started out:

Ireland’s latest online retailer, Curious Wines, has certainly gotten off to a flying start. Launched late last year, from day one their online presence has been an easy-to-use, friendly and comprehensive site… It would surprise you how many big, rich, high-profile sites get it all wrong…

…and just got better from there. We’ve got a PDF of the article and we’re showing it around like baby pictures, we’re so proud.

To our great delight, we also took home a great big gong at the Digital Media Awards, winning our category for Best Commercial Website in Ireland. (You better believe the champagne corks popped that night!) We were also chuffed to bits to find this very blog shortlisted for Best Business Blog at the Irish Blog Awards - an enormous compliment considering we’ve only been blogging since the end of November. We lost out to the very worthy Blacknight blog, and had a fabulous evening at the Awards anyway.

Lar Veale at the esteemed SourGrapes.ie kindly popped over the day after the Blog Awards to do a video wine tasting of our exclusive Santa Alicia Reserve Sauvignon Blanc:

Cracking value at only €9.99 and beats the pants off anything from your local supermarket.

Thanks, Lar! (Also, we dig your funky theme music.)

We also had our very first in-store review; wine lover Brian Clayton came to the warehouse, took photos, shopped his socks off and wrote a rave review. He travelled down with his dad and his uncle looking for an alternative to their regular buying jaunts to the continent, and declared the Curious Wines Experience to be:

…just like shopping in France - bar the temperature!

Our Twitter cup overfloweth’d with kind customer comments last month, too:

• ManicMammy: Lovin’ the Babe. Popped into y’all @curiouswines earlier so all stocked up again. Happy days!
• keithnolan: Have you tried @curiouswines yet? Highly recommended - I’m saving for my third case from them.
• davidrconway: Just got off the phone from home. Those nice chaps @curiouswines delivered the goods in jig time again. Gonna be a good weekend chez moi.
• elfinamsterdam: @CuriousWines my mum was extolling your company’s virtues to my wine snob uncle who shops with your competitors. Expect a visit soon!

To be perfectly honest, while we’ll never turn down an award and we’re thrilled to bits with February’s successes, it’s this kind of world of mouth and compliments from customers that mean the most. And lets face it - you can have all the awards in the world, but without fabulous customers, there’s no Curious Wines!