We’re proud collectors of every tweet from every fan we ever get on Twitter, but quite honestly we’d be completely happy if all of those tweets consisted of Maurice O’Mahony’s “Yummmmmmmmmmr” praise. (He’s waxing eloquent about our rich Betton, but we’d like to think it applies to all our wines.)

To add to our ego-puffing press clippings, Curious got a mention in the Drinks News column in July issue of Easy Food, Ireland’s leading food magazine. We also got a nice mention in Silicon Republic, in an article about the impact Microsoft’s Bing search engine is having on Irish business. (In our case, none.)

Right in line with our recent wedding series, Brian Clayton is pitting us (or at least our wine) against our local friendly competitors at Bubble Brothers. He’s got stacks of booze from both of us and is calling in friends, family, neighbours and strangers off the street to help him pick the best wedding wine for his sister’s wedding. Luckily there is no vintner’s equivalent to throwing down the gauntlet!

And sticking with the wedding theme (we swear we did not plan this), two of our favourite Dievolino bottles fell victim to the tempting charms of luscious, hand-made gnocchi over at The Daily Spud:

The white, Dievole Dievolino Bianco Malvasia, was a very pleasant little number, smooth and with a little citrusy tang, which went down a treat with the gnocchi and made for a very happy first date. The red, Dievole Dievolino Rosso Sangiovese, with its healthy tannin hit, was a cracker which warmed up beautifully and for which all present declared immediate and undying love.

That’s the sort of love story we like to read about!

Yes we are slackers, but we do genuinely love our ardent Curious fans and so Monthly Love is back with a bang. (Our apologies for being tardy the last few months - we were waylaid by a warehouse full of wine.)

The New Zealand wine tasting event went down a treat with the punters; Robert Francis Wine has a full set of tasting notes and ManicMammy offered up (not turned up!) her nose as well. Brian Clayton shared his thoughts as a first-time eventer, although the title Wine Tastings are Fun! is pretty much all we needed to hear to make our hearts overfloweth:

All in all, it was a smashing night. I met a number of Irish wine names, everyone was very friendly and in great form. I was stunned by some of the revelations, mainly to do with how different in character a different ‘breed’ of a familiar grape can be. If you get any chance at all to attend a wine tasting, grasp it with both hands.

Our July and August sale on French wines was inspired by long-time fan Roseanne Smith [t], who let us know she was “Trying to recreate last year’s French jaunt in Ireland!” with a case of our fabulous French wines. Katherine O’Neil [t] chimed in to add “with Curious Wines, you can almost imagine yourself in the south of France. Happy days!” and so the 10% off sale was born. Thanks, ladies!

The ladies at Dine and Wine also plunged their thirsty little mits into a box of our goodies and came up smiling:

I had 3 wines from the delivery and I am pleasantly surprised. None of the wines in the box are over €10 which makes it a giggle to buy even when not on offer.

So there you go - spreading France, happiness and even giggles makes a good month for Curious!

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!

2009 has already been chock full of delight for Curious Wines - we kicked off with a bang when we found out we’ve been short listed for a Digital Media Award in the Best Commercial Website category. We’re super-excited and looking forward to the awards night on 13 February to see if we’ll be cracking open champagne.

Lar Veale at the wonderful SourGrapes.ie is pairing wines with the Irish Blog Awards Foodie Nominees; we’re delighted to be on that list, and even more delighted he summed up Curious thusly:

With a clear customer focus, a great selection of wines and web savvy, Curious will not just survive, but thrive in ‘09.

We’ll drink to that!

Roseanne Smith discovered that unpacking glorious cases of wine is fun for the whole family, and shared evidence of this with us:

Curiosity did not kill this cat - we promise he was wearing a lampshade well before the wine was delivered. (Either that, or this is a cat who really knows how to party.) There’s also great video of her kids jumping up and down on the packing bubble wrap; apparently they later turned the box into a space ship!

Meanwhile, back on Twitter, Curious Wines have been going down a treat with the drinking public:

• Smallsips: Barossa Babe has seduced me and touches me in places that other wines don’t get to.
• Davidrconway: Happily working through the new world mixed case. Eyeing up old world reds for next payday.
• Paul Sutton: Getting my head around the boost graph library and sipping a nice glass of The Lizard merlot thanks to Curious Wines.

If you’re keen on crowd sourcing your wine, check out Barossa Babe, the New World Mixed Case, and the plummy Lizard Merlot.

If we’re a little late with this month’s Monthly Love, it’s because we’re staggering under the sheer weight of all the fabulous things said about Curious Wines as 2008 closed out.

December kicked off with a hell of a bang when Blake Creedon, one of the top wine writers in Ireland and an Irish Examiner columnist, gave us top billing on his list of recommended online wine retailers:

…exemplary, comprehensively searchable and informative website and their prices seem relatively keen. But for me, the most important aspect of this new business is the choice they offer.

Frank Hannigan also very kindly gave us our very first recommendation on LinkedIn:

The wine is staggering value at every price point. I will never buy rubbish wine again from Tesco or Supervalue or their ilk. I would have to be mad as a brush to do so when you can access the range of stunning wines available from Mike at the same price.

Our Bandon neighbour Catherine O’Neill is steadily drinking her way through our stock, and started with a great review of Long Neck Sauvignon Blanc. Meanwhile, over at Louder Voice, there are already 15 reviews of wines from our warehouse, being drunk for everything from book club meetings to video reviews.

Speaking of video reviews, Frank O’Brien at Robert Francis Wine kicked off a six part video review series covering half a dozen of our wines with this review of Domaine du Chateau d’Eau Pinot Noir 2007:

The Twitter love-fest carries on with gratifying feedback from our dedicated wine loving customers:

• Keith Nolan: Just received my second case from @curiouswines - ordered less than 24 hours ago. Cheers guys!
• Elf in Amsterdam: Cannot say how amazed I am at the 24hr turn around on the Christmas Case of wine I bought from @CuriousWines
• Conor O’Neill: Just back from a fantastic @curiouswines launch party in Bandon. Hadn’t realised how much really good value wine they have. Stocked up!

Finally, we’re delighted that customers have continued adding wine reviews to our product pages, with 5 stars from Lar Veale at Sourgrapes.ie for Woodstock “The Stocks” Shiraz, and the 5 stars for a Last Stand Shiraz that helped soothe a broken heart!

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle,
when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the
mayonnaise jar and the 2 glasses of wine…

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had
some items in front of him. When the class began,
wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty
mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full. They
agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured
them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into
the open areas between the golf balls.
He then asked the students again if the jar was full.

They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it
into the jar.

Of course, the sand filled up everything else He asked
once more if the jar was full.

The students responded with a unanimous ‘yes.’

The professor then produced two glasses of wine from
under the table and poured the entire contents into the
jar, effectively filling the empty space between the
sand. The students laughed.

‘Now,’ said the professor, as the laughter subsided, ‘I
want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.
The golf balls are the important things; your family,
your children, your health, your friends, and your
favorite passions; things that if everything else was
lost and only they remained, your life would still be
full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your
job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything
else; the small stuff.

If you put the sand into the jar first, he continued,
there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.

The same goes for life: If you spend all your time and
energy on the small Stuff.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your
happiness.

Play with your children. Take time to get medical
checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another
18 holes. There will always be time to clean the house
and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first;
the Things that really matter. Set your priorities. The
rest is just sand.’

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the
wine represented.

The professor smiled. ‘I’m glad you asked. It just goes
to show you that no matter how full your life may seem,
there’s always room for a couple of glasses of wine with
a friend.’

And Ireland’s mixed case wine specialist wholeheartedly agrees.

November’s been a smashing month at Curious. Since we’ve taken the site out of soft launch and into the big, bad public marketplace, we’ve had amazing feedback from such a wide range of people.

We’re having a great time on Twitter, making friends with wine lovers around the globe and having excellent exchanges about everyone’s favourite Friday night wine. The immediacy of the feedback is so encouraging:

• Brian Quinn: Very impressed with CuriousWines.ie. Got a lovely case of mixed red at a great price. Recommend following @curiouswines for discount codes.
• Keith Nolan: Placed my order with @curiouswines - nice site! The competition is 5 mins away  but Curious is far better value.
• Keith Nolan: Top marks to @curiouswines! Enjoying a glass of a fine merlot from them. Delivery was left locked in a secure place when I got home - go buy!

We’ve also been feeling the blog love. Our Bandon neighbour Conor O’Neil knocked our socks off with this great review:

I think it’s probably the best looking and most effective wine web-site in the country and puts the major chains to shame. The wine value is also fantastic.

You really couldn’t ask for a more glowing debute than that. We’re sending each of these fans a special coupon to say thanks, because it’s either that or sit here and blub like a pair of big girls’ blouses.

We also particularly appreciate the warm welcome from our independent wine selling neighbours Bubble Brothers, who came along to our inaugural wine tasting night and graciously quipped us “bright new nails in the coffin of incurious wine consumption.”

We’re also seeing our first customer reviews come through on the site, with excellent ratings for the fruitful Tussock Sauvignon Blanc 2007, supple Lizard Merlot 2006 and the “star find” El Tesoro Monastrell Shiraz 2006 - a 10 star bargain at only €8.49. You can read customer reviews below every wine at Curious, and if they’re lonely and unloved, feel free to add your own review. (There’s no annoying registration required or anything.)

So the curiously named Curious, our brand spanking new wine blog, is live. Eight months from setting pencil to the grand plan for Curious Wines – including the vision of a website to set the standard in Irish wine retailing – our fabulous and enduringly tolerant web designer had had enough of my nit-picking and finally opened the final part of our site to the public.

We’ve a load of work to do still in terms of content but I believe our company and our wines have a stage to be proud of. The guiding principles for Curious Wines are to be fresh, relevant and accessible – “there’s nothing worse than a wine snob,” I keep telling Matt as we search for the honeysuckle in a Riesling – and the fabulous and enduringly brilliant Sabrina Dent has set the bar for us to maintain.

I hope you like the blog, love the site, and even moreso love our wines. But more importantly I hope you get our raison d’etre.

Something as beautiful and life-enhancing as wine deserves more than being confined to the mass-volume, brand-dominated, euro-per-square-inch-measured shelves of the supermarkets. If we can consistently bring innovation and fresh perspectives to exploring, purchasing and enjoying wine, and of course continue to introduce new wines of genuine character and matching value to Irish wine lovers, we’ll have hit the blueprint for Curious Wines.

By reading this, you’ve obviously found the Curious Blog. Do keep checking back on us – you’ve at least two giddy, sometimes moderately witty, always wine-obsessed contributors with a ton of ideas for ensuring our wines aren’t our only curiosity.

I’d also urge you to sign up to our Wine Club, as we’ll always keep the juiciest content, and the juiciest deals, for our Curious friends!

For now, very best wishes and enjoy your wine,

Michael Kane
Owner, Founder, Wine-Lover, Dreamer