Wine-Blog-Itis Virus is Airborn

This summer, a team of virus hunters will journey to the unexplored territories of the US, the UK, Italy, France, Spain and Walla Walla, Washington, to explore what they call "hot zones"—sites where a deadly new virus has emerged making wine bloggers believe fictional cartoon characters exist. In all the locations, the common enemy is the Wine-Blog-Itis virus, or a close relative, like a third cousin. The Wine-Blog-Itis broke out in California in March of 2008, known to be transmitted by social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and the OWC. Within weeks, it spread to people. The final human death toll was less than zero, but the rate of delusion hitting wine bloggers everwhere has reached well into the thousands.

Now the virus hunters are on the move to learn why and how the Wine-Blog-Itis virus strikes. Their research can help head off not only this deadly virus, but also other virulent diseases that break out suddenly to plague both man and blogger.

To curtail the initial Wine-Blog-Itis outbreak, Wordpress shut down 100 wine blogs—decimating the local wine industry.

"We want to know what changes drove this virus to emerge in the first place," says Joel Vincent, executive director of the Open Wine Consortium, a research group that focuses on diseased wine afficianados, based in the San Fransico Bay, California. "What conditions allowed this virus to jump from computers to bloggers?"

Joel Vincent believes that the virus initially hit with the creation of a cartoon character named Budo Kun of Internet wine retailer, Domaine 547. "What's interesting, is that in a very short time frame, wine bloggers everwhere had reported seeing this cartoon character in a taxi, at a party, fraternizing with other non-existant animals, hanging with Britney Spears and jet-sking. It's a cartoon for God's sake!!"

Wine-ing 2.0 will keep you current as we receive more information on the recent developments.