Tomorrow I am off to Burgundy, Alsace and Champagne; oddly enough these are three of my four favourite wine regions. To dine we will be revisiting La Ferme de la Ruchotte and going for two meals at the best place I have ever dined, l'Arnsbourg.

Of course, there will be wine tastings: Roulot, Roumier, Lambrays, Dujac, Arlaud and hopefully Mugnier and Pernot in Burgundy. Only three tastings in Alsace, but we are super-high-grading: Trimbach, Sorg and Boxler.

All of these I will write up, along with the general drinking that will no-doubt occur, but it seems unlikely I'll be able to post these whilst I am away. I'll be back on Tuesday 8 July and will post two postings a day from my trip until the site is up-to-date

I've been told my RSS feeds contain too much. This has led me to fiddle with my blog software and discover that I can just put summary descriptions in which then link back to the main article. From now on my RSS-feeds will contain less. If you have no idea what an RSS-feed is then don't worry about it. I'll test it with my last post.

Just a quick post to say many thanks to the 6516 unique visitors I have had to this site last year (not including non-viewed traffic), This is up from 3678 unique visitors in 2006. These 6516 visitors have made 18207 visits to my site and I have served up 74279 pages last year. I am touched that so many people have dropped by this spume of drivel and many of you keep coming back repeatedly. That being said, only 56 people have clicked on my advertising links; since they only pay out when one has earned $100, Google are yet to pay me anything. I may be an underground hit, but not with people who need wine tours, want to buy cheap wine, think they are drinking too much, or whatever Google chooses to advertise next.

Many thanks for stomaching my bonkers-ness and visiting so often. Happy New Year, one and all!

The blog software is now upgraded and seems to be running fine. Hopefully, dear reader, you will not have any more problems accessing the site.

I am upgrading to the latest version of my blog software, which requires me to move to an ASP.NET v2.0 capable server. There may be some downtime whilst this happens. Don't worry, you won't miss anything.

I've signed up for Google AdSense, in the vain hope it'll earn me a few pennies toward a bottle of wine. I suppose this means I should now try to ditch my eccentric style and be really populist so I get lots of hits, but it just isn't going to happen.

Click on those links, boys and girls.

On Monday I am going into hospital to have a hiatus hernia fixed. Apparently I'll be in for five to seven days, so there will be no wine notes for the period I am incarcerated. I'll be looking forward to my first glass of wine when I escape.

Thanks to my neighbourly friends at co:edit, Elitist Review has a new homepage. It is a very good piece of design, I am sure you'll agree. It is certainly a lot better than my own hopeless effort that used to grace the site.

I suppose I just have too much time on my hands, but after a very polite and charming email asking if Elitist Review was a family of sites I decided to make it just so. New additions are food.elitistreview.com (for all good things foodie I encounter) and drinks.elitistreview.com (which will cover non-wine drinks). When writing for these I will continue to stick to the tenet that nice things are nicer than nasty things, so even if I am writing up a home-mixed cocktail that turns out to be awful it will be classified as 'sub-interest'.

As I write food.elitistreview.com is empty, but when I encounter a note-worthy meal it will be written up. I am very pleased to report I will be co-blogging about food with my witty, charming and articulate partner Daniel Lindholm; I am sure he will be a civilising influence to hold back my excesses.

If you wonder what I drink when no fine wine is available, drinks.elitistreview.com has a first entry.

I hope you enjoy my new sites. Thanks for dropping by.