Fridays Creek dipping its toe into blog world

Saw where Fridays Creek Winery in Owings, Md., added a blog component in early December to its Web site. As regional wineries go, that's still rare.

In the month since it was added, winemaker Richard Cleary has put together a couple of entries including this one:

Hi all. Rich Cleary here, I am the winemaker for Fridays Creek Winery and I thought, maybe, a blog would be fun. So I will try to keep you, the fans, up to date with the happenings here at the winery. Since I am the winemaker, cellar rat, and marketer, my blog should be quite diverse. Everything from what I accomplished today or this week to what color bottles and capsules we will be using. I by far spend most of my time ratting away in the cellar, that is taking care of barrels and the wine in them, or racking wines from tank to tank. The more time I have for writing the more detailed I will get. For example, today I organized the storage area, (now to be known as the cellar). I racked 550 gallons of Cab 07 into barrels, 9 of them, New American White Oak from Keystone. I then racked 6 barrels of the new Patio White components into the clean tank. But first I transfered the 07 Gewurtraminer from a 505 gallon tank to the 550. It may sound boring but believe me it was uneventful. So long for now the oven bell just rang meaning my three loaves of bread are done.

I asked the winery by e-mail how the blog was going, and received this response earlier today from Frank Cleary Jr., who handles public relations among his other roles there:

Cleary: "The jury is still out on the blog component to our content management system; we have used it less than a month. We chose it because it is integrated in terms of user permissions to the rest of the site. Once we use it a bit we might go to a dedicated data base that requires a separate log-on to post items. I set it up to be easy for him to post. We decided not to allow comments by others yet till we get a feel for if, so the system has more capacity than we use."