A couple of weeks ago we were fortunate enough to get a mention in the Wall Street Journal. It was certainly a very cool thing to have happen. Traffic to the site rose dramatically, for a few days. Some folks joined the mailing list and some others subscribed to our RSS feed. Many were exposed to our project that otherwise wouldn’t have been; I could hardly complain. Yet predictably I suppose, soon after the paper and the online article hit, traffic quickly tapered off to former levels. After all, we don’t have any wine for sale (yet).

As luck would have it however, a woman named Karen Schroder happened to be reading the Journal that particular Monday and was interested enough to send me an email. Karen is an agent at ICM, one of the larger talent agencies in the US, and wrote to tell me that she was interested in helping me turn our winery adventure into a book – replete with wine country silliness and behind the scenes details – if I were interested. Karen relayed that she represented bestselling authors Amanda Hesser and Candace Bushnell among others, and that she thought the blog had “the perfect mix of a personal story combined with fascinating information about the industry and the process of wine making.”

After thinking about her offer for a reasonably dignified period of time, right around 90 seconds, I of course jumped at the opportunity. Now I suppose I qualify as one of those unpublished authors you sometimes hear spouting off at dinner parties. Yeah, the ones you roll your eyes at. That’s me. Good times.

It’s all very exciting and I’ve been busy collecting interesting characters and stories from my friends and acquaintances. So far I’ve got the family winery start up cautionary tale. I’ve got an arm full of stories about the wine country version of the jet-setting toxic bachelor (no link for that one!). And I’ve got a smattering of pretty interesting inside baseball distributor stories. You know, like where the wholesale rep expenses a bag of weed that he bought for a wine buyer? Stuff like that.

I’m just now getting started but I can honestly say that researching and talking with folks, hearing their stories first hand, is and will surely be the most enjoyable aspect of this project. Obviously I don’t know how the story will end, it could be a tragedy after all, but with this type of opportunity I have to think that the future is pretty bright for Capozzi.

Anyway, I’ll be at Wine 2.0 in San Francisco on Wednesday and if you’re in the neighborhood I’d love to hear some more good stories. Grab a glass of wine and tell me your tale. I’ll be the guy in the pinotblogger shirt (which we should be shipping this week, at long last).