Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/107279
EDITOR'S LETTER Bigger, Better and More Practical Wines & Vines grows via merger with Practical Winery & Vineyard T he merger of Practical Winery & Vineyard into the organization and pages of Wines & Vines, announced in January, is big news for our company and big news for you as a reader. Here is the story behind the announcement. This merger has been in the works for some time. Now that it is nearly complete you can look forward to a magazine that is bigger, better and more practical. Beginning with our April issue, editorial content from Practical Winery & Vineyard (PWV) will be incorporated as a section in Wines & Vines. PWV will cease publishing as an independent entity. The founder and publisher of PWV, Don Neel, will stay in charge of the editorial content of the section. He will keep up his 33-year tradition of sourcing in-depth technical articles from the international wine industry's leading researchers, winemakers and viticulturists. The new content in Wines & Vines will make future issues bigger in size (at least 16 pages in the April edition). Our circulation will be substantially bigger, too, since former PWV readers will begin receiving Wines & Vines. The magazine will benefit from additional detailed content written by authorities new to our pages. And it will be more practical because PWV articles are well known for their useful detail and relevance to working winemakers and grapegrowers. inaccurate, point out where extra information would be valuable and make other suggestions to improve the content. Don would pass on the critiques, ask the writers to address all of the concerns and submit further drafts until everything was complete and polished. I began a peer review process at Wines & Vines for technically oriented articles in part because I respected the process Don used, and frankly envied the admiration his publication enjoyed for those articles. At that time we were competitors, but in recent years PWV has become linked as a business with Wines & Vines, and both are now owned by the Wine Communications Group of Sonoma, Calif. Circulation grows In January PWV sent its final independent issue to subscribers. In April those subscribers will begin receiving Wines & Vines each month. The PWV section within Wines & Vines will deliver the same quantity and quality of information as the quarterly journal, but on a more frequent basis. Wines & Vines readers will get the PWV content at no extra charge. The consolidated magazine will command a bigger circulation of more than 8,300 combined for print and digital formats. A benefit for the entire wine industry is that for the first time PWV article archives will be available in full online. Starting in April the back issues of 2011 and 2012 will be searchable, and older issues will be added subsequently. A new section by the respected technical journal will come to Wines & Vines in April. Strong editor I am sure Don Neel will also keep up his tradition as an assertive editor who pushes contributing writers to dot every "i," cross every "t" and more importantly get every fact and reference right. Since becoming editor of Wines & Vines seven years ago, I have heard from several of those contributors about their experiences with Don. Their good-natured complaints about his strict standards were always matched with admiration for the integrity with which their articles were handled. For the past year two years PWV has been published quarterly, much in the mode of an academic journal. The standards that Don imposed on writers and their writing were similar to those of good academic journals, too. Even before adopting the journal format, Don submitted nearly all his articles to peer review, as academic journals do. Peer review Peer review means circulating drafts of the articles to other relevant experts in the field so they can flag any passages that seem 8 W in es & V i ne s F E B R UARY 20 13 Former challenger Wines & Vines has published continuously since 1919, when it was founded as California Grape Grower. It is not only the longest-running wine industry periodical in North America but also possibly the oldest commercial wine publication in the world. Practical Winery & Vineyard started in 1980. As industry members of my age will remember, it was a challenger to Wines & Vines, and at times a strong one. Now it's fair to note that Wines & Vines has learned some lessons from the competition over the years, even as the best parts of PWV will now be incorporated in our pages—both paper and digital. I want to welcome Don Neel and his associate publisher Tina Vierra to our company, and introduce them to you.