My first foray into InterNet wine discussions groups was back in the early '90’s (as I recall) on the UseNet alt.food.wine Site.
I’m pretty sure I met some of you, like BradHarrington, there on alt.food.wine.
As best I can tell, that UseNet group no longer exists, except as a GoogleGroup, I think. That thing was such a bif time-waster. Especially because I had to hook up my punched card reader thru a USB port to get to the InterNet)
I recall there was one lady, who worked in a tasting room up in MendoCnty, that was stalking me for awhile…until she came to her senses. Danged if I can remember her name, though.
So curious as to who here had their first wine discussions on alt.food.wine??? And who first met one TomHill there (and complained bloody-hell about his irritating use of ////'s in his TN’s)??
Yes, I was there in my earliest days trying to learn about wine. I remember you, Tom, as well as Mark Squires, Stu Yaniger, Tom Reddick, Jeff Pfohl, Bob Foster, Brad Kane, and, of course, the brilliant but cantankerous Robert Callahan. Many others will come to mind, I’m sure, as soon as I hit “Submit.”
Yup, Peter…bunch of familiar names there. Callahan…he was a real there.
A lot of the old-timers (of which I’m not one) started out on the old Prodigy board that was moderated by one RobertParker (anybody remember him??).
But I was never there. My start was on alt.food.wine. I recall it was unmoderated and it got pretty wild & wooly there.
Tom
Yep. Got my start there, as well as on the AOL wine boards, which was once a vibrant community, as you know. In addition to the above, Joe Dougherty, John Gilman, Sasha Katsman, Jason Brandt Lewis, Cole Kendall, Randy “Bucko” Buckner, Allen Meadows, Howard Sherry, Don Rockwell, Dan Kravitz, Milan Maximovich, Paul Winalski, Mark Levesque, Jeff Davidson, Bill Spohn, Mike Evans, Art Johnson, Bob Heuman, amongst others, also participated on alt.food.wine before migrating to Robin Garr’s Wine Lovers Discussion Group and Mark Squire’s board.
I actually worked with Callahan for a bit at Garnet starting in '96 and got to meet a lot of folks there that posted on alt.food.wine and AOL.
I left off Mike Bassman! I remember when you two went and raided that store in Queens that was closing and blowing everything out.
There are a lot of folks that posted with handles that I never knew, but I imagine I know now, as well as a bunch that no longer participate on wine boards.
I liked alt.food.wine, though I spent more time on Prodigy and CompuServe (and a bit on AOL). This makes me want to run down a bottle from Gabrielli Winery in remembrance of alt.food.wine and Usenet in general.
Lots of good names from the past up there. Some are no longer w/ us.
The Rest of the Story:
SamGabrielli started his wnry in 1989 w/ his wife, Bernadette Yamada-Gabreilli. They had a daughter they named Rosie.
Hence the handle Rosaphilia. Supposed Rosaphilia’s real name was Anna Yamada… but that may have been an assumed
name for convenience. There is a Japanese body-builder by the name of Anna Yamada that looks pretty hot: http://www.google.com/search?q=anna+yamada&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
I’m pretty sure that was not the chick that was stalking me on AFW. Rosophilia may have assumed it to distract people.
It appears she is still on AFW and continues to insult folks.
I gather Gabrielli is now out of business.
Tom
I participated on both alt.food.wine and the AOL boards as well, and met a number of people thru them, including Brad Kane, Mark? who helped clean up Ground Zero and never got paid for hos work, and suffered health problems, Roy Hersh, and a few others. My only time getting censored was when I told Bob Foater to f*ck off.
I got into wine and alt.food.wine fairly early on and remember many of the names Brad listed above (and we had Callahan to dinner a few weeks ago). When I moved to DC I found my wine storage space via Kate Whitmore and I still have wine there. And I believe I met Kevin Shin through afw soon after moving here all those years ago.
I used to post on the sci.aquaria and rec.marine.aquaria. There are archives that have my old posts on them from 1993. Is there an archive of the old posts from alt.food.wine? Might be interesting to read what people were saying about, let’s say, Harlan 25 years ago.
I was never on Usenet but I was around in the earlier days of WLDG and WCWDG. And by cracky, I did first come across the long and boring tasting notes of one TomHill from the Usenet archives. Used to print them out and read during my workday lunch times in the middle+ '90s. Good stuff. Kinda got me going in all this internet wine business and look where that’s led.
![[stirthepothal.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f40faec63ca1018898a40805efbf9f0066a3d205.gif "[stirthepothal.gif]"){kind=small}
there.